"I would trust an American version of ancient Rome much more than a European one, because there's really much more contact in spirit between the two."
—Peter Ustinov, on the audio commentary track of Spartacus
Ustinov may not be one to let the truth get in the way of a good line, but this particular comment is worth taking seriously, forcing a serious consideration of films often taken too lightly. Even before Gladiator won the Academy Award for Best Picture, it had provoked a quiet cry of distress from some corners of the film world, often for the wrong reasons. While Ridley Scott's movie certainly wasn't the best of 2000, the most frequent complaint focuses on issues too far outside the film itself. Gladiator resembles the sort of project that Hollywood used to produce and reward on a regular basis, the charge goes; therefore, it had an advantage its competitors couldn't claim.
That may be true, although attempting to ferret out the thought processes of Academy voters is never an easy task. More importantly, the charge shortchanges Gladiator and its genre by dismissing both as empty spectacle. The brief passage of time since its release has helped cast the film in a new light, and to underestimate it is to overlook its use of Rome as a vehicle for commentary on a superpower of a more recent vintage.
In this respect, Gladiator is far from the first of its kind, as a wave of recent DVD reissues confirms. Ben-Hur (Warner Home Video) is another Best Picture winner, and, in a strange combination of sacrilege and patriotism, it presents the birth of Christianity as a precursor to the creation of the United States. Though subtitled A Tale Of The Christ, author Lew Wallace remained a religious skeptic until well after his book's 1880 publication. Writing about colonial Jerusalem afforded him an opportunity to write about colonial America, with leather armor standing in for redcoats.
The third film adaptation of the perennial bestseller, directed by William Wyler in 1959, was the first version of the sound era, allowing for an added emphasis on this strand of the story. Investing a loose tradition with additional meaning, Wyler uniformly cast British actors as Romans, and non-Brits, led by American Charlton Heston, as subjects of the Empire. In other films, this choice can seem more like ornamentation, but the emphasis placed on Jerusalem as a colonized community lends added meaning.
Listing a variety of anti-Roman activities in a speech designed to alert Stephen Boyd's Messala to the changes afoot in his boyhood home, the jaded, veteran Roman official Sextus (André Morell) includes both a refusal to pay taxes and a "carpenter's son who goes around doing magic tricks." The magic tricks, however, trouble Boyd less than the message that "God is near, in every man," an interpretation of Christianity as close to Thomas Jefferson as anything found in the gospels.
Cast out as a radical by Boyd, Heston journeys through the highs and lows of the Roman Empire in a quest for revenge, but remains unsatisfied even after his enemy's death. Vengeance has led to other concerns. One of the film's most striking shots, a bit of deep focus that provides one of the few reminders of Wyler's presence behind the camera, says more than dialogue could: Heston, newly freed from a torturous stint as a galley slave, looks down through the cracks of a ship. There, he finds a scene identical to the one he'd left behind: a beleaguered, multiracial slave crew oppressed to the point of death, a tired, poor, huddled mass yearning to breathe free if ever one lived. When Heston converts to the religion that recognizes the humanity of his leprous mother and sister, outcasts even from the Roman prison system, Wyler could just as easily have ended the film with "God Bless America" as with the subdued "hallelujahs" of Miklós Rózsa's score.
Taking a different approach to roughly the same era, the Stanley Kubrick-directed Spartacus (Criterion/Home Vision) addresses democracy's discontents. Adapted primarily by blacklisted Hollywood Ten writer Dalton Trumbo from a novel by Howard Fast, a former Communist who served prison time for refusing to name names, the 1960 film offers an account of a slave revolt that occurred during Julius Caesar's ascent. While it features a hopeful prelude referring to the abolition of slavery and maintains Ben-Hur's Anglo/international dichotomy in its casting, it also shows a clear relevance to issues both contemporary and close to home.
According to the new DVD version's liner notes, Fast's novel was "popular reading in Communist circles." It's not hard to see why its presentation of an underclass uprising against an ostensibly Republican society of great prosperity struck a chord. Where Heston's aristocratic Judah Ben-Hur has the misfortune of falling into slavery, Spartacus (producer/star Kirk Douglas) has never known privilege. A rebellious "Thracian dog," as one of his Roman tormentors puts it, Spartacus was doomed to slavery by his birth and doomed to a probable early death by his rebellious temperament, with little chance of interrupting the cycle of oppression. Where Heston becomes a tourist in the world of inequality, Douglas knows its depths exclusively.
For its first hour, set in a gladiatorial school run like an abusive military academy, Spartacus slowly builds toward a slave revolt, justifying the rebellion with nearly every detail. Abused, dehumanized, alienated from each another, and forced to die for sport, the enslaved gladiators, led by Douglas, enact a revolution performed spontaneously but stoked by countless injustices. When freed, they form a traveling commune, journeying to freedom, but inhibited—and used as leverage—by the Roman government's machinations.
In portraying a Senate whose members are more concerned with self-advancement and empty rhetoric than with the common good, Fast and Trumbo make little attempt to hide their contemporary models. These famously (if temporarily) defeated men knew they would not likely see their ideals enacted in their lifetime; their hero, though crushed by the system, becomes an example for those who follow. The film uses one rising world power to critique another, suggesting that, while empires come and go, they all have to answer to the masses that build them, one way or another.
The excesses of 1963's Cleopatra (also new to DVD) and an endless procession of low-budget costume adventures helped bring an end to Hollywood-produced Roman epics, but that ended with the more or less unexpected bang of Gladiator, a film that even sympathetic reviewers seemed to treat as a guilty pleasure, a continuation of the gaudiness of the worst ancient-set films. But, in the aftermath of recent events, this seems less and less true. Only a few months later, it seems perfectly suited for the political climate of the 2000 election.
The accents here take on a significance of a different kind. This is late-period Rome, a proto-American polyglot stew in which an aging philosopher-king played by an Irishman (Richard Harris) chooses a Spanish general, with an American accent, played by an Australian actor (Russell Crowe), to restore the Empire to a true republic. The opposition is an untested, megalomaniacal youth (Joaquin Phoenix), driven near-mad with privilege and speaking like a stock-character fop with American inflections.
They struggle to determine the fate of a nation distracted from its founding principles by wealth and the interests of a powerful ruling class. The unbilled third participant is the populace of Rome itself, driven to indifference by general prosperity. When presented with the problems of the city, "beginning with the basic sanitation of the Greek quarter," Phoenix turns away from the concerns of a minority to the continued distraction of an easily pleased majority, instituting a marathon series of gladiatorial contests.
However disingenuous, even hypocritical, this might seem coming from a film driven by its bloody battle scenes, Gladiator is a big-budget film spectacle that critiques its status as spectacle through comparison to ancient precursors, offering its own variety of entertainment as a symptom of national decay. Though borrowing liberally from Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and The Fall Of The Roman Empire, it remains as close to the spirit of Satyricon. It's not the hard times, the film suggests, but the good ones that drive an empire to ruin.
Its appearance in theaters during the 2000 election season could hardly have been more apt. The perceived lack of difference between the two leading candidates provided fodder for endless jokes, but might also have served as a secret hope for many. Shying away from the details of policy and the engagement of specific issues, Bush and Gore got more mileage out of promises to preserve the status quo and continue the economic growth of the 1990s into the next decade.
Why worry about the sanitation of the Greek quarter when acknowledging the issue means acknowledging that the present falls short of paradise? Though the timing of Gladiator's release probably owes more to coincidence than design, the coincidence is worth noticing. It continues the pattern of Rome-based films that serve as mirrors to the present, not just windows to the past, and provides another reminder that what happened in Rome can, and does, happen here.