'Alexander' : with no more parents to conquer, he wept

M. Dargis

There comes the moment in the career of many directors when they are compelled to tell the story of a great man in whose life they seem to see a glimmer of their own image. Francis Ford Coppola had Preston Tucker, the automotive innovator who tried and failed to challenge Detroit in much the same way as the filmmaker took on Hollywood, while Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson each had Jesus. Now Oliver Stone has Alexander the Great, the Macedonian tyrant who cut a bloody swath through the ancient world to no obvious end other than, if Mr. Stone's big, blowsy movie is to believed, get away from his kvetch of a mother.And, what a kvetch she was! Mad of eye and teased of hair, Olympias, played with nose-flaring gusto by Angelina Jolie, was the mother of all monstrous mothers, a literal snake charmer whose love for her only son had the stench of incestuous passion and the tedium of the perpetual nag. For Alexander - Colin Farrell, upstaged by an epically bad dye job - the Oedipal plot would only thicken because he also loved Olympias's most loathed enemy, her husband and his father, Philip, the King of Macedon (Val Kilmer). The struggle between Olympias and Philip, these primordial warring female and male forces, would be reproduced in both Alexander's bisexual desires and his rapacious conquest of the feminized East. In other words, Alexander became his dad to waylay his mom.