THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Gladiators galore in Ridley Scott's Rome.

BY ANTHONY LANE

The new Ridley Scott picture "Gladiator" begins in triumphant gloom. The date is 180 A.D., and the Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) is stuck in the mud and mists of Germania, on the northern flank of the Empire; his legions, fanatically faithful to their leader, are ranged against a tribe of Germans so aggressively hairy that even a soldier as war-wise as Maximus is uncertain whether to harass them with cavalry from the rear or simply shave them to death. Maximus is followed into battle by his fearsome dog. "At my signal, unleash hell," he says. Is that a battle cry, or is it time for a walk? At any rate, we are plunged into a melee of sprayed blood and breath that steams in the air; great tubs of fire are catapulted toward the enemy, and flaming arrows fly like shooting stars. Victory nears amid descending snow.

We have been here before. The date was 1964 A.D., and the movie director Anthony Mann was sticking to his guns, or his javelins, in "The Fall of the Roman Empire." The most memorable scene in that overarching, undervalued movie is also set on a northerly plain, with lighted torches flaring in swirls of snow. I guess that Ridley Scott and his writers--David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson --are trusting the short memories of the movie going public, but I was touched to see them returning to the embrace of so wondrous an image. It seems to gather in all the fearful ambitions of an imperium; are we meant to imagine civilization blazing a trail through barbarous wastes, or the scorched-earth policies of unchecked power? Maximus himself is poised between the two: a good man meting out brutality. Crowe is stocky, sad, and stubbled, with a low Neanderthal brow and quick eyes, educated in suspicion; though shorter than most of the men around him, he has mastered the art of walking taller than any of them. Once or twice he tries a smile, and it practically cracks the lens.

The story is your basic three-act affair, the kind of thing that screenplay workshops teach as holy writ. After his German victory, Maximus is asked by the aging emperor Marcus Aurelius played by a loose haired Richard Harris, who is about as Roman as a pint of Guinness--to be his successor. Maximus goes away to stroke his chin and think about it, but before he can offer a response Marcus is smothered to death by his own son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who promptly declares that he, not some sweaty soldier, will be taking charge. Viewers new to the period may ask themselves how so sane and pensive a parent-Marcus wrote the "Meditations," after all, a touchstone of the Stoic temperament--could have sired so rich a fruitcake. Digging around, I found a fourth-century historian who claimed that Commodus' mother fell for a gladiator and confessed her lust to Marcus; he, in turn, ordered not only that the gladiator should die but that his wife should wash herself from beneath in his blood and in this state lie with her husband." That would explain a lot. Amazingly, it doesn't get into the film.

Maximus escapes death, goes home, finds his family slain, faints, wakes up on a slave train, and ends up being sold to Oliver Reed. What a life.

Reed, who plays an ex-gladiator named Proximo, died during the making of the film--of drink, needless to say, the blood having long since passed from his alcohol-stream. Having cowered at his Bill Sykes in "Oliver!," I thought he was a terrifying actor who never got his due; with his bullock's bulk and that soft, whispering sea roar of a voice, he could have trod the Burt Lancaster path. This last role is not quite meaty enough for a sendoff, but I liked the sight of his blue eyes, glazed with the tedium of daily massacre, opening a little wider as he first watches Maximus in the ring--gold dust glinting in the sand.

All plots lead to Rome, and Maximus, presumed dead, arrives incognito at the gates of the Colosseum, accompanied by his new best friend and fellow-slave Juba (Djimon Hounsou), plus a barrel load of computer-graphic imagery.

Gladiator takes C.G.I. about as far as it will currently go; much of the ancient city is a virtual re-creation, as is most of the throng that packs in to watch the games. It's hard to pin down, but your senses are never quite pricked with the sharpness of the real; you can see the air humming with bloodlust, but you can't smell it. Maybe that's a good thing, because if "Gladiator" were any more authentic the audience in the movie theatre might start spearing one another in the throat.

You find yourself thrilling to acts of violence, but that, I guess, is the freakish strength of this picture. It shows you the tantalizing laws of cruelty, and it forces you to ask yourself just how speedily you, too, would slide from citizen to lout. At one point, Russell Crowe crosses his forearms in front of him, with a blade in each fist; then, with a swift, double backhand jerk, he scissors a man's head off. My, how we cheered. If Jerry Springer ran the Super Bowl, this is how it would end up.

At the climax, Maximus even takes on Commodus himself; this may sound unlikely, but the young emperor was, indeed, a crazed amateur gladiator, who fought more than seven hundred times, once against an unarmed giraffe. So says Gibbon, at any rate, and if you want to prep yourself for this film skim through Volume I of "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Note, in particular, the famous claim: "If a man were called to fur the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus."

In other words, Ridley Scott's movie-like Anthony Mann's, which had the same background, and most of the same characters--is positioned at the exact moment of paradise lost. "So much," says Marcus, with a weary pause, "for the glory of Rome." It's a wonderful line: is he dissing the fatherland or proudly recalling all the wars he has fought? 'so much'-in the name of Pax Romana?

The exhausted opening of the film already feels like an ending, and, with mad gaze and milk-white armor Joaquin Phoenix, who has fleshed out alarmingly since his gawky teens, is just the kind of bad angel who can ruin your peace and call it entertainment. Romans rise ecstatically to their feet, not knowing that he has brought them to their knees.

High politics wind through "Gladiator" in a tangle of constitutional announcements. "There was a dream that was Rome," we are told, and the echo of Dr. King bounces awkwardly off the sight of Juba, a near-naked black man, scrapping for the pleasure of the crowd. "Give power back to the people," Marcus tells Maximus, but nothing that ensues does much honor to popular virtue, and when Maximus complains to Commodus' elegant sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) that he has "the power only to amuse a mob" she replies curtly, "That is power."

Maximus does not want to fight, but only by fighting can he avenge his family and salve the wounded state of Rome; on the other hand, he does rather enjoy himself out there, wearing a spiffy helmet, engaging hungry tigers in hand-to-paw combat, and making the charioteers wish they had fitted the optional airbag.

"Gladiator," like its hero, is aroused by everything that it knows to be corrupt; why else would the musical score (by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard) march so doomily in the footsteps of Mars from Hoist's "The Planets"? "I will give the people the greatest vision of their lives," Commodus says, and it is no accident that he sounds like a film director: D. W. Griffith, perhaps, or Leni Riefenstahl, one of those dangerous geniuses who remind you what menace a vision can bear.

There are times when "Gladiator" appears to be not so much photographed as cast in iron: gray-blue skies, flesh as cold and colorless as the armor that protects it, and hardened profiles that you could stamp on a coin. I spent half the movie trying to work out what the computerized Rome reminded me of, and then I clicked; it was Albert Speer's designs for the great Berlin of the future. Scott's is hardly a Fascist film, but it is insanely watchable in ways that set you fretting; like his own "Blade Runner," it makes you desperate to know the worst--to see what extremes this poisoned world can stretch to. When one gladiator has another pinned on the ground like an insect, he asks the Emperor to decide the fallen man's fate by the raising or lowering of a thumb. The mob does its best to sway his choice, which leaves us with the disconcerting spectacle of multiple, raving, Latin-speaking Siskels and Eberts-forty thousand thumbs way down.

So that's what mass slaughter was like: just another trip to the movies.