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Synopsis: The Persian Empire of the god-king Xerxes is on the march, intent on adding Greece to its subject nations. Standing in his way is the Greek kingdom of Sparta, a land in which every son of every man is trained as a soldier from birth. King Leonidas of Sparta is offered the post of Warlord of Greece if he will bend his knee to the will of Xerxes, something he can never do. Unfortunately, the skullduggery of his enemies and traitors in his own land hamstring his plans for war--the invasion will take place at the sacred festival of Cannae--leaving Leonidas only his hand-picked bodyguard of 300 Spartans to oppose a hundred thousand Persians at the pass of the Hot Gates on the penninsula of Thermopylae. Leonidas's wife, Queen Gorgo, tells him to "return with his shield, or on it."

Go Tell the Spartans: The Battle of Thermopylae is one of those events in world history that exists more in myth than in actual fact. Oh, its impact on the course of Western Civilization is immense. Leonidas and his 300 were massacred by the Persians, but delayed them long enough for the Athenians to flank the Persian fleet and destroy it utterly. Thus, the classical civilization of Greece endured to be spread throughout the Near East by Alexander the Great and through the West by the Roman Empire. We'll never know how the world would be changed had Persia ascended in the West. The winners, after all, write the histories. Because the story of the 300 Spartans continues to resonate, it's difficult to know what really happened. Did Leonidas only have 300 soldiers? Probably not. Were they flanked by a hidden goat pass? Maybe. What matters with this story isn't the actual events, it's the story itself. This is the classical equivalent of The Alamo, a propaganda victory in bloody defeat. This version of the story doesn't have even a cursory accquaintance with historical fact. It indulges in the myth, which is probably wise. The truth might make for poor drama.

Understanding Comics: Frank Miller, who wrote and drew the book on which 300 is based, is not one of the great draughtsmen in comics. Miller's gifts are found in arranging panels on the page as a means of propelling the narrative. His drawing style is inspired in equal parts by Kazuo Koike's Lone Wolf and Cub, with it's slashing gestural lines and rough pen strokes, and Alex Toth's philosophy of black spotting as the over-riding design decision. Miller's panel arrangements were groundbreaking when he first appeared (though, in retrospect, owe a lot to Miller's idol, Will Eisner). In short: accurate drawing of anatomy and environments are secondary in Miller's work to mood and narrative thrust. The antithesis of this is the work of Hal Foster. Foster didn't take shortcuts. He worked his drawing until they looked right because they were right. Foster's best known creation is Prince Valiant, a comic that seems more illustration than narrative. Foster's work functions as a series of static historical tableaux, not very different from pedimental friezes. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but it's a style that seems diametrically opposed to the function of the medium itself. At least, to me it seems that way, anyway. Mind you, there are great draughtsmen who are also great storytellers within the medium--Milt Caniff comes to mind, as does Winsor McKay--but the brutal, meat-grinder nature of the comics industry itself tends to force most artists to gravitate to one pole or the other. Miller has made his choice, for better or for worse, and for the most part he has expanded his area of comics. I mention all of this because 300 works a strange bit of alchemy on Miller's work.

As was the case with Rodriguez and Miller's Sin City adaptation--which Miller himself called "experimental"--300 takes the panels of the comic and transposes them to the screen as a kind of storyboard. It goes out of its way not to deviate from the printed page, though it does go out of its way to create a visual analogue to Lynn Varley's muted palette of colors. Unfortunately, this is a woeful misunderstanding of the difference between comics and movies. A comic page juxtaposes its images in space and in sequence, while a movie juxtaposes its images in time. Because the comics page juxtaposes its images in space, and because it has to pick and choose those images more carefully than a movie--a comics panel is like a moment frozen by a lightning flash--the reader himself has to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The language of comics isn't in the images themselves, per se, so much as it is in the selection of moment and the arrangement of those moments on the page. Here, Miller is a master. This is entirely beyond the capabilities of film. What 300 does is arrange those images in time, giving them a duration comensurate with the narration or action required, then fails to fill in the interstitial leaps of closure that a comic reader is forced to provide through practical necessity (and which moviegoers are almost never asked to provide). The filmmakers have also taken the images themselves and burnished them to a high gloss, taking Miller's virtuoso panel layouts and turning them into Hal Foster's static friezes. One pundit has noted that this renders the movie as a series of animated album covers rather than as a narrative, and that's not far wrong. Subtle, this movie is not.

Politics: The movie is unfortunate in its choice of timing, too. When it was written, the Iraq war and the saber-rattling at Iran that form most of America's foreign policy as of this writing were but a gleam in the eyes of a small group of conservative think tanks. Today's climate is the bloody aftermath of a foreign-policy debacle, one the subtext of this film would seem to advocate exacerbating. Given the way it's filmed, 300 resembles some varieties of fascist art and the overall militarism espoused by the Spartans themselves seems to feed that. The Iranians have already denounced the film as anti-Iranian propaganda, and I can see their point even if I don't necessarily agree with it. Mind you, I doubt very much that Frank Miller is some kind of crypto-fascist (his Give Me Liberty argues fairly forcefully the other way), but one could certainly read such meanings into what's on the screen.

300 is also a bundle of homosexual panic. The film is deeply, overtly homophobic. The Spartans deride the Athenian "boy-lovers" and Xerxes himself is the ultimate incarnation of male fears about homosexuals: a powerful, outsized, androgynous queer prescence resplendent in plucked eyebrows and body piercings demanding that manly men submit to him on their knees. He seduces the traitorous Ephialtes with a harem of hot lesbian concubines. His hand on Leonidas's shoulder from behind seems an image specifically calculated to repulse the film's primary audience of teen-age boys. And yet...what are we to make of a film in which the Olympian ideal of male beauty is resplendent in every frame? The Spartans are a queer audience's fantasy cast, a collection of hot, totally ripped men in gladiator outfits that reveal every ripple of their cut abdomens. While the film will tickle a hatred of gays in some audiences, others will wonder at those strange feelings that the movie illicits, feelings divorced from the standard thrills of an action movie.

Performances: 300 seems to be the film that will finally put Gerard Butler over the hump as a leading man. Butler has already had an interesting career, including turns as Dracula, Attilla the Hun, The Phantom of the Opera, and Beowulf. He's the kind of actor Charlton Heston used to be: don't expect subtlety from him, but he excells at larger than life. He's perfect for this film, in other words. In credit to the make-up design, Butler's Leonidas looks exactly like a demi-god from Attic sculpture (he most resembles the sculpture of Poseidon of Artemision). Likewise, Lena Headly is properly regal as Queen Gorgo, even when she's naked. The film indulges the fallacy that classical characters all speak with British accents, but that's no big deal in the face of a set of performances that are all pitched just this side of kabuki theater. The tenor of the performances is of a piece with the images on the screen, actually: bombastic to the point of absurdity.

3/14/2007