Word: hrothgar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story will be familiar even to those who don't know the poem. The kingdom of old Hrothgar (voiced and modeled by Anthony Hopkins) is troubled by the predatory sorties of Grendel (Crispin Hellion Glover). Accompanied by his "14 brave thanes," Beowulf (Ray Winstone) comes across the sea to slay the monster and, not incidentally, add another laurel to his own legend. He repels a Grendel attack on Mead Hall, severing the beast's arm. Grendel limps back to his lair, where his mother - she has no name, so we'll call her Grendma - watches him die. When Beowulf discovers...
...That might be a blessing in the early scenes, which have as much peeing and belching as a PG-13 rating will allow, and where the strangely Shrekish-looking Hrothgar staggers about drunkenly in a toga that is ever in danger of slipping off his mammoth body. It also takes a while to grow accustomed to the faces of Hrothgar, his wife Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn) and the oily counselor Unferth (John Malkovich). The faces have lines and creases, but they don't look lived in. This quibble subsides when Beowulf appears. The political drama of the palace is instantly...
...with pathos, as much for monster as for man. Grendel is a horror, a plague, to Hrothgar's kingdom, but he seems plaintive, lonely, in his cave. He complains to his mother in some Scandivanian tongue, as if Gollum had shown up in a Bergman film. Up close he has the physiognomy of Rondo Hatton, the actor whose acromegalic face got him roles as villains in ?40s mysteries and horror films. Grendel too seems typecast for villainy, but maybe the humans just don't understand how close he is to them. Why, they might...
...also gives him a weakness for the ladies. Once he becomes king, he marries Hrothgar's widow but keeps a younger blond (Alison Lohman) on the side. And in his showdown with Grendma, he's simply out of his shallows. She appears to him drenched in gold, with high-heeled feet and nipples pert enough to hang a horseshoe on. When her hand touches Beowulf's sword, it turns to water, even as his resolve melts away at her caress. Ulysses may have resisted the sirens, but Beowulf's self-regard leads him to think he can bed Grendma...
These artistic enactments are forms of mythmaking. They rearrange experience to endow it with drama and significance. The novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's point of view. In Gardner's telling, a blind harper appears at King Hrothgar's hall and sings, transforming Hrothgar's bloody, sordid career into "ringing phrases, magnificent, golden, and all of them, incredibly, lies. The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they who knew the truth, remembered...