{"id":136,"date":"2014-12-09T19:43:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T19:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegrinnellbeowulf.com\/?page_id=136"},"modified":"2014-12-09T19:43:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-09T19:43:00","slug":"beowulf-dir-robert-zemeckis-2007","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/timarner.sites.grinnell.edu\/beowulf\/beowulf-adaptations\/beowulf-dir-robert-zemeckis-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Beowulf, dir. Robert Zemeckis (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inner Demons: Zemeckis’ Beowulf<\/em> and Guilt Culture<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beowulf <\/em>is one of the oldest works of English literature, perhaps first written in Old English by \"beowulf<\/a>Christian monks, and it records what some scholars believe is a version of an older, orally performed tale about the pagan past of the Anglo-Saxon\u2019s Scandinavian contemporaries. Robert Zemeckis\u2019 Beowulf<\/em>, released in 2007 and written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, interprets the original poem as the creation of an unreliable narrator within a corrupted and biased society. While the movie follows the plot of the poem fairly closely, cutting some of the \u201cdigressions\u201d and simplifying the politics so that Beowulf rules the Danes rather than returning home to rule the Geats, a few key alterations make this movie much more than a cinematic rendering of the Old English poem. The movie presents itself as the original and uncensored story of Beowulf<\/em>, but it introduces themes of guilt not in the poem.<\/p>\n

The Beowulf of this movie is a hero for the modern era, one who is flawed, guilt-ridden, and ultimately a martyr for his people. Gaiman and Avary initially conceived the story as a low-budget film on a much smaller scale, but the use of computer animation and motion capture technology caused them to rewrite the script for a much larger budget and scale. This creates an unusual tension between the script\u2019s commitment to psychological realism and the film\u2019s highly stylized special effects. In one scene Beowulf implores us to see him as a man \u201cfallible and flawed\u201d and in the next he rides clinging to the back of a dragon and uses a ship\u2019s anchor to lasso its wing. Other reviewers have mostly focused on the movie\u2019s special effects and appearance; Manohla Dargis wrote in\u00a0The New York Times <\/em><\/a>\u00a0that they throw \u201ceverything they can think of at the screen, including lots of big: big noise, sets, moves, effects, stars and, yup, even big breasts.\u201d Roger Ebert<\/a> commented \u201cto say the movie is over the top assumes you can see the top from here.\u201d\u00a0 While most reviews condemn the motion capture acting as wooden, many praise the animation of the dragon and sea monsters as beautiful and dramatic.<\/p>\n

However, while I found the visuals to be ridiculous, my real problem with the movie lay in the story\u2019s reinterpretation of Beowulf as a character. Science Fiction World\u2019s <\/em>Gerard Wood<\/a> claimed to have enjoyed seeing Beowulf as a flawed hero, saying that, \u201cthis is a hero for our less heroic times, but one with whom modern audiences can engage more readily than with the superman of the poem.\u201d Zemeckis\u2019 Beowulf<\/em> tries to create a more psychologically realistic and relatable version of Beowulf, but I came away with an uneasy sense of watching something fake, and not just because of the blandly creepy motion capture acting. Essentially, the movie is the ultimate guilt movie in a shame culture, forcing modern ideas of sin and repentance into an Anglo-Saxon world defined by public shame and humiliation.<\/p>\n

While Anglo-Saxon culture privileged boasting as public performance as a means of securing honor, the movie implies that Beowulf\u2019s boasts are a form of vanity and egomania. Gaiman and Avary\u2019s script makes liberal use of Beowulf\u2019s penchant for boasting by including numerous scenes of storytelling. In their interpretation, any scene narrated not by the poet, but by a character, is a distortion of the truth. As Laurence de Looze has argued about the boasts in the poem, \u201cdifference of opinion concerns not the facts of the story but their interpretation.\u201d In the movie, Beowulf alters or leaves out any part of the story that doesn\u2019t improve his reputation. In both the poem and the movie, Beowulf recites the tales of his defeat of the sea-monsters and Grendel\u2019s mother, but, unlike the poem, the movie visually shows us where Beowulf\u2019s tale diverges from reality.<\/p>\n