The Odyssey
After winning all those Oscars including Best Picture for “Oppenheimer,” writer-director Christopher Nolan goes back almost 3,000 years to essentially tell the same story all over again.
It’s called “The Odyssey.” Created in ancient Greece by a blind bard named Homer, with its companion piece “The Iliad,” it marked the transition from oral storytelling into what would become known as Western literature.
For those who dozed, or more likely have zero recollection of high school English, “The Odyssey” recounts the decade brave warrior Odysseus (Matt Demon) spent fighting the Trojan War, followed by the decade he spent trying to return home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) in the Greek kingdom of Ithaca.
It was, as an opening line of onscreen text informs us, “A time of apparent magic.”
On his journey Odysseus encounters a variety of giants and monsters, a forest witch who turns men into beasts, any number of spellbinding nymphs, and ghosts of his soldiers lost along the way.
While Nolan and company are certainly up to the epic grandeur required to retell the tale, the film’s resonance comes from a deeper, more soulful place. As much as “The Odyssey” is a work of almighty heroism, it is also a descent into never-ending doubt.
Like “Oppenheimer,” “The Odyssey” is a cautionary tale. Both screenplays tell of men at war, each possessing the tortured genius to create a super weapon. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, the weapon was the atomic bomb that ended World War II.
For Odysseus, it was the Trojan horse, a gigantic statue seemingly left, after ten years of fighting, as a symbol of concession outside the heavily fortified walls of Troy.
Not long after the Trojans manage to bring the monumental offering inside their gates, warriors who had been hiding inside emerge under the cover of night to turn the tide of the battle.
While both weapons would secure victory, their creators would be haunted forever after by guilts, doubts, and the soul-crushing knowledge of violated ethics.
“Tell me about a complicated man,” was the way Emily Wilson began her 2017 translation of “The Odyssey,” that Nolan based his script on. Damon plays the role low key, more pragmatic than noble.
Odysseus has enough on his plate – from monsters trying to eat him and his men, to all those blithe spirits tempting his desires – to leave little room for extra flourishes.
Around Damon’s reliably charismatic performance, Nolan walks a tightrope between ancient and contemporary, making classical Greece feel accessible and urgent to modern audiences.
Homer’s “Odyssey” was populated by gods as well as humans, and at least one critic has bemoaned the absence of these deities in Nolan’s script. But the gods lurk invisibly in every detail. Rather than rely on green screens and special effects to conjure what they look like, Nolan instead shows the gods in the way the way the human characters perceive their presence. Storms at sea prove Poseidon’s wrath. A clap of thunder indicates Zeus is nearby, listening in, judging what he hears.
While “The Odyssey” is an origin story in Western Civilization, its gods of nature have enough in common with the spirits of ancient Hawaii, that they could all be cousins from across the seas.
Odysseus’s struggle to return, as it turns out, is only half the story. Penelope and son Telemachus in Ithaca face their own challenges at home. Their banquet hall is a snake pit of boorish, bullying freeloading “suitors” led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), all eating, drinking and biding their time, hoping to replace Odysseus by Penelope’s side and in her bed.
When – spoiler alert! – the hero finally returns, the ensuing action dwarfs everything that has come before.
Loud, chaotic action, often in dimly lit spaces, is one of Nolan’s few missteps in this work of epic filmmaking. Matt Damon reported in interviews that the globe-girding project was his most grueling shoot, by far. Nolan clearly felt that it would require an odyssey to do justice to “The Odyssey.” Shooting in ultra high-res IMAX, he might be forgiven letting scenes run longer than they have to, to further admire their scope and craft. No matter. Even at three hours, the action is gripping and urgent. It never feels like a long movie.
It’s uncanny how archaic beliefs, practices and stories almost 3,000 years old fit so neatly into Nolan’s screenplay and his state-of-the-art 21st century filmmaking. What’s also surprising is the depth of emotions conveyed by Damon and Hathaway who blazes to life as the story nears its end.
For all the epic action along the way, “The Odyssey’s” most enduring image is the pair’s often challenged but never broken love on a final sail into the sunset.
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