Beowulf (the film): Fathering Monsters

Jolie as Grendel's MotherJolie as Grendel’s Mother 

Film Friday

I’m teaching Beowulf at the moment and of course my class wants to know what I think of the movie, by which they mean Robert Zemeckis’s animated 2007 version rather than the 2005 Swedish film Beowulf and Grendel. Neither is very good but it’s interesting to see what each does with the poem. Especially interesting is how the Zemeckis film manages to cast Angelina Jolie (an animated version of her) as a beautiful, and nude, Grendel’s Mother. Give the film credit for thinking outside the box.

I had to see the film just to find out how they were going to pull that off. For the first twenty minutes or so, I was pleasantly surprised: the film was inserting even minute details from the poem. For instance, in what almost seems a throwaway line, the poem notes that Grendel trashed everything in Heorot Hall except King Hrothgar’s throne. Here’s the passage as translated by Seamus Heaney:

He took over Heorot,
haunted the glittering hall after dark,
but the throne itself, the treasure-seat
he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord’s outcast.

Small detail though this appears, it gives us a clue into the meaning of the monster. He is less than an external threat and more a spirit of discontent at the very core of society. A descendent of Cain, he is the fratricidal rage that can break out between fellow warriors. (I have written here, here, and here about America’s own Grendel problem, embodied in the mass killers who periodically erupt in our midst.)


The good news is that, though this rage occurs within the Danish kingdom, it has not yet destroyed Hrothgar’s authority. (Same for America.) Incidentally, the throne, along with the entire hall, is destroyed after Hrothgar dies and civil war breaks out.

The movie takes this poem’s tiny detail about the throneand makes it the movie’s central mystery. Why won’t Grendel approach the king’s chair? Because he is Hrothgar’s son.

Needless to say, this is where the film departs from the poem, but it’s a clever departure. To become king, Hrothgar makes a deal with the devil and Grendel is the consequence. It’s a moral message: if you grab power illegimately, your actions will come back to haunt you.

The seduction of power is embodied by a very sexy Angelina Jolie. You sleep with the devil and she gives birth to Grendel.

Tormented by what his actions have wrought, Hrothgar commits suicide and Beowulf becomes king—and proceeds to sleep with “power” himself. (He claims that Grendel’s mother is a hag and that he killed her, but he’s lying.) The result of his unholy alliance is the dragon, the poem’s third monster.

At the very end of the film, Beowulf redeems himself by killing the dragon but he is killed as well, and we see his henchman Wiglaf prepared to take over the throne. Jolie looms on the horizon. Will Wiglaf too be corrupted by power?

The movie understands that the monsters are internal rather than external. In the poem, however, the dragon is an old man’s monster, the greedy self absorption that can accompany old age. Maybe that’s why, in the film, the dragon symbolism doesn’t really work.

I don’t have problems with the liberties that Zemeckis takes with the poem. But different monsters have different symbolic associations, and it makes no sense for a young ambitious Beowulf to father a dragon.

In short, the film doesn’t work on an emotional level.  Which is why, I suspect, it did poorly at the box office.

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