Eagles and Angles

Channing Tatum is a girl toy with stoic virtues in The Eagle.

The Eagle. Written by Jeremy Brock, based on a novel by Rosemary Sutcliff. Directed by Kevin Macdonald.

             

There’s a memorable passage in Heart of Darkness (1899) where Joseph Conrad has his narrator, Marlow, imagine the experience of a young Roman arriving for a tour of duty in a certain remote province. “No Falernian wine here,” he says. “Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush…There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.” The place Marlow describes is not Africa, but ancient Britain, and the analogy is compelling. Britain, which in Conrad’s time stood at the apex of the modern world, was once akin to the equatorial jungle where Marlow will encounter “the horror”. To the civilized Romans, it was the painted, skin-clad Britons who once presented the face of savagery. And under the right circumstances, in the right kind of wilderness, who’s to say they (or we) couldn’t go savage again—or that yesterday’s savages won’t be masters in their turn?

            It’s to the credit of Kevin Macdonald’s new sword-and-sandal actioner, The Eagle, that it evokes—however briefly and obliquely—the spirit of better stories. Based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth, it tells the story of Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum), a young officer assigned to command a fort near Hadrian’s Wall, at the northern extreme of the Roman world. Marcus is dashing and dishy but mopes a bit under a cloud of family dishonor, for it was his father who once led a legion to defeat north of the wall. Worse, in a symbolic calamity apparently more unforgiveable than the death of five thousand men, the elder Aquila let his legion’s eagle—its regimental standard—be captured by the enemy. The gilded bird is still somewhere up in the Highlands, it is whispered, worshipped as a god by the dirt-wearing natives.

            Sorry, no points for guessing how young Marcus aims to retrieve his family’s dignitas. No points either for deducing the titles of other, better movies Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) has ransacked for inspiration, from The Four Feathers to Braveheart to Apocalypto—or the bromancy direction the  partnership between Marcus and his British slave, Esca (Jamie Bell) will develop. The film offers action, to be sure, but the herky-jerky kind used in Gladiator, where you can’t really see whose fist is hitting what where. In the end, The Eagle is about as predictable as the fact that Romans will banquet lying down (a fact Macdonald strangely forgets, by the way).

            That The Eagle rises to watchability is due to Channing Tatum (G.I. Joe, Public Enemies). Looking like Josh Harnett with a wrestler’s neck, Tatum has girl-toy bona fides yet,  surprisingly, projects the kind of stoic competence that the real second-century Romans patiently cultivated. That, and a few tense scenes in the early going, when Marcus’ band of legionaries are forced to arm themselves at night, in total silence, against a native attack they’re not sure will ever come. For those few moments at least, Macdonald indeed manages to capture the spirit of those who, as Conrad describes them, “were men enough to face the darkness.”

Copyright 2011 Nicholas Nicastro