The critics canned Alexander, but while I thought that it was a failure, I really feel that its failure is both noble and interesting, born of a failure to fully realise an overly grand ambition rather than any failure of imagination. I don't know if it's quite accurate to call it a revisioning of Alexander's life and person - is there even an accepted account of either? But it's characterised by a resistance to and incredulity towards any simple narrative of his feats or account of his personality - this is made perfectly clear both in the structure of the film, which is cut up by flashbacks, flashforwards and revisitings at several points (an interesting example is the way that it initially seems to be presenting a standard "rise to greatness" narrative culminating in Alexander's famous victory over the Persians at Gaugamel, before immediately going back and by filling in the gaps in the chronology leading up to that triumph - Alexander's exile by his father Philip, etc - problematises the status of what it had just presented as a straightforward received account), and in the comments of the framing narrator, the old Ptolemy, at the end. So far so good.
In a similar vein but maybe more overtly 'revisionistic' are the depictions of Alexander's homosexuality and the distinctly enlightened nature of his tyranny (the former is clear, albeit never made 100% explicit...and what's with Hephaiston's eyeliner?...and the latter comes through in Farrell's (and, perhaps more germanely, Stone's) Alexander's sensitivity and especially his wish to unify all of the races and tribes that he conquers for some kind of pan-utopian reason rather than from the simple desire for conquest or power...and then, shading from that, the psychologising of his character, and particularly the way his personality and actions are depicted as flowing from his troubled relationships with his mother and father. All of that is interesting, but I didn't feel that the pieces quite came together - while it looks and to a large extent feels right (the battle scenes and the council ones work), I just wasn't convinced (which is, natch, part of the function of what I was talking about in the first paragraph), and while Farrell was good, he lacked the necessary stature to make it all work.
I don't know if it's even possible for a film to have it 'both ways', so to speak - all I can say is that Alexander falls short (and this is the director's cut that I saw, too)...but I admire it nonetheless.
