Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” Leaves the Gods in the Outtakes
Nolan advances his vision, however crowd-pleasing and anachronistic, with vigorous confidence and unimpeachable clarity. The dialogue, terse and contemporary, puts his distinguished cast of actors in their comfort zone and turns ancient, iridescently complex figures crystalline and hard-edged. As Penelope, Hathaway has a laser gaze to match; she borrows a sublime gesture from classic Hollywood when, informing Telemachus that he’s not yet enough of a man for a big fight, she momentarily glances down mockingly from his eyes to his body. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, gets, from Jon Bernthal, an oddly apt New York white-ethnic outer-borough accent. As Helen, who is somewhat uneasily married to him and whose abduction led to the Trojan War, Lupita Nyong’o rises to a quiet pitch of fierceness when she laments being used as a justification for death and destruction. In the role of the enslaved swineherd Eumaeus, who is deeply devoted to Odysseus and fiercely protective of Telemachus, John Leguizamo exudes worldly wisdom and rough-hewn poise, an inner nobility contrasting with the venality of the lordly suitors. Samantha Morton’s bluff, country-tough performance as Circe almost sells the script’s revisionism, which transforms Homer’s enticing-voiced singer and dangerous seducer into a moralizing critic of manners, who says that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they ate like pigs.
The actor whose performance is most closely bound to Nolan’s conception of the character is Matt Damon, as Odysseus. Homer’s character, notorious as a schemer, here comes off as plain and direct—a gruff, practical tactician, rather than something more energetically inventive and morally dubious. It’s a role that calls for a performance that’s both muscular and glib, powerful and mercurial, but Damon follows Nolan’s premise by making Odysseus impassive and burdened.
And what is Odysseus’ burden? To define the hero’s troubles and thus his character, Nolan boldly expands things referred to only glancingly in the Odyssey into major scenes. Chief among these is the Trojan horse and Odysseus’ leading role in its deployment, which, for Nolan, becomes the crux of the story, shaping Odysseus’ personality and determining the course of his life through his wanderings. The Trojans unquestioningly bring the horse, apparently a religious offering, within their city walls, only for a handful of Greek troops hidden inside, led by Odysseus, to open the gates, letting in a horde of warriors who lay waste to Troy.
Odysseus is portrayed as enduringly guilt-ridden over the ploy; in making an ostensible gift into a deadly weapon, he believes that he has violated Zeus’ law of hospitality. It’s also suggested that he suffers from P.T.S.D., and that his years of wandering are also years of inability to reintegrate into post-combat life. After he’s held by Calypso for seven years, taken to her bed as a virtually captive lover, numbed by the lotus that she feeds him, she says that her actions were a means of healing him: “You weren’t ready to go home.”
Psychologizing Odysseus like this lends “The Odyssey” a readily digestible modernity—ancient Greeks, they’re just like us!—but does so at the expense of the richness of detail and the societal complexity that makes reading Homer such a vital and immediate experience. And the suppression of much of the story’s cruelty is more than mere bowdlerizing; it represents an effort to redeem Odysseus for modern times and render him both sympathetic and tragic. The movie has no room for the Odysseus who, in Book IX of Homer’s poem, matter-of-factly tells one of his hosts about an earlier stop in his itinerary, “I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us.” I won’t give away the film’s ending, but it’s not the one in the poem and it’s thrillingly audacious, far-reaching, socially conscious, and ultimately undeveloped.
