Reading the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf is not one of my fondest school memories. In general, I enjoy epics full of swords, gore, and dismemberment, but this one made me want to hack off my own hand at the wrist, it’s so bloody boring. When I heard that Hollywood was preparing a digitally-animated Beowulf, I wondered who, besides English teachers with their knives out, would actually watch it. The trailer featuring a naked CGI version of Angelina Jolie gave me one answer: horny teenage boys. It also hinted at major revisions of the text: there is nothing in what I read that resembles the world’s most famous mother.
The first 10 minutes of the Robert Zemeckis film stay close to the epic: a feast in the king’s hall is disrupted by the monster Grendel, who kills many of the men and eats them, crunching their bones. The king — who sounds and looks like Anthony Hopkins but for that corpse-like cast that the animators haven’t worked out — puts out a call for a hero to rid the land of the monster. From across the sea Beowulf answers. When Beowulf (who is voiced by Ray Winstone but does look like the actor) arrives the movie takes off, and we see what the writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary are up to. They are deconstructing the epic, satirizing its conventions, and bringing it alive for the contemporary audience.
For starters, epic heroes are champion bluffers and braggarts who exaggerate their own exploits. They are bullshitters of the highest order. They have to be, or why would anyone risk life and limb on their say-so? In the times described in Beowulf and other epics, people lived in constant danger of animal predators, seafaring marauders, and natural disasters, and they needed heroes to lead and protect them. The king had to be the strongest man in the community, able to slay X number of men in single combat, ford rivers, kill wild beasts, and satisfy X number of women at a time — life expectancies were short, and the tribe had to propagate in order to survive. Courage, strength and valor were not just required, but necessary in a leader. Gaiman and Avary tell us that apart from whatever advantages he might actually possess, a hero is one who has the nerve (and the self-belief) to lay claim to these qualities.
But Beowulf the movie is a true 21st-century product, and in these times when there is no clear and present danger of monster attacks (and I mean literal people-eating monsters, not politicians), courage, strength and valor no longer mean very much. They have been reduced to buzzwords to spice up ad copy or political speeches. For the most part, they are obsolete concepts. So what we have here is an epic steeped in irony: knowing, funny, and tinged with sadness.
For all his exploits, real or imaginary, a hero is a man obsessed with the size of his genitals. Beowulf declares that he will fight Grendel naked and without weapons. In the movie’s most hilarious sequence, the naked Beowulf battles Grendel (I’m always happy to see Crispin Glover, even in troll form) in the hall, his privates concealed by strategically-placed swords, tables, and whatnot. The epic tells us little about Grendel’s life; here the writers provide him with a back story that will surely raise the hackles of literary purists. He has issues that would appeal to a Freudian: he literally cannot kill the father.
Women did not have major roles in the old epics, but here they have two. There’s woman as tempter: Grendel’s mother (Jolie), who offers fame, glory, wealth unimaginable and sex. To walk into her dark, mysterious, watery lair is to enter the womb. Then there’s woman as partner: the queen (Robin Wright Penn), who ages from a lovestruck young woman into a wise and knowing observer of how man is so easily led astray.
Towards the end of the movie, the heroic age is ending, Christianity is on the rise, and the definition of heroism has changed. “Men are the monsters now,” Beowulf tells his faithful sidekick Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson), who gruffly reminds him, “You are Beowulf!” Beowulf is not allowed to be a mere man. How can a character who is larger than life conduct a life-sized life? Lies must be told and truths hidden away in order to preserve the myth. In olden times, the myth was more important, more necessary, than the truth. In our own time, what are myths for?