Big Screen Rome - Amazon Web Services

attitudes about female political skills and familiarity with women in positions
of power, but the film also presents an equally modern viewpoint
about the importance of family by highlighting Lucilla’s maternal instincts
(Solomon, 2001a, 94). As the film demonstrates, it is Lucilla’s fear for
her son under the rule of her volatile and murderous brother that is her
primary motivation for wanting to see good government restored.
Despite her best efforts, however, Lucilla’s domestic relationships are
anything but idyllic. Like Commodus, the character of Lucilla in Gladiator
experiences a series of broken or thwarted attachments, in both her
familial and conjugal roles. Her natal family shows signs of intricate
rearrangements of kinship terms. Lucilla is the sister of a corrupt brother
who loves her as a mother-wife, and the daughter of an absent father who
loves her as a son. “Let us pretend that you are a loving daughter, and I
am a good father,” Marcus Aurelius tells her, and she replies, “Is this not
a pleasant fiction?” Lucilla is also marked by losses in romance. Her husband,
Lucius Verus, is dead, and it has been at least eight years since the
end of her erotic liaison with Maximus, as their sons by other partners are
both eight years old. The ruptures and dysfunctions in Lucilla’s relationships
create an emotional space where the film reconstructs a temporary
bond between her and Maximus, one imbued with both political and
erotic connotations. In three intense encounters, the film accurately
portrays the injured resentment, unfinished longing, and half-swallowed
whispers that transpire between ex-lovers who are compelled by circumstances
into one another’s orbit. “Many things change,” he lies to her.
“Not everything,” she lies back.
Gladiator reverses the trend of earlier epic films in which the most
powerful scenes take place mainly between male characters, while the
heterosexual romance is subordinated to these complicated and thematically
more important male/male interactions (Fitzgerald, 38). Because the
comprehensive figure of Lucilla rejects the one-dimensional portrayals of
women in previous epic films, the scenes between her and Maximus are
just as important to the narrative as any of his scenes with the male actors,
perhaps even more so, since Lucilla’s contact with him serves to focus and
articulate the theme of Republican Rome. Moreover, because their lingering
sexual desire for each other is expressed but never consummated in
the film, the scenes between Lucilla and Maximus maintain a tension that
mirrors the progress of the cinematic plot towards its climax. By combining
elements of sensuality and domesticity with ample political intelligence,
Lucilla responds to issues relevant to contemporary women who
attempt to manage competing personal and professional roles, and who,
236 GLADIATOR (2000)