Choose Your Agamemnon

Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.

Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.