CAESAR
Review from The HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, June 26, 2003
By Ray Richmond
Bottom line: This mostly tasty mini lavishly portrays the ruler behind the salad -- heavy on the dressing.
He's more than just a salad. Hold the parmesan and croutons, because Caesar isn't merely for lunch anymore. He's now one of those two-night, four-hour miniseries jobs that lay on the costumes and period details particularly heavily. In this impressive TNT production, Julius Caesar is also a lot of other things: friend, statesman, orator, ruler, epileptic, nobleman, jerk. In short, he's painted here as a particularly complex guy, which lends considerable historical fuel to an epic that moves beyond cheese to search for the soul of a man painted in great cultural ambiguity. "Caesar" is ambitious and, perhaps even more surprising, perfectly literate and watchable.
That said, it's always a challenge to take seriously men who are wearing togas. For male boomers of a certain mindset, it brings back memories of "Animal House." And let's face it: Chris Noth isn't really a toga guy. The late Richard Harris, now there's a man who was equally at home in flowing robes as he was T-shirts and jeans. But Noth and Christopher Walken, well, they look like they're playing Roman dress-up. Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. And luckily, the guy whom we really need to buy as Caesarian -- Caesar himself -- fills the duds with panache. That would be Jeremy Sisto, who cuts a convincingly charismatic figure in the lead.
Sisto portrays the ambitious political animal from age 18 through 55, when the military leader was murdered by his own Senate. The film depicts his growing ambition, power and political/propaganda savvy as he butts heads with the tyrannical Sulla (Harris), the insecure and vindictive rival Pompey (Noth) and the outspoken Roman senator Cato (Walken).
There is nothing subtle about the garish sets or brutal battle scenes. Director Uli Edel keeps the action in "Caesar" moving along at a pulsating pace, realizing that that there is little in life worse than history turned bloated and ponderous. There is an energy vibrating underneath the warfare and the dialogue that's palpable. Too, the location (shot in Bulgaria and Malta) production design from Francesco Bronzi is particularly impressive, as are the costumes from designer Simonetta Leoncini. And the camerawork by director of photography Fabio Cianchetti and his team brings the whole enterprise to vivid life.
Typically, the weakness that dogs these revisits to yesteryear is the script. And indeed, the teleplay from Peter Pruce and Craig Warner is not the two-parter's strongest element. It occasionally degenerates into the usual leaden speechifying and proclamations. The characters sometimes talk over one another rather than to each other. But the scribes are admittedly hindered by the very scope of the enterprise itself, having to create a world that feels larger than life. And Pruce and Warner largely succeed in at least crafting personalities who are consistent and believable if not always fascinating.
It helps that the acting is generally straightforward and not loaded down with campy caricature, with Sisto, Walken, Noth, the incomparable Harris and Valeria Golino (as Caesar's wife, Calpurnia) all turning in commendable work. And it's to the credit of the writers that by the end, we're not able to pinpoint for certain just who Julius Caesar was. He is cast as being neither truly good nor truly bad, but a unique salad, if you will. That's probably as close to the real truth as we're likely to get.