Spartacus: The Mini-Series

'Spartacus' the '04 mini-series starring Goran Visnjic (who?) as Spartacus leads a cast of even lesser known names in a surprisingly good retelling of the famous slave rebellion against Rome, circa first century BC. Almost three hours long, 177 minutes to be exact, the storyline is consistently enjoyable throughout and the allotted viewing time passes quickly.

Plot: A band of gladiator slaves rebel against their masters, first destroying the gladiator school and then the local garrison of Roman troops. As the slave army roams the countryside they attract more slaves to their cause and their numbers multiply. Repeated attempts are made by Rome to destroy the rebels but against all odds the slaves win victory after victory. That is until Spartacus plans for a sea escape are thwarted and all the might of the Roman Empire are summoned to squash the insurrection.

Surprises: I was surprised to see that two of my favorite scenes in the original '60 epic were not included in the mini-series. However, In spite of there absence the film doesn't suffer from their exclusion. This is all in all an excellent production that deserves to be seen.

Cast: Goran Visnjic does a masterful job at balancing the emotive, warlike nature of Spartacus with the more sensitive, cerebral longings of the legendary warrior, while Rhona Mitra as his love interest Varinia displays a much more aggressive, firey nature than we've come to expect from the original Varinia played by Jean Simmons. Rhona is absolutely magnificent! James Frain gives a fantastic performance as well in the role of David, Spartacus second in command. Also strong performances by Angus Macfadyen as Marcus Crassus and my daughter's favorite Paul Telfer as Gannicuc.

The rationale for turning Stanley Kubrick's 1960 film "Spartacus" into a two-part television mini-series was that this time the production would be more faithful to Howard Fast's novel. Given that the Spartacus revolt is a part of Roman history it would make more sense to try and be more faithful to that actual history than a fictional novel, but that is going to have to wait for another day and it just might take a while for Hollywood to want to revisit this story. The chief attraction of Fast's novel, in contrast to the historical record, would seem to be the happy ending that is provided by virtue of Spartacus having a child who survives his death and is raised free.

What we believe we know about the real Spartacus is that he was born free in Thrace and may have served as an auxiliary in the Roman army in Macedonia. However, he deserted, lived as an outlaw, was captured, sold into slavery, and ended up being trained at the gladiatorial school of Batiatus in Capua. In 73 B.C.E. Spartacus escaped with 70-80 other gladiators and camped on Vesuvius, where they were joined by other slaves who ran away from their masters and began plundering and pillaging the region. Spartacus wanted to escape Italy by crossing the Alpus, but the slaves from Gaul and Germany wanted to stay in southern Italy and continuing the plundering and pillaging. That first year Spartacus and his men defeated a force of 3,000 raw recruits led by Cladius Glaber and then two forces of legionary cohorts. In 72 B.C.E. Spartacus had an army of approximately 70,000 slaves and the Roman Senate sent two consuls, Publicola and Lentulus, with two legions each against the rebels. Publicola defeated the Gauls and Germans, and Crixus was killed. At Picenum in central Italy, Spartacus then defeated first Lentulus and then Publicola, having 300 prisoners from the battles fight in pairs to the death. The slave army then moved north and defeated the proconsul of Cisalpine Gual at Mutina. With the Alps open as a way out of Italy, the Gauls and Germans refused to go, and Spartacus returned to southern Italy intended to try and cross to Sicily.

At the height of the revolt Spartacus had about 120,000 followers and the Senate sent Marcus Licinius Crassus with six new legions in addition to the four consular legions to defeat Spartacus in 71 B.C.E. Exactly how Spartacus died is not known, although it is believed he died in the battle near the headwaters of the Siler River. Six thousand of the slaves that were taken prisoner by Crassus were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua, where the gladiators had been trained, to Rome. Another five thousand slaves escaped and fled north, but they were captured by Pompey's army and the following year Pompey and Crassus were elected consuls.

Enough of the history lesson. The point is that the slave revolt was not as unified or as simplistic as it appears in either version of "Spartacus." Following the lead of Fast's novel, it is not the conflict between Spartacus (Goran Visnjic) and Crixus (Paul Kynman) that is at the center of the drama but the collision course between Spartacus and Crassus (Angus Macfadyen), who are such mirror opposites. You have the former slave who is uncomfortable with being declared the leader of the slave revolt and the rich Roman who is just begging to be put in command of troops. Then there is Varinia (Rhona Mitra), the wife of Spartacus, created by Fast from a reference in Plutarch to Spartacus having a wife who was a former slave.

I wondered about the casting of this version of "Spartacus" in terms of the ages of the actors playing the historic figures. Overall, they are slightly younger. The year the slave revolt was crushed Spartacus was 38 (Visnjic is 32), Marcus Licinius Crassus was 45 (Macfadyen is 41, but looks much younger), and Pompey the Great was 36 (George Calil is 31). Although Pompey actually enjoyed a triumph when he was 24, he was the exception and not the rule. Yet in this production it is like the junior executives are fighting over who gets to run the firm. No wonder a giant slave army is running around the Italian countryside for a couple of years and no wonder after watching this remake you will be more impressed with the performance of Kirk Douglas in the original.

Visnjic's Spartacus comes across as bored rather than brooding. Before a big battle his idea of strategy and tactics is to hope that maybe they will get a break and be able to win. I can appreciate the idea that it is better to die free than to live as a slave, but you should try to avoid rushing off to die. Macfadyen's Crassus is rather petulant. He wants to rise to power in Rome but is thwarted by the machination of Agrippa (Alan Bates), and he sees Spartacus as the key to every thing he wants. That explains why he postures like he really believes he can defeat the gladiator in one-on-one combat on the field of battles, and why he is fixated on Varinia. This guy cannot be in charge of himself, so how can he run the Roman Republic? Bates and Mitra turn in the two best performances in "Spartacus," which makes their supporting characters the two most interesting ones. Spartacus has been an idealized champion of the masses because he stood up to the Romans at a time when they were carving out their empire, but the idea that he was a sensitive guy who accepted gender equality is just a bit too much. Hopefully, the next time the story of Spartacus is filmed they will just go with getting the history right instead of being concerned with political correctness.

This new rendition of 'Spartacus' provides a more accurate depiction of the Roman Slave Revolt that took place between 73-71 B.C. but is horribly lacking in script and acting: something to be expected from a TV miniseries I suppose.

Goran Visnjic as Spartacus simply fails to leave any memorable impression. His voice is so passive and unengaging, and his face so placid, that he hardly passes for a charismatic leader who commanded over 100,000 people. The character follows the positive comments by classical sources on the real Spartacus as having been a skilled commander and humane leader. There is little information on Spartacus however and really no information on his origins. Rome had been in an ongoing civil and foreign wars in which slaves were routinely used as auxillaries. Such auxillaries were commonly used to carry out indiscriminate massacres by their leaders such as Sulla or Marius because they were more expendable if popular sentiment became too hostile. Being an adult in these times, Spartacus may have been among such groups of men and not so much the saintly Marxist hero fighting for the laborer portrayed by Fast. As for Crassus, Angus Macfadyen is diappointing but the fault lies more with the screenplay and script. He plays Crassus as if he were a rich snob who's obsessed with power. Marcus Licinius Crassus was very rich but hardly a snob. Plutarch describes Crassus as affable and modest: a man who would talk to persons high and low with tact and politeness. Generous to others, he acquired influence by his vast wealth, being a court advocate, and giving loans without interest to important upstarts like Caesar from whom he could also ask for payment on demand (a traditional Roman practice seen as normal.) This often allowed Crassus to get political favors from the debtor instead of money: a valuable political advantage. Although he was avaricious, he was not a miser and kept his home open to any one who was in need. He was very much the precursor to the modern professional banker/bailbondsman all rolled into one: tactful, polite, generous, and accomodating enough to make you want to come back and do business again. As in the original 'Spartacus', Crassus' motives for accepting the command against Spartacus are portrayed as a sinister attempt at undermining the Republic whereas the historical facts do not support that conclusion. Crassus was ambitious just like every other patrician noble and, although his popular politics were akin to some of Caesar's, he was generally a conservative populist and his desire to crush the slave revolt was compelled by a true sense of duty. Historical sources give no indication that he sought to establish himself as a dictator such as with Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The primary motivation for his politics was his desire to outmaneuver Pompey the Great, his arch-rival, in the military and political spheres. Unlike Caesar who eventually shought permanent dictatorship, Crassus prefered a republican oligarchy as a political system and so was the main party in forming the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Caesar. All historical records show that the policies of Crassus at the time were typical of other moderate populists (e.g. restoring the power of the tribunes; including the equestrian order in jury selections; and later seeking to enfranchise northern Italy.) The film instead portrays the character as a dictatorial megalomaniac with a personal grudge against Spartacus.

The depiction of the campaign is pretty accurate in comparison with the original film. As the film shows, Crassus had encircled the slave army near Rhegium with an extensive rampart and Spartacus was able to flee only after a desperate and hard fought breach of the pallisade. Crassus then caught up with Spartacus' army north of Brundisium and finished off most of it including Spartacus. Pompey's arrival and gloating over the capture of 6000 fugitive slaves infuriated Crassus because he claimed that he had won the war while Crassus had only won the battle. As with his relative Lucius Licinius Lucullus who was commanding the war in Asia Minor, Crassus thought of Pompey as nothing more than a carrion bird who cirles safely above to later swoop down and feed on prey killed by others. His loathing for Pompey was probably another reason why he had 6000 slaves crucified from Capua to Rome along the Appian way. Spartacus' crucifixion and sight of his child is poetic license: Spartacus' body was never retrieved from the final battle and all accounts indicate that he died fighting. Another error is the presumption that Spartacus was from Thrace because he was nicknamed 'The Thracian.' This nickname most probably came from his training as a 'Thracian' gladiator where he wore limited armor using a short Thracian sword and a small circular shield. The book making him a son of Thracian slaves is pure fiction. The name Spartacus indicates instead that he was from Greece (probably Sparta) and perhaps even taken as a slave or auxilliary by Sulla in his wars against the Greek city states in the Mithridatic War 20 years before. He may later have been taken by Sulla to fight as an auxillary against Marius before the Servile War depicted in the film only to be enslaved/re-enslaved after Sulla had surpressed the Marian plebiscite. Such a scenario would explain his hatred for Rome and his keen knowledge of the sophisticated infantry tactics used by the Roman legions. His defeat of the Italian legions had also more to do with his skilled command of a large host fighting an ill-trained enemy with poor logistics. The Roman forces Spartacus initially fought were principally raw legionaires who had remained in Italy while all of the seasoned legions were committed to extended wars in Spain and Asia Minor under the command of Rome's best generals. At the same time, Italy was barely recovering from civil war and economically devastated. Under these circumstances, Spartacus' probable service as an auxilliary, the size of his army, and the poor military logistics in Italy would explain why he fought so triumphantly against antiquity's most powerful army for almost 3 years.

Although the film is more faithful to the historical events involving Spartacus' slave revolt, I found the original film to have a better script, superior actors (Douglass, Ustinov, Olivier, Laughton, McGraw, and Simmons), and a far more talented director (Kubrick). Finally, although claiming to be more faithful to the book, this min-series' communist undertones are interestingly far less pervasive than those Fast's novel or the original film.