Beowulf's Backside

I had a chance to see Hollywood's new attempt at interpreting Beowulf yesterday, and my feelings are a little mixed. There were, as I expected, several glaring inaccuracies, omissions, conflations, and a heaping helping of juvenile sexual references and crudities. I didn't really expect them to stay true to the storyline.

Hollywood can't seem to do that anymore, no matter what the story at hand. Every director has to put his fingers in the pudding, for some reason. Never mind the fact that the piece of literature in question here has been doing fine on its on merit for more than a thousand years. I'm sure some twenty-first century visionary best knows how to jazz it up. I always wonder at the pure hubris of the motion picture folk sometimes when it seems as though the most popular and lasting interpretations of most literature-to-film productions are the ones that stay closest to the originals. Take the Lord of the Rings series, for example.

Anyway, descending the soapbox and coming back to the matter at hand, it was an entertaining little bit of fluff. I enjoyed it. I don't think I can use much of it in class because there was too much flesh for the classroom, including lots of Beowulf's derriere in the fight scene with Grendel and, of course, the much-advertised naked-golden-Angelina-Jolie monster.

The creators of this particular screen play, one of whom was Neil Gaiman, an author I love, also decided to explore themes I didn't particularly find present in the original epic. While it bothered me a little at first, after thinking about it more, I find myself increasingly liking the direction they took the story. It's less about invincible heroes and more about peeling back the curtain to look behind the legends. It's not my beloved epic poem, but I think it's okay in its own right. Maybe for our time of flawed figures, it's more important for us to peel away that curtain to look than to look at the cloth of gold time has drawn across.