Too Prickly, and Will Lift Sores

I've been putting off writing about Alejandro Amenabar's Agora for a few days--first due to technical reasons, then because I ran out of steam. But I think I might as well make some observations, before the spirit completely ceases to move me.

Organized roughly around the long-forgotten life and death of martyred philosopher-mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria (here played by Rachel Weisz), Agora is also very clearly put together as a shadow-show collating its creator's views on science vs. faith...maybe not even vs., once you get down to it, but the way that both can be equally uniting as well as dividing, cultish as well as uplifting. True, Hypatia's atheist devotion to unravelling the mysteries of gravity, elliptical orbits and the true composition of the solar system never end up killing anybody, unlike the constant clashes of Alexandria's early Christian, late Pagan and edge-of-Diasporic Jewish faiths--but it doesn't make her automatically perfect and above it all, either, since she A) discounts all faiths equally, B) has no trouble sacrificing her personal relationships on philosophy/science's altar and C) (most tellingly) simply does not understand that the main driving engine behind Christianity's rise from illegal cult to controlling interest is that it is rightly called "the slaves' religion".

Our main (sympathetic) Christian character is Davus (Max Minghella, son of Anthony), Hypatia's personal assistant, who she treats as a combination of friend, child, pet and tool, depending on what she wants at any given time. As head of the Library of Alexandria, her father's patronage and power is what has allowed her to become a teacher leading a symposium made up of other young men who will later become Alexandria's ruling class, all of whom are likewise green-sick with love for her; Davus sees them as competitors to be overcome, but has no idea how to go about doing so, until Christianity's promises are dangled in front of him by the zealot who will later become Bishop Cyril--the promises of judgement, of retribution and recompense, of an adjustment which will see all men either equal or dead, and all women returned to their "natural" place in the "natural" order.

On some level, Davus probably understands that to remove Hypatia's capacity to pursue her intellectual goals would be to destroy everything he is most attracted to in her--but then again, it may be that he sees lobotomizing her as a way to protect her, especially once the Pagan-to-Christian power-shift starts rolling, and the Library is gutted to make a church. Or maybe, true to its cultish roots, he simply sees his new religion as a form of witchcraft. Indeed, in a very powerful scene, Davus's first real "prayer" begins as a version of the Lord's Prayer, then devolves into him simply gabbling over and over: "Don't let anyone else have her, don't let anyone else have her, don't let anyone else have her, please, please, please..."

Much has been made of Amenabar's slippy-slidey trickery with dates and events, but I'm less likely to call anyone on that, having done the same thing so often myself. (Continuity's always a chore--last night, I realized that most of A Rope... takes place not in Arizona, but New Mexico, and had to do search-and-replace grindwork accordingly.) And a lot of people have also called him on his repetitive use of EXT. DEEP SPACE shots or overhead/sky shots in general, whether tracking or stable, which he uses to contextualize the overall ridiculousness of the human condition. To history's victims like Hypatia--trapped naked and alone in a tiny room, awaiting either shameful mutilation at the hands of people who hate her or merciful death at the hands of one who loves her--these single fleshly moments may seem unending, as huge as the cosmos itself...but really, she (and Amenabar) know(s) better. So the climactic triumph here is not how a huge group of people took power back from another group by turning off their own capacity to question, but how one person might have used only their brain and a set of calculations to think their way around the single largest issues of their day.

Or, to put it another way: Down on the ground, with stones being hurled at you, it probably really doesn't matter if the earth goes 'round the sun or vice versa, in the most sadly practical sense--but Hypatia, at least, might have proven to her own satisfaction which was which. And therefore (as she says she would, at an earlier, happier point, if she did) she might, at least, have died content.

Amended to add: Steve pointed me towards always-interesting Catholic critic Stephen Greydanus' response, here (http://decentfilms.com/articles/agora). I agree with him on most parts, although I really will stress that Hypatia's occasional embracing of Davus and other slave characters seems to have about the same emotional weight as celebrating a happy moment by cooing over your cat. She doesn't free him because she feels bad about him being enslaved, or in spite of him having just professed sexual desire for her--from what I can tell, she does it because she doesn't want him around her anymore; his desire freaks her out at best, disgusts her at worst. And believe me, he can tell.

Wrath Incarnate

And while we're at it: Neil Marshall's Centurion, which I have to take back ASAP, is a straightforward historical action flick with horror overtones--a grim, grubby, blood-soaked fairytale of occupied vs. occupiers, based on the disappearance of the fabled Ninth Legion. Not quite up to The Descent standards, but easily up to Dog Soldiers...and it has some interesting things to say about male and female gender-roles to boot, along with a wealth of resonance about wars of attrition and the generational scars they produce.

The set-up goes thus. With the Empire they represent overextended and dumping territory wherever they can, 3,000 (or possibly 300) soldiers march into the Pict-held part of what will eventually be Scotland, already disenchanted with the idea that "Roman Britain" will ever be anything but a bad mistake made for pure ego-boo reasons. They're led by slab-o'-manly-man General Virilus (Dominic West--and yes, that is his character's name, I shit you not) and his current second-in-command, Centurion Quintas Dias (Michael Fassbender!), sole survivor of a Pict raid that kicked this whole slash-and-burn rebel-cleanser off.

Guiding them is Etain (Olga Kuryalenko), who has no tongue and almost animalistic tracker-killer skillz; "A she-wolf," Virilus' boss Agricola says, approvingly branding her with Rome's own emblem. She is also, as the unfortunate Ninth are about to find out, all Rome's sins of conquest come back home to roost. If you remember your Last of the Mohicans, Kuryalenko is playing the Maugwa part here--she takes them further than they should go, then leads them into a trap so they can be slaughtered, repaying her debt to Gorlacon, the local "king" who took her in after Romans made an example of her village, parents and body. Gang-raped and mutilated as a virtual child, she's re-made herself into a sort of shark-restless blood golem with "a hole in her" that only Roman suffering can fill; hell, this fearsome little girl even manages to kill West in hand-to-hand combat, matching spear against gladius. "If Etain is hunting you," a witch later tells Dias, "you are already dead."

Dead or not, though, Dias and the few legionaries who manage to escape Etain's initial rout do keep on running. And there's something wonderful about her remorseless pursuit, about the image of strong men turning pale when her figure appears on whatever hill is nearest. Her shadow is inescapable; it blocks the sun, moving towards a final consummation--Roark's Drift or Assault on Precinct 13, re-staged at the Roman encampment they finally make it to, only to find it already abandoned. And even her inevitable death is not the victory it might be, once Dias realizes the Wall's already going up, with him on the wrong side of it.

The resemblance to my own "Sent Down" is striking, but it doesn't last, and the film has a lot of other pleasures to dole out. Well worth your time, in other words.