Making the epic poem into a big screen blockbuster will be a tall order for Hollywood moguls, reflects Enda O'Doherty.
Hottest entertainment news of the week is that Hollywood stunner Angelina Jolie (Alexander, Lara Croft) is to join Cockney beefcake Ray Winstone (Last Orders, Sexy Beast) in a mega-budget Robert Zemeckis treatment of the legend of Beowulf, based on a script knocked out by some anonymous dark-age poet guy about 1,200 years ago.
The good news for Bob and the team at Paramount and Warners is that there won't be much strain on the budget paying the writer, though I hope they've been told there is some Irish guy peddling a more recent version whose lawyers might try to muscle in on the action. The bad news is that I have read the script, and I can tell you it's going to need some work.
The story, for those who have forgotten, is that this Beowulf, a warrior prince of the Geats and a fine all-round athlete (if a little boastful), goes to help out his Danish neighbours across the sea, who have been getting serious aggravation from the man-eating monster Grendel (bolting down blood, gorging on the lumps - not nice).
Our young buck Beowulf (Ray Winstone) of course dispatches Grendel no problem, and so the Danes break out the mead and start into a bout of wassailing. That turns out to be a bit premature because who comes crashing in next but the monster's mother (Angelina Jolie), bent on avenging the slaughter of her lovely boy.
But after an exciting underwater fight Beowulf slices off Mrs G's head clean and everything is AOK again.
And then. Well, and then nothing. Beowulf goes home, becomes king of the Geats, rules for 50 years and is eventually killed by a dragon.
Obviously, from the excitement point of view, things are going to need to be spaced out a bit better. Also, in the text there is a lot of repetition and wandering off the point.
While I have the greatest respect for writers, this Beowulf-poet could have benefited at an early stage of the project from the advice of an experienced Hollywood producer, who would have told him straight up: "I just don't see where you're going with this, Egfirth."
It's not that there is any fundamental problem with the subject matter. There's a big market for sharp sword-song, mashed mead-benches, bright blood-gush, all that kind of thing. But what about something for the girls? Angelina, of course, is sure to be sensational as Grendel's mom, but why kill her off in scene three? And where's the sex interest? Maybe we could build in some kind of creepy trans-species attraction-repulsion thing.
Certainly the script needs work, but then there's nothing new about that. In colleges all over the world Beowulf has been used for generations as a form of torture/therapy for the brighter kind of literature student. Kids who have waltzed through school picking up A-pluses all the way from their admiring English teachers slip into university looking forward to three glorious years lounging around in black clothes, unpicking Conrad, Faulkner and Eliot over double espressos with their intense friends. The function of Beowulf studies is to teach them that life is not like that.
Written in a strange language that is English but not as we know it, the poem offers students an experience of translation that can be a real brain-cracker. But just as painful dentistry can protect against gingivitis, so early exposure to the raw Anglo-Saxon experience may help ward off middle-aged mind rot, while the real intellectual treat, the deciphering of unpunctuated, blotted, gap-studded scraps of original manuscript in insular script, provides great training for anyone who moves into newspaper sub-editing.
Literary adaptors for the big screen, who make their fortunes piggy-backing on the classics, seldom reply when asked why they do it "because I needed a new chateau in France".
The prolific Andrew Davies, who filleted all the thought and poetry out of Dr Zhivago and turned Miss Austen's finest novel into a leer over Mr Darcy's trousers, said he hoped his TV versions would send people back to the original. I'm sure Bob Zemeckis doesn't lack chutzpah, but somehow I doubt if he'll try that one.
