The Eagle was a film that, despite a fairly
aggressive marketing campaign in the UK at least, sort of slipped past most
people’s radar. This is a shame. I’m not sure what I expected before I watched
it, but I know there is a buzz surrounding Rosemary Sutcliff’s work. I personally very much enjoyed her novel Outcast.
The fate of the Ninth Legion—a Roman legion in Britain in the 2nd
Century (CE)—has fascinated writers for centuries, so Sutcliff’s take (1954)
was not the first (nor will it be the last).
However, hers must be a particularly good one, as it has been adapted on
TV and radio by the BBC numerous times.
So it was waiting for a good film treatment, and the joint
Anglo-American effort has served it well.
However, the breakdown between Anglo and American traditions can be seen
in the film’s discarded alternate ending, about which I’ll write more in a
minute.
It’s an
adventure story at heart (which is Sutcliff’s specialty) but set in a
relatively unknown period, giving the filmmakers a good deal of freedom. The director himself has cited the lack of
available factual certainties and has used this to make leaps of faith that
are, on the whole, successful (a similar technique, I think, was employed with
the interesting but marginally less successful Beowulf & Grendel). Set
in 140 CE, it follows young Marcus Flavius Aquila, a Roman soldier who has
grown up in the shadow of his father’s disappearance in Britain with the Ninth
Legion. Determined to reclaim his family
record and regain the symbolic Eagle which disappeared with the legion, Marcus
proves a courageous and effective tactician.
Inheriting a Celtic slave, Esca, last of the Brigantes, Marcus goes
rogue and disappears past Hadrian’s Wall, to the edge of the known Roman world,
in an attempt to physically regain the Eagle (and learn some answers about how
exactly his father died).
Almost all of
the elements of the film come together beautifully for me. Channing Tatum may be far from my favorite
actor, but he reflects the director’s intentions well: by using actors with American accents to
portray the Romans[1]
and actors with British accents to portray the Celts, director Kevin Macdonald
makes the point that although our cultures can never be considered stand-ins
for one another, there are some sympathetic, cohesive elements—Roman attitudes
toward combat, military glory, and family honor, for one (in the commentary,
Tatum, perhaps unconsciously, linked being in US Army training to that which he
had to undergo to be a legionary). Marcus
is not Channing—the most difficult customs to reconcile are Marcus’ cult of
Mithras and the Roman attitude toward entertainment—but I think Tatum makes
quite a convincing—and sympathetic—Marcus.
Rome is
vilified in Gladiator almost entirely
in the person of decadent psychopath Commodus, while it is lauded in the
characters of Marcus Aurelius and (Spanish-Roman) Maximus himself. No one in The
Eagle, however, comes out smelling like roses; certainly, effete characters
like out-of-touch Roman senators are scorned, but the brutal ways of the
various Celtic tribes are contrasted with the deeply-felt wrongs of Esca,
standing in for all Celtic tribes who do not assimilate well with Rome. I knew Jamie Bell’s name well enough from his
unforgettable turn in Billy Elliot, and
although I had heard him play Tintin in the animated version, I thought it
interesting that he had chosen this role.
The Eagle is kind of a buddy
film, but with both young men quite taciturn and distrustful, a lot of ground
work has gone on to establish their relationship. Both actors are believable for the physical
demands of the roles; Esca, as the slave, victim, and ultimately, the one with
all the power, emerges as both the most mysterious and interesting of the
two. I absolutely adored this character
and almost wished the movie wouldn’t end so we could observe what happened to
the two after their discovery of the Eagle.
It was interesting to me that Bell used his northern accent, which he
obviously didn’t in Tintin (though
this makes sense given that the Brigantes were based in Yorkshire).
As the
filmmakers admitted, Sutcliff invented a tribe called the Seal People, Celtic
warrior/fishermen who lived in the northwest of Scotland. The filmmakers have chosen—no doubt with
their own rationale—to fashion this tribe so that they look like a crossing of
cultures between the maritime native peoples of Canada and the Woad-painted
Picts. This is a bit far-fetched and
difficult, at times, to take in (after all, as the most vicious of the tribes
that ambushed the Ninth legion, they effectively take on the mantle of the
Other, so with a heavy visual reference toward Native Americans, it makes it
easier for the audience to want Marcus, Esca, and the others to defeat
them—they are Other, they are savage, they are not like Us). Interesting, the Seal Prince was played by a
French-Algerian actor whose command of Gaelic is, it must be said,
flawless.
Like many films
that I really like—Master and Commander, for
example; the first two Nolan!verse Batmans—this
is a man’s movie. By that, I mean, that there are no women characters of any
consequence. While I understand why the
filmmakers would choose to focus on the Marcus/Esca friendship and would not
wish to cloud the issue by bringing in secondary characters—Marcus’ uncle’s
role is highly incidental—it would have been nice to have had some female
voices, either Celtic or Roman. That
said, I had a gut-feeling that slash-ficcers were going to zero in on this as a
possible pairing, and visits to fanfiction.net and deviantART confirmed
this. Sometimes slash-ficcers annoy me,
whipping stuff up with no pretext whatsoever, making assumptions (Frodo/Sam and
Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin being my pet peeves). Slash-fic just isn’t really my cup of
tea.
The haunting
music and beautifully-filmed sequences (shot in Hungary and Scotland) lent a
great deal of atmosphere, and in general I think the script sounded neither too
modern nor too archaic. However, back to
the discarded alternate ending. The one
ultimately chosen—without providing too many spoilers—would be your
stereotypically “Americanized” ending:
upbeat, providing finality. The
discarded ending would have seen Marcus reject his quest and would have been
altogether more lowkey. I’m not sure
which one I prefer, but I understand why the filmmakers ultimately went with
the more “Americanized” one.
While Lincoln may have been the best film I
saw this winter, The Eagle was the
one I enjoyed the most (even more than The
Hobbit!).
[1]
To the point that Mark Strong—that perennial character actor who has only
gotten one chance at leading man fame, to my knowledge, as Mr Knightley to Kate
Beckinsale’s Emma—adopts an American accent to play one of the gone-native
Romans. However, his accent is so
convincing, it helped me to pick him out later, again playing an American, in
an ad for the highly-anticipated Zero
Dark Thirty.
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