When my sister was trying to make sure that all her Omaha family were safely at home after the Von Maur shootings, I was blithely at Beowulf, the most recent film version after the Sci-Fi Channel's Grendel earlier this year, besides all the other versions I mentioned, including the recent opera.
The new movie with the big-name cast is hilarious. It is a digitalized comic book (fake-looking humans) which I alternately laughed at or dozed through except for one part, the dragon section. The movie opens with a naked Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar in a kind of sheet toga--you can see that he's naked by the open side, besides which he sheds the sheet entirely after calling for merriment and fornication, looking like a chubby naked Santa Claus with obvious assets, his queen staring down at his front. The film loves nudity. Ray Winstone, a paunchy actor digitalized into Sean Bean's body, is a Beowulf stripped down for the long Grendel attack sequence because he's determined to fight the beast on his own terms, as he puts it. Lots of coy tricks hide his genitalia except for some really fast sequences when it seemed obvious, since he was just one of those virtual-reality video-game manikins anyway, he was sexless the way they used to make dolls. The most notorious nudity is Angelina Jolie's as Grendel's mother, a monstrous hag in the original, here Jolie at her most seductive, gold flowing down her nude body rising from the underground lake--think of those chocolate fountains at fancy receptions--her single braid elongated into a serpentine tail. This is undoubtedly the sexiest Beowulf ever, for no good reason other than the usual movie pandering.
I really hate those fake digitalized humans in video games, no matter how "real" they look, and so I never could take any of these surly characters seriously and was puzzled at very rare close-ups that switched to the actual humans, the difference obvious. Then, too, there were the unwitting effects. When one of Beowulf's Geat warriors plants a battle axe in the middle of Grendel's skull, the look on Grendel's face was like Migraine #547, "Now you've really pissed me off," and I laughed--loudly. (He bites off the guy's head in spite.) After Grendel's mother avenges her son's death with an attack on the mead hall, the corpses are hung across the hall like so many long-underwear union suits, which is just what I thought of, Grandpa Luckert's long johns. There is no explanation for the huge treasure horde in the mother's lair, though it seemed to copy the one in Pirates of the Caribbean. (The ending actually reveals how she apparently amassed all that wealth.)
On the other hand, it got some major points right, very curiously. And I know because I came right home and started re-reading Seamus Heaney's definitive, much-acclaimed translation in the bilingual edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). King Hrothgar's shore guard challenges the Geats' landing "in formal terms, flourishing his spear." Grendel did attack because the mead-hall carousing irritated him: "Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,/nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him/to hear the din of the loud banquet/every day in the hall, the harp being struck . . . ." John Malkovitch played Unferth the unpleasant, envious braggart just as the epic describes him. Beowulf does rip off Grendel's limb: "he left his hand/and arm and shoulder . . . ./He has done his worst but the wound will end him," as it does, the monster dying back in his swampy den. Beowulf does have to go underwater to kill the mother: "he dived into the heaving/depths of the lake. It was the best part of a day/before he could see the solid bottom." (Some breath control that, but then this is hero worshipping in the earliest form.)
In the movie all this is treated in stock comic-book terms, against which I have no great complaint, having learned the Old and New Testaments forward and backward with thick comic-book versions faithful to the Bible. It's just that I was in Disneyland and not the foreboding epic wherein every tribe fears every other tribe in "this unreliable world," "enemies with hate-honed swords" waiting at the borders to attack the minute any weakness is revealed, such as the death of a king, as happens at the terrifying conclusion after Beowulf's death and funeral: "A Geat woman too sang out in grief;/with hair bound up, she unburdened herself/of her worst fears, a wild litany/of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,/enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,/slavery and abasement." That was the Viking world where vengeance is better than mourning and a blood feud breaks out at a wedding banquet, "the killer instinct/unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant," as one is "wintered into wisdom." Beowulf comes to Hrothgar to "raise a hedge of spears around you," knowing that one leaves nothing but his fame as a warrior. In that he sounds like a good Greek in The Iliad, but this is Denmark, Beowulf from southern Sweden, the cold North of stormy seas and dark superstition. (Coincidentally, one of my favorite sleuths, the equally brooding Kurt Wallander, is from the same area in Henning Mankell's series.)
In the original, Grendel is one of the seed of biblical Cain, who's blamed for all the monsters and demons: "Cain got no good from committing that murder/because the Almighty made him anathema/and out of the curse of his exile there sprang/ogres and elves and evil phantoms/and the giants too who strove with God/time and again until He gave them their reward." The movie takes a bold leap off into space, but its creators forewarned no one should mistake the movie for the literary classic.
The only part of the movie which genuinely made me forget my comic-book-blahs-and-blues was the dragon's. The dragon and his fire-breathing depredations suddenly lit up the screen, pun intended, with thrilling effects. Now I can go back to that screenwriting left turn. It is the movie's brand-new twist to this most ancient of Anglo-Saxon tales that Grendel was sired by Hrothgar's mating with Grendel's mother as the dragon was sired by Beowulf's mating with the mother, who then becomes invincible, has done it before and will do it again. And her golden horde becomes apparently the treasure heaped into the funeral ships the Vikings used for their greatest warrior kings, sending the body and wealth sailing out in a ship on fire. (This kind of burial happens to William Holden, as I recall, in Blake Edwards' sardonic S.O.B. and is what the grandchildren insist upon in a more recent movie I can't remember right now, about the dying patriarch of a large American family.) I didn't mean to spoil anything--as if I really could--but for anyone puzzled, that's why Beowulf is so grieved to slay the dragon and why, when he and the dragon lie dying on the beach, the dragon turns back into a golden-skinned young man, just as Grendel had shrunk back into a small human form at his death. Naturally, the very Christian poet of the original would never agree to that, besides which Beowulf is cremated on a huge pyre. Oh, well, it's a novel causation that makes some sense for the hatred the monstrous boys feel for their human daddies.
I urge you to read the original in Heaney's translation, if for nothing else the pleasure of the notorious Anglo-Saxon alliteration and the lines split into two-beat halves: "He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain,/limping and looped in it. Like a man outlawed/. . . ." "bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood/and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body/utterly lifeless . . . ." Various set pieces deal with true sorrow, the blood feuds, the culture of warriors with its curious formality among allies, an old man's loss of interest in life after his son is killed, the sad, sapping effects of old age. It even has biblical interest--the writer is Christian but never mentions Christ--with a mention of the Great Flood engraved on a sword hilt: "It was engraved all over/and showed how war first came into the world/and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants/ . . . the Almighty made the waters rise,/drowned them in the deluge for retribution." The dragon is described in serpentine terms recalling the Edenic snake: "He rippled down the rock, writhing with anger" . . . . [in the battle with Beowulf] "while the serpent looped and unleashed itself./Swaddled in flames, it came gliding and flexing . . . ."
I guess the next best thing would be to read John Garner's short novel, Grendel (1971), taking the monster's point of view, which I first heard, hypnotized, being read over the radio and so bought the book. Or you could watch another far-out version because of its bleak Nordic violence, like a variation on a theme, The 13th Warrior, with Antonio Banderas thrown into the mix as a Moslem needed to help fierce, husky blonde Vikings overcome the cannibalistic Wendol, "creatures of the mist," terrorizing the neighborhood. But I'll stick with Heaney's.
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