Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job, admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new, nepotism hire.