Before The Odyssey, filmmaker Christoper Nolan’s big-budget adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, perhaps the most recognizable artistic interpretation of the tale is a 2,500-year-old vase known simply as “Odysseus and the Sirens.” Painted by an unknown ancient Greek artist and now residing in (you’ll never guess) the British Museum, the image depicts the story’s most recognizable element: the magical temptresses who are but another obstacle in the title character’s long journey home.
It is fitting that the famous image is painted on a vase, a spherical canvas, as the medium’s 360° nature clearly represents the story’s never-ending lifespan. If you spin the vase, the story goes on and on forever. If you tell the story over and over again, it never ends.
The Odyssey is one of the most important stories in the history of civilization, and it’s a bit of a surprise to think that there’s never been a large-scale cinematic telling, particularly during the epic-heavy ’60s or the frat-bro retellings of the early aughts. You probably know more about this particular hero’s journey from the picaresque O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) or the rat-infested subway surfing of a personal favorite of mine, The Warriors (1979), than you do from anything where people carry swords and wear sandals, much less from a book in your high school English class. That means, basically by default, Christopher Nolan has made the finest version of The Odyssey ever committed to celluloid. It being very good is simply par for his course.
It’s been twenty long years since the Trojan War began, and Odysseus (Matt Damon) has yet to return home from the bloodshed that ended a decade ago. As he traverses the seas leading back home to his beloved Ithaca, where his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), await his arrival, he faces a cyclops, a witch, giants, whirlpools, heavy storms, and those dreaded muses. (The monsters in particular are quite frightening, and the effects work, which include everything from puppetry to old-school camera trickery, make Ray Harryhausen look like Playmobil.)
Nolan’s signature is his obsession with time-bending, which, thanks to the episodic flashbacks built into the text, has never worked better in his own storytelling. As he lies on the nymph Calypso’s (Charlize Theron) beach, he remembers everything from the deception of the Trojan Horse and the Sack of Troy to his tribulations with the countless creatures, all of which better inform his determination to get back home.
Nolan used the modern-day translation of the text from classicist Emily Wilson, and the film is equally contemporary. Wilson begins her translation, “Tell me about a complicated man,” and this Odysseus is just that. He is a man who does not hesitate to rape, kill, pillage, and burn, or, at the very least, doesn’t mind if the men he leads do so. He is a man who believes that no soldier should be left behind, unless it means saving your own ass. He is a man who gives in to temptation, which isn’t exactly his Achilles’ heel — more like his Odysseus’ balls.
Wilson continues in the next line, “Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost,” and that is both a bit of literal geographical unawareness — he thinks he’s taking a shortcut back from Troy and ends up arriving ten years later, just a tad behind schedule — and an omnipresent awareness of his fallibility. Any time he does something less than desirable, the goddess Athena (the goddess Zendaya) appears to shake her head disapprovingly. His mistakes are not just those of a mere mortal man; they represent humanity’s frailty. This is what Nolan does. His last movie turned the story of the atomic bomb into a personal drama about regret, largely about the guy’s sex life.
It is a wonder then why Nolan cast Damon, a classic leading-man good guy with real-life girl-dad energy. Supposing Nolan would only work on this scale with someone from his repertory troupe, I suppose there was no better option. DiCaprio is too obviously metropolitan; McConaughey is too obviously Texan (though that apparently wasn’t an issue with Jon Bernthal, who, despite playing the part of King Menelaus quite well, always looks and sounds like he should be running a laundromat in Dundalk…), and that leaves Damon. But Damon does not play complicated in a way that this Odysseus, a man we are all supposed to see ourselves in, is meant to be. Damon is much more believable as a guy whose rash decisions involve something like, say, buying a zoo.
As Odysseus struggles to return to his kingdom, suitors scheme to take Penelope’s hand and ascend the throne. The action and adventure scenes are reprieved by literal palace intrigue, and the politicking is delicious. It’s led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson) and Polybus (Corey Hawkins), and the men eat Odysseus’s food, disrespect his home, and abuse his beloved dog. (Between some expected and reasonable scenes, like the hunting of deer, and the most heinous stuff you’ve ever seen, like throwing puppies off a cliff, the treatment of animals in this one is pretty rough and occasionally hard to stomach.)
I’m particularly struck by Pattinson, who is really revealing himself as one of our slyest goofballs. He both drinks Odysseus’ wine and chews his scenery in a love-to-hate-him performance. By the time Odysseus makes his way home to Ithaca (spoilers, I guess, for the most foundational text in the history of oral communication), you relish his revenge.
The casting is one of the film’s greatest strengths, as it uses what we know about these actors to feed our relationship to these characters. It’s character shorthand, explaining who they are and why we should care about them before it even starts. Damon is the good guy in the end, sure. Holland is the naive cherub who must work overtime to be taken seriously; Pattinson is the scoundrel, delighting in his own devilishness; Hathaway is the regal queen for whom you would cross oceans of time (sorry, Adam).
This film is good news for us holding on to our Himesh Patel stock; Elliot Page and Mia Goth are welcome, if inevitably underserved, in their too-brief appearances (don’t even get me, or the internet, started on Lupita Nyong’o); and the bench is so deep that actors with tremendous skill, like Bill Irwin and James Remar (a Warriors reference?), are asked to be very unlike themselves and play to absolutely nothing in their skill sets, if they’re recognizable at all. Nolan has gotten to the point where he can truly have anyone he wants do anything he requests.
The great film critic Pauline Kael once argued that “movies are good at action; they’re not good at reflective thought or conceptual thinking.” She believed that, as a medium of both image and sound, the art form was at its best when it was whizzbang, exciting or stimulating, and rarely confrontational. I understand her meaning (just like you, Pauline, I, too, love the Jackass movies), and I can see why she doesn’t think popcorn cinema should be in the same conversation as the great works of the Greeks, but I also think she was wrong and often dismissive. Take someone like Nolan, who seems to be one of the few filmmakers, and perhaps the only one making major motion pictures, striving for all of the above in his art.
Not only is The Odyssey the first film shot entirely on IMAX cameras (Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is truly groundbreaking in that regard), filmed on location in caves and on oceans, proving that Nolan’s signature grandeur is practically de rigueur, but it’s a great adventure story about the woes of one man. He’s done this before, turning the pulp of Batman detective comics into an international terrorism allegory and showing that the story of the man who invented the deadliest weapon in the history of mankind can be an honest-to-God blockbuster. He left himself nowhere to go except the story of ancient gods and goddesses and those that they ruled, the complicated men who represented humanity’s most eternal struggles.
There simply is no more important story, and Nolan tackles it with ease. The only question that remains now is thus: is this the biggest and best that Nolan — or anyone, for that matter — could possibly be?
Review Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal
Feature Image Credit to Universal Studios