Mutiny in the Arena: Covered in Man-Sweat

MIKE, aka goatdog: Episode 8 of Best Pictures from the Outside In brings us two big hunks of manly, epic action. There was so much testosterone flying through the air that I almost felt compelled to grunt and scratch myself. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) is a solid action-drama featuring two titanic performances from Charles Laughton as the despicable tyrant Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as the noble Mr. Christian; they both received Oscar nominations along with Franchot Tone's composite Roger Byam. It has the kind of epic scope, larger-than-life performances, and special effects that gets Oscar salivating.

And then there's Gladiator (2000), which had me scratching my head. It has several of the same ingredients—representatives of pure good and pure evil (Russell Crowe's Maximus and Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, respectively), an epic scope (from the wilds of Germany to the deserts of North Africa to the streets of Rome), and special effects. But to quote a friend, it's like they threw eggs and milk and flour onto a table and called it cake. Aside from Crowe's Oscar-winning performance, nobody really impressed me, Phoenix least of all. The much-lauded battle scenes were unwatchably shot and edited (fast! slow! fast! jittery! slow!), the Oscar-winning visual effects looked like the crowd scenes in a Sega Genesis game, and the screenplay distilled a lot of potentially interesting issues down into unimaginative talking points.

So we have two! big! films! that feature pitched battles between utter good and utter evil—or does the sequence where Bligh guides his loyal crewmembers across 3500 miles of ocean in a teacup provide Laughton with a bit of three-dimensionality that Phoenix's Commodus lacks? How does Mutiny's shot-on-location ethos, supplanted by some judicious use of rear-projection, stack up against Gladiator's cartoon Colloseum? And, most importantly, did you grunt and/or scratch yourself during either of these films? Be honest: you're among friends.

NICK: Hold on—I have to finish watching The Game and polish off some more Michelob and bring my voice down a few scales before I'm ready to talk about this.

At which point, I'll be agreeing with virtually everything you just said. Though I will also add that the visual and narrative economy of Mutiny on the Bounty, keeping over a dozen recognizable characters in play and following three major protagonists without the pace flagging or the story losing its balance, shows that Frank Lloyd was a lot more proficient at captaining this ship than he was the S.S. Cavalcade two installments ago.

I may also let on that Franchot Tone's might be my favorite of three very good lead performances in Mutiny (all of them Oscar-nominated) and that I think Crowe is phenomenally good in the chintzy, continually disappointing Gladiator. Beyond holding the film together against heavy odds, he actually sold Maximus to me as a character instead of a plaster-cast of generic clichés. Though his remarkable, charismatic earnestness only makes the rest of Gladiator look more and more like a moderately diverting coloring book about Roman Times.

But like I said, I won't be prepped to delve into any of this before I've finished updating my Fantasy Football roster and eating the rest of my Manwich.

NATHANIEL: Nobody told me there was a coloring book!? I suddenly like Gladiator so much better. Even if it the crayons are only in blue (mood lighting), sepia (sand... and oldey times!), and red (real men do bleed).

I kid. You know what's weird? I actually liked Gladiator much better this time than I did in 2000 when I was horrified that it beat up on Crouching Brockovich and Hidden Wuxia. At the very least I'd forgotten that Crowe is really strong in it (though that Oscar is still a stretch) and that Ridley Scott always can be counted on for at least a few sharp or memorable visuals. I loved that plasterhead of Caesar behind Commodus (boo hiss—to both character and performance sadly) and that fakey CGI collisseum is easier for me to swallow in a way since there's that great shot of the same building preceding the f/x games where suddenly Commodus is in frame, placing little dollies... excuse me figurines into the center. To quote Monty Python's Holy Grail... "It's only a model"

The same could be said of Connie Nielsen. She's really only there for demographic quadrant reasons. She's not organic to the material at all. I generally appreciate backstory intrigues that aren't fully shared with the audience but her previous relationship to Maximus is so vaguely drawn that I just didn't care.

The romances in Mutiny on the Bounty are easier to buy, partly becaue they're not meant to be taken as seriously. They're romps in the grass, summer flings... they just happen to come with marriage and babies due to unpredictable forces of nature (i.e. Bligh vs. Christian)

But again... it's all about the men. Even the love stories. Gladiator's love triangle romance is totally between Maximus and Marcus Aureulius (oh Daddy!) with Commodus being the (wo)man scorned. and Mutiny's is totally all about Christian & Byam with Laughton not invited to the nuptials. Bless Frank Lloyd for even giving Gable & Tone a post-coital shot lying pleasantly in the grass—admittedly their women are just out of frame but still... they're brothers in arms and nearly in each others.

MIKE: I'm glad you brought up Connie Nielsen, Nathaniel. I'm still somewhat confused by the film's treatment of her. We get a solid hour of muttering and insinuation about how she's a super-schemer, completely untrustworthy and the most dangerous dame in town, but it seems all she does is frown and cry. Her big speech at the end seems both out of nowhere and completely redundant.

In fact, that whole scene... all right, I know movies aren't history lessons, and if you expect good history from Hollywood you deserve what you get (which is usually a pie in the face), but I was still surprised that Scott and company hijacked history so much in the service of their vaguely pro-democracy and ant-tyrant message. The historian in me is much happier with Lloyd's seafaring epic, which hews pretty closely to history, at least history as modified by literature—aside from importing Nordhoff and Hall's fictional creation Byam and upping Bligh's air of supernatural evil by having him recapture Byam, they provide a pretty solid little history lesson. Oscar loves a historical epic, and sometimes he loves facts, but, well, does any of this matter to you guys?

NICK: Let's say that it bothers me when the history doesn't even feel true. An emperor getting into the ring to fight a prisoner, just to prove a point? And in a disgusting eggnog-colored outfit, to boot, that makes him look like a pupating insect? Not just historically insane (from the very little I would even know), but afoul of every reason of absolute power for which Commodus wants to be emperor. He'll kill his own father but won't "make a martyr" of Maximus?

MIKE: The weird thing is that Commodus DID get in the ring, decked out as Hercules, which maybe explains the buggy costume—one of Hercules's less famous adventures, of course. But when he fought, it was only for show, against people who would submit to him. But the only "point" he was proving was that he was colossally egotistical.

NICK: What really bothers me about the social context in Gladiator, though, is its incessant chatting about "the mob" without getting close to it, ever, and the extreme condescension it voices about pop crowds (bloodthirsty, mindless) while being so hell-bent on flattering the film's own audience that "the mob" never makes a wrong move. As much as we hear that they are cosmically depraved, etc., they instinctually hate Commodus, who is furnishing them with all this spectacle that they love (hate?), and they cheer for Maximus even when he berates them. Filmmakers: MAKE UP YOUR MIND. Take a risk and smack your audience for our own bloodthirstiness ("Are we not entertained" by those grisly sequences in the ring?) or shut up with your vague moral judgments that you're unwilling to dramatize.

About Connie Nielsen: if you scoot really close to her, does that tattoo between her eyebrows read "we tried so hard to get Monica Bellucci"?

NATHANIEL: While we're scooting close to the screen, did I actually catch side boob and nipplage on the Tahitian honeys in Mutiny on the Bounty? I hate to be so juvenile but I dug all the explicitly implied (?) sex of Mutiny on the Bounty. Are we still Pre-Code Hollywood or did Frank Lloyd get away with it because he's lensing the "natives" ... and that doesn't count as real nudity. At least it doesn't in conservative American homes of the 1970s with subscriptions to National Geographic.

Oops... We left Rome & Tahiti for Michigan and my childhood! My apologies. Back to the topics at hand: How strange is it that we've had two Clark Gables up against two Russell Crowes, two huge alpha males in the Hollywood firmanent. Preferences? Thoughts?

NICK: Mutiny could have started production before the passing of the code, but it certainly opened later. The National Geographic factor is the clincher here: you can see the same stuff in Hawaii (1966), right before the parameters for screen nudity technically got widened. You know, for white people.

Speaking of white people: ever notice how weird Ridley Scott is around anyone BUT white people? He sold a great Aryan villain in Blade Runner, but he sure bungles Djimon Hounsou's "Juba" here, and Black Hawk Down is just around the corner...

And speaking of nudity: Russell Crowe. (What do you mean, he didn't do any?) What I love about the Gladiator/Beautiful Mind pair is that it shows how profoundly Crowe can shift gears: he's as compressed and direct here as he is fussy and "technical" as Nash. It's exactly this quality of simplicity that saves the movie for me, since, as we've already mentioned, it's always trying so frenetically to throw so much at the screen. Crowe is grounded and substantial, and his subtle shifts in expression (smoldering at injustice, adrenalized in the ring, visibly reminded of his grief, stunned and angered by the audience) suggest eddies of deep content in Gladiator that just aren't there. He's like a sexy, muscular Spencer Tracy, when the Spencer Tracy "let's play it low-key" thing actually works.

Gable, for me, repeats a neat trick in the Capra and Lloyd movies, starting out affable and getting testier and testier. I admit that I admired the performance more this time than the first time I saw it (at Goatdog's theater!), because it keeps Fletcher from being altogether admirable. Meanwhile, Laughton seizes some moments to make Bligh's desperation to be liked and his miserable self-pity quite naked. Tone has to be a bright, fresh-faced blank slate throughout and register every little wrinkle of experience that Christian and Bligh etch onto his face and his spirit throughout, so that he'll have some moral credibility at the end. I think he's quite marvelous at this, and I love the whole movie's resistance to superficial personalities.

ME: I agree that Scott does get a little weird around non-white people, although for the most part American Gangster didn't strike me that way. Maybe it's up to the actors to make their scenes work: for example, Ghassan Massoud, as Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven, stands out as one of the film's most interesting characters despite its weirdness about the Muslims.

I like Crowe better overall here than I did in A Beautiful Mind, but he doesn't achieve the heights of that film's last third, when his twitches coalesced into a fully realized personality. But the winner for me is still Gable in It Happened One Night (if only because I can't pick Claudette Colbert in that movie, since you asked about the men). What he does feels like more than just a "neat trick," although I agree that it's basically the same thing here and in IHON. He hints at tiny cracks in that affability in both films, but when they appear in IHON there's a surprising underlying viciousness that I didn't see as much here. If I had to pick one of the 1935 nominees, it would have been Laughton, mostly for what he does in that rowboat sequence when we realize what a capable captain he can be when he has something specific to concentrate on. And you have me almost convinced about Tone, who I've always thought of as a distant third in a race between Laughton and Gable, perhaps because as the composite everyman fly on the wall type guy, he has to carry too much of the burden of explaining things to the audience.

NATHANIEL: Maybe Ridley Scott should make a B&W picture so that extreme variance of skin tones don't distract him? I still shudder thinking about a few moments from Black Hawk Dawn. Yikes. Or perhaps he's just stronger if there's a limited palette. I mean you have to love all the pasty whiteness of the Hauer / Hannah scenes in Blade Runner and the twin sunburnt reds of Sarandon and Davis in Thelma & Louise.

I was actually so surprised at the late scenes when Bligh turns out to be a resourceful leader. Gladiator (and many other movies for that matter) would never muddy the waters to that degree. Could you imagine if Commodus had some late breaking scene where he reveals some hidden kindness or stealth wisdom? Even his affection for his nephew is viewed as sickly. He starts out nasty and he just gets keeps getting nastier. It's less a character arc than a freefall.

But back to Mutiny. I haven't seen the Marlon Brando version of this movie but I remember the 1984 Mel Gibson production as being far less balanced. You were basically on Team Mel the whole time. I was never really on Team Laughton but I wasn't always entirely with Team Christian and suddenly I was thinking Team Tone seemed pretty smart. I thank the movie for questioning my allegiances since that's, you know, what the story is about.

NICK: Plus, isn't it kind of amazing that there's hardly a scene in Mutiny that could be cut without any loss to the film? Even with a grandstander like Laughton, a cock-of-the-walk like Gable, and a new star in Tone that the studio really wanted to sell, I don't get any sense of the actors pulling focus or of the film losing sight of its narrative, its themes, or its ensemble disposition. Maybe the falling-in-love interlude between Gable and the island woman is a bit smooshy, but that's all I can think of.

Whereas, I'm convinced that you could start Gladiator with the scene where Commodus kills his father, more than half an hour in, and the movie wouldn't miss a thing. In theory, we'd lose our sense of Maximus' battlefield prowess, but as Mike indicated earlier, that whole sequence is so terribly shot and edited that we don't understand that prowess anyway.

I don't want to sound like I'm overpraising Mutiny—it's a terrific achievement in workmanlike craftsmanship, but it doesn't really hit any Masterpiece notes. And I don't mean to short-sell how fun Gladiator can be when Scott captures the enervated energy or the life-or-death stakes inside that ring. I admit that I like the score a lot, too. But it still stands that there's almost nothing in Mutiny that I want to fix and almost nothing in Gladiator that I don't want to trim, tighten, deepen, or improve.

MIKE: Well, I think I speak for the rest of us when I say, "What he said."

What say you, readers? Gladiator is #125 on the IMDB's top 250 films; did we miss the boat on that one? Does Mutiny on the Bounty warm the cockles of your landlubbers' hearts?

Stats: Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for eight Oscars (three lead actors, director, editing, screenplay, score) and won only Best Picture. Gladiator was nominated for twelve Oscars (supporting actor, art direction, director, cinematography, editing, score, original screenplay) and won five (picture, actor, costume design, visual effects, sound).

Previously: #7: It Happened One Night and A Beautiful Mind, #6: Cavalcade and Chicago, #5: Grand Hotel and LOTR: ROTK, #4: Cimarron and Million Dollar Baby, #3: All Quiet on the Western Front and Crash, #2: The Broadway Melody and The Departed, #1: Wings and No Country for Old Men

Posted by mike, August 28, 2008 10:44 AM