Producers: Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan Director: Christopher Nolan Screenplay: Christopher Nolan Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Himesh Patel, Ryan Hurst, Bill Irwin, Elliot Page, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth, Benny Safdie, Will Yun Lee, Logan Marshall-Green, James Remar and Travis Scott Distributor: Universal
Grade: B
Back in 2002 Christopher Nolan was briefly attached as director on “Troy,” Warner Brothers’s planned big-budget adaptation of the “Iliad” traditionally attributed to a poet named Homer. He eventually ceded the job to Wolfgang Petersen, but had conceived of a version of the taking of Troy with the notorious wooden horse that he’s now incorporated into his cinematic telling of the second so-called Homeric epic, “The Odyssey.” The willingness to toy with the traditional account, derived not from Homer, who only briefly alludes to the Trojan Horse in the poem, but especially from Vergil’s “Aeneid,” is characteristic of the freedom with which the writer-director has approached his source.
That extends to his decision to treat the figure at the center of the episodic tale in a distinctly modern fashion. The Homeric Odysseus is a representative of the Greek notion of martial excellence. He may be a more cunning, conniving fellow than his upper-class comrades, but he’s equally capable of utter ruthlessness and violence. Nolan can’t ignore that, and indeed embraces that side of the man in the story’s final act, when he’s returned to the homeland (and the wife) he’s been away from for twenty years of warfare and wandering and slaughters the men who have been ravaging his land, humiliating his son and demanding the hand of his supposed widow Penelope (Anne Hathaway, regal yet vulnerable).
But Nolan’s Odysseus (played by a grim and increasingly chastened Matt Damon) is also what Homer’s is not—a man haunted, in a way today’s “wounded warriors” would recognize, by what his cleverness has wrought. (In that he’s akin to the version of Odysseus Ralph Fiennes played in Uberto Pasolini’s “The Return,” though not nearly as ruined.) Consider Nolan’s portrayal of his appalled reaction to the carnage his fellow Greeks perpetrate on the Trojans after they take the city (as monumental a place as Petersen depicted in “Troy,” in line with Homer’s idea).
He’s especially disgusted when a bunch of soldiers manhandle a screaming little girl and prepare to slice her to ribbons (thankfully, the director and editor Jennifer Lame, who handles the episodic nature of the tale quite smoothly, cut away at the last moment, sparing us the sight of her death). This Odysseus interprets the chaos as a sign of a deteriorating culture that is abandoning adherence to Zeus’s law, especially regarding hospitality and what the Greeks called xenia, or guest-friendship, a concept Nolan’s script refers to repeatedly.
The portrayal of Odysseus as a sensitive, humane person as well as an implacable warrior is frankly an anachronism, and Nolan’s film is replete with anachronisms. Some simply involve language—not the aphorism “The gods help those who help themselves” that Odysseus remarks at one point, which might seem a modernism transposed to the Mycenean era but actually has echoes in ancient Greek literature, but more jarring locutions, as when Telemachus (Tom Holland, once again playing much younger than his age but convincing as a boy not yet of age) refers to Odysseus as “my dad.” Of course, one wants to avoid falsely elevated dialogue, but there are limits.
But others are more questionable, especially in terms of concerns characters express that strike one as references to modern scholarship. The most notable are the repeated references to The Peoples of the Sea; Mycenaeans would certainly have been concerned about raids on their settlements, but they would hardly have referred to them with a phrase that’s become current among students of ancient Greece to identify the mysterious seafarers who have been identified as contributing to the downfall of Mycenaean civilization, and eastern Mediterranean culture generally, that signaled the beginning of the illiterate Greek Dark Ages, from which the Homeric epics represented a renaissance. Even more egregious is the moment when Odysseus opines, ruefully, that the Age of Bronze is coming to an end. Here he seems absurdly prescient, even prophetic, about modern chronological categories.
The intent behind this, one assumes, is to suggest that Odysseus is a basically timeless figure, simply a man desperate in his quest to return home despite the obstacles in his path. But the mixture of traditional Greek hero, regretful warrior and broodingly soulful husband and father is difficult to pull off, and as hard as they try, Nolan and Damon don’t make it entirely credible.
Sometimes, moreover, Nolan is pretty cavalier about changing or adding to Homer’s narrative. He pretty much ignores the gods that are so prominent in the poem, except for retaining Athena (Zendaya, simply robed and pensive) as Athena, who drops by occasionally to advise or warn Odysseus during his travails. He drops the Phaeacians entirely, having Odysseus instead recite his adventures in flashback to the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron, rather uncertain and unconvincing), a rather more sympathetic character here than in the poem whose purpose, she explains rather self-servingly, is to help him remember rather than compel him to forget; she explains that he has to be made ready to go home. (At times his narration turns the film into something like an illustrated audio book.)
Nolan also entirely reimagines the episode involving the murderous Laestrygonians, turning simple savages into huge creatures in metallic silver armor. (He also depicts them being summoned to attack the invaders by the screams of a strange little girl—a weird and inexplicable detail.) And early on he inserts a subplot about a connection between the evil suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson, pouring on the snide oiliness) and Sinon (Elliot Page, persuasively humble), the Greek soldier left behind to trick the Trojans into taking the wooden horse inside the city walls, in order to make Odysseus’ merciless treatment of the former more viscerally satisfying. He also reimagines Antinous’ attempt to assassinate Telemachus as a rousing fight sequence in a temple. Given his propensity to sideline the gods, moreover, Nolan foregoes the poem’s ending, constructing a romantic departure instead.
And yet while “The Odyssey” often feels more Nolan than Homer, the combination largely works, a synthesis that preserves much of the ancient text’s action while making it more accessible and emotionally resonant for contemporary viewers, many of whom will never have read the poem—though, to be honest, their enjoyment of the film will be enhanced if they have.
Certainly, the film is visually spectacular, especially on the IMAX screen, even if Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is often darker than might be ideal. Nolan’s refusal to depend overmuch on CGI gives the sweeping visuals a tactile feel reflected in Ruth De Jong’s production design and Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes. The film puts the lie to the idea that Hollywood doesn’t make movies like they used to anymore; it boasts huge sets and a cast of hundreds, if not thousands—real people, not computer-generated simulacra.
And yet there are instances in which Nolan’s penchant for practical solutions has a negative result. While he and Lame use ingenious cutting and imaginative prosthetics to give the episode in which the witch Circe (Samantha Morton, far plainer than the voluptuous woman is usually portrayed) turns Odysseus’ men into swine an imaginative jolt, the same techniques are far less successful in the sequence in which the huge cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin, a convincingly ghostly ghoul) is depicted as eating several of Odysseus’ men before the hero blinds him and leads the survivors to safety out of the cave by crawling alongside the creature’s sheep. Here a bit more input from special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher and visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson might have been advisable, even if the devouring of the men would have taken on a Dynamation feel.
In any event, a faint recollection of Harryhausen intrudes into the Laestrygonian melee, and is even more obvious in the clearly CGI, though brief, Scylla and Charybdis sequence, which is both impressive in its depiction of the huge whirlpool and genuinely terrifying in Scylla’s abrupt attack from the rocks above.
With the exception of the uncertain Theron, the lead cast is uniformly strong, with Damon, Holland, Pattinson and Hathaway ably realizing Nolan’s conception of the characters. Among the others, Lupita Nyong’o is stunning in the dual roles of Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra; as the husbands, Benny Safdie is adequate as Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition to Troy killed by Clytemnestra upon his return, though his face is obscured in most of his scenes, including his appearance as a shade in the underworld during Odysseus’ visit there to consult the prophet Tiresias (an unrecognizable James Remar), while Jon Bernthal is rough and ready as Menelaus, Helen’s mate, whose counsel Telemachus accepts while searching for his father.
Of the others John Leguizamo is a standout as Eumaeus, Odysseus’ loyal old servant. Also noteworthy are Corey Hawkins as the brutish suitor Polybus, Mia Goth as Penelope’s self-serving maid, Ryan Hurst as Telemachus’ trainer and protector Mentor, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Odysseus’ lieutenant, and Will Yun Lee as the sailor who cannot resist the call of the Sirens, which Odysseus has tied himself to the mast to hear with hope of survival.
Until now “The Odyssey” has not fared particularly well on screen, big or small. Mario Camerini’s 1953 “Ulysses,” despite the presence of Kirk Douglas in the title role, was a sad affair that foreshadowed the cascade of chintzy sword-and-sandal stuff Italy turned out in the later fifties. (Nolan does, however, adopt one of its narrative elements, introducing the hall at Ithaca with a Homer-like bard, here played by Travis Scott, whose intention to sing of Troy’s fall Penelope cuts off peremptorily.) Somewhat better, but still far short of the mark, was writer-director Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1997 mini-series, whose three-hour running-time (shorn of commercials) Nolan almost equals, though Lame’s crisp editing and Ludwig Göransson’s propulsive score make the new version feel far less lethargic. It’s still worth watching, despite subpar effects and a dull lead performance by Armand Assante, though, if only for a young Bernadette Peters’ turn as a Circe much sexier than Morton’s.
One can question Nolan’s excisions and departures from the Homeric text and some of his interpretive choices and characterizations; and one can quibble about a few elements of what’s generally a remarkable visual tapestry. But as a whole his version of “The Odyssey” is a robust, exciting realization of what for him was clearly a labor of love, a rare example of old-fashioned filmmaking on an epic scale.