Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

226 RECEPTION OF FATHER AND SON
he announces with quiet emotion: “We’re going home.” As cheering
soldiers lift him onto his horse, Alexander once again sees Philip look
on from among the crowd, glimpsed in the middle distance as a static
fi gure among bustling camp followers on the ridge above the camp.
This time the fi lm cuts repeatedly back and forth over emotive musical
orchestration, using reaction shots to establish an empathic dialogue
of mutual regards. Alexander (in close-up) looks tenderly to Philip,
Philip to Alexander. This time there is no harsh rebuke—no words
need be spoken. In his father’s eyes, the son has become a man.
Philip’s approving presence effects reconciliation and moral endorsement
from beyond the grave, a sentiment backed up by the mushy
soundtrack. In respecting the wishes of his army—earlier equated by
Cleitus with his paternal “blood”—Alexander knows that at last he
has earned the respect and acceptance as a “worthy son” that his emotionally
crippled father was incapable of expressing in his own lifetime.
(One signifi cant detail of mise-en-scène is that Alexander’s horse
in this scene is a new one. The death of Bucephalus, the embodiment
of Alexander’s struggle for Philip’s attention and approval as a boy, is
a major narrative element of the immediately preceding battle and
supplies one of the fi lm’s keynote visual images.)
This scene takes as its immediate model not Rossen’s Alexander
the Great but the execution of William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart
(1995). The two scenes situate their fi lms within the tendency
of historical epic in the 1990s and 2000s to factor in a reifi ed New Age
spirituality, typically from the heroic male lead’s subjective point of
view, in order to explore a more emotionally available and vulnerable
masculinity. Here, as in Braveheart and Gladiator, magic realism delivers
a classical deus ex machina in terms that play to a modern
audience’s preconceptions. Because the protagonist is near death
we can choose to rationalize his perception as a hallucination, while
simultaneously experiencing the emotionally satisfying catharsis of
an otherwise unobtainable moment of closure that resolves the fi lm’s
most important and most troubled relationship. Susceptibility to an
altered state of consciousness is an updated manifestation of the
Romantic closeness to nature endemic to the heroes of premodern
historical epic fi lm; it is very hard to imagine such a scene playing in
any other genre. 15
Gibson’s fi lm carries its own male-epic share of father-angst—I take
the title of the present chapter from its dialogue—but the hero’s vision
is of his dead wife, Murron, moving silently among the crowd at his
fi nal ordeal. Wallace’s romantic relationship with Murron is the motor
for Braveheart’s plot; similarly, Gladiator’s Maximus is primarily
motivated by his wish to be reunited (whether in life or death) with