The New Criterion

The recent release of the film adaptation of Beowulf has provoked largely negative reactions. The most vitriolic reviews have branded the film unintelligible schlock totally unfaithful to the original. That the performances are enhanced by computer graphics does not help, lending the actors - who include Sir Anthony Hopkins as the Danish king Hrothgar and John Malkovich as his malcontent adviser Unferth - a surreal, slippery quality somewhere between reality and cartoon. And, as nearly every reviewer has noted, Angelina Jolie is truly awful as Grendel’s mother. Sheathed in gold, she looks like an Academy Awards statuette gone awry, speaking her lines with the accent of a mid-century German emigre.

However, I would urge any detractors of the film to read this optimistic assessment from the Times of London, which points out that the movie does in fact capture much of the terror of the original and is "in touch with the critical debate about the poem." In his groundbreaking 2001 translation, Seamus Heaney attempted to distill the poem’s "overall power to haunt"; the director Robert Zemeckis, at his best, also recreates the candle-lit, mead-soaked interior of Heorot and the snowy vistas, buffered by the cold northern seas, where the monster Grendel roamed. I also found the depiction of Christianity’s growing influence on heathen Nordic tribes a brave thematic choice to hit upon for a movie so obviously targeted to general audiences.

My day job is teaching English at a classical high school, and I recently took some of my students to see the film. They were skeptical at first, having spent a month perusing the Heaney version and listening to Old English recitations, but found it ultimately compelling for the same reasons as the Times reviewer.