In Defense of Gladiator

 In Defense of Gladiator

Ebert's review of Gladiator is a fascinating document, not because it lands its blows but because it so precisely misses what the film is doing. Each complaint is argued with real conviction and each complaint is wrong at its foundation. What Ebert calls a pall over the picture is the picture's aesthetic. What he calls depression is gravity. What he calls muddy is mourning. Nearly every frame he objects to is a frame doing exactly what Ridley Scott wanted it to do.

Start with the color grading, because that is where the review opens and where its misreading is most fundamental. Ebert complains that the film looks muddy, fuzzy, and indistinct, that it was evidently filmed on grim and overcast days, that the palette runs to mud tones. This is not an accident of production. It is the entire visual thesis. Gladiator is a film about a man whose life has been drained of color, whose wife and son have been murdered, whose empire has been stolen, whose only remaining function is violence. The palette reflects his interior. The exception Ebert himself identifies, the golden wheat fields of Elysium in Maximus's dreams, is the film giving away its own grammar: the living world is ash, the remembered and hoped for world is gold. Ebert notices the technique, quotes it back, and then holds it against the film. When he writes "that proves the point," he is right, though not in the way he intends. It proves the point that the film's visual design is rigorous and purposeful rather than accidental and dim.

The Colosseum looks like a model from a computer game, Ebert writes. This was 2000, and the digital extension of the Colosseum was genuinely groundbreaking work. It won the Oscar for visual effects that year. More importantly, the long shots of the Colosseum were never meant to stand up to forensic scrutiny. They were meant to establish scale before the camera drops into the sand where the fighting actually happens. Scott shoots the arena combat in tight, handheld, chaotic takes because gladiatorial combat was tight, handheld, and chaotic. Ebert wants lucidly choreographed swordplay on the Rob Roy model. Rob Roy is a duel film. Gladiator is a slaughter film. The two require different cameras. Demanding elegant fencing choreography from the Colosseum is like demanding ballet from a bar fight.

On the charge that the characters are bitter, vengeful, and depressed: they are. This is Rome under Commodus. This is a man whose family has been crucified and burned. This is a sister watching her brother plot incest with her while threatening her child. What does Ebert want them to be? The complaint that Gladiator lacks joy is a complaint that a tragedy is not a comedy. The Raiders comparison is telling. Raiders is a serial adventure. Gladiator is a revenge tragedy in the classical mode. To fault one for not being the other is to fault a sonnet for not being a limerick.

Ebert calls the moral lesson "it is good when gladiators slaughter everyone in sight and then turn over power to the politicians." This is a reading so willfully reductive it almost parodies itself. The film's political argument is that tyranny corrupts even the entertainments it uses to placate the people, that Commodus's games are the regime's self portrait, and that the only honorable act left in such a Rome is to die well having refused the tyrant's terms. Maximus does not turn power over to the politicians at the end. He asks that Rome be returned to its senators because he is dying and because his last living act should align with what Marcus Aurelius intended before Commodus murdered him. This is not a glib message. It is a Roman one, a Stoic one, and the film earns it through two and a half hours of suffering.

On Commodus. Ebert says Phoenix is passable but that a quirkier actor could have had more fun. This may be the most revealing sentence in the review, because it exposes the register Ebert wanted the film to occupy. He wanted Peter Ustinov collecting tears in crystal vials. He wanted camp. Phoenix refused camp. What he delivers is something far rarer: a portrait of a grown man who never stopped being a wounded boy, whose cruelty is recognizably the cruelty of a child who was never loved by his father and now has the machinery of empire with which to act out that wound. The incest subplot with Lucilla is not an exotic decoration added for lurid flavor. It is psychologically coherent. Commodus wants the mother he lost, the father he lost, and the power that would compensate him for both, and he cannot distinguish between these hungers. Phoenix plays this with unsettling quietness. Ebert wanted bigger. The film is better for not giving it to him.

The thumbs up charge is the kind of pedantry that passes for criticism when a reviewer has run out of real objections. Yes, the Roman convention was pollice verso and pollice compresso, with scholars still debating the exact gestures. The film chose the modern iconography because the modern audience reads it instantly. This is not ignorance on Scott's part. It is the same choice any historical filmmaker makes a hundred times per picture, which is to use the symbol the audience understands rather than the symbol accurate to the period. Ebert knows this. Every Roman epic ever made contains dozens of such choices. Singling out the thumb here is a reviewer looking for ammunition.

On the supporting performances. Ebert grants that Crowe is efficient, which is like saying Olivier was adequate as Hamlet. Crowe's Maximus is one of the great leading man performances of the new century, a study in grief and restraint that carries the film's emotional weight without visible effort. The scene in which Maximus returns to his burned farm and kneels in the ash, lifting the charred feet of his hanged family, is acted without a word of dialogue. Ebert does not mention it. The scene in which Maximus removes his helmet in the Colosseum and tells Commodus his full name and the names of the dead he serves is the single most quoted passage from the film and one of the most potent revenge tragedy speeches in modern cinema. Ebert does not mention that either.

Connie Nielsen, whom Ebert correctly singles out, plays Lucilla as a woman performing loyalty while plotting survival. Every scene she shares with Phoenix is a small masterclass in layered fear. Oliver Reed, in his final performance, gives Proximo a weight no other actor alive in 1999 could have supplied: a ruined man who once had his own freedom and who chooses, at the end, to give it to Maximus. The line "shadows and dust" would not work in another actor's mouth. It works in Reed's because Reed himself was a ruin by then, and the camera knows it.

Ebert's comparison to Titus is the review's most peculiar move. Titus is a brilliant piece of stylized Shakespearean horror, and Julie Taymor is a director of exceptional visual invention. Titus is also a film watched by approximately no one outside the critical community, because its visual invention serves Shakespeare's most lurid play at full volume for three hours. To tell readers that Titus is "immeasurably better to look at" than Gladiator is to confuse personal taste for argument. Gladiator is operating in a different tradition: the sword and sandal epic as filtered through Kurosawa and through seventies revenge cinema. The tradition Ebert invokes, Spartacus and Ben Hur, is exactly the tradition Gladiator is reviving, and reviving well enough that it restarted the entire genre. Every Roman epic made after 2000 exists because Gladiator proved the genre could still work.

The "Rocky on downers" line is clever and almost right. Gladiator is a downward spiral with a moment of ascent, which is the structure of classical tragedy. Maximus does not climb out of poverty to win a title. He fights to die well and to take Commodus with him. The climactic duel, with Commodus stabbing Maximus before the fight even begins, is not a boxing finale. It is the tragedy confirming that honor can only be preserved through death in a world where the dishonorable hold the imperial throne. Maximus wins by destroying his enemy at the cost of his own life. This is not Rocky. This is Sophocles.

The final scene, in which Juba buries the small wooden figures of Maximus's wife and son in the sand of the empty Colosseum, is one of the most moving closing images in any blockbuster of that decade. It pays off the Elysium dreams. It pays off the prayers Maximus whispered to his dead. It places the reunion outside of Rome, outside of history, in a place neither senate nor emperor can reach. Ebert did not find the film moving. The film is profoundly moving, and twenty five years of audience response is the verdict on that point.

Gladiator is not Spartacus. It is not trying to be. It is a mourning film shaped like an epic, carried by a career defining performance, directed with painterly seriousness by a filmmaker who understood that the glory of Rome had to look like ash to mean anything. The pall Ebert complains about is the film. Without it, the picture would be a theme park. With it, the picture is one of the few modern epics that earns its own gravity.