The Odyssey

Even Christopher Nolan’s worst movies somehow manage to deliver. So it makes no sense to ask whether his movies are good or bad, whether or not they delivered—they are always, at some level, good. Rather, the only interesting question is, how did he deliver this time, and how did he disappoint?

And in the case of Nolan’s newest film, The Odyssey, there is certainly no shortage of material to consider, given the movie’s impressive 172-minute runtime. The Odyssey is the truest historical epic we’ve received in years (a genre that had mostly died out after 300 and has only recently seen a revival with films like The Northman and Napoleon). It follows Homer’s original epic, which viewers may vaguely remember from high school English or only recognize by their familiarity with O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. More than the source material, Nolan makes his movie feel epic with a tremendous sense of scale, a pounding score, beautiful landscapes, and images projected on IMAX screens that are literally bigger than anything seen before.

Undoubtedly the greatest strength of this movie (and every Nolan movie) is its set-pieces. Doing as much in-camera with practical effects as possible, Nolan’s films are consistently tactile, bringing a level of immersiveness that few other directors can match. The ship scenes alone, creaking and straining as they’re tossed about on the Mediterranean Sea, achieve a visceral nautical realism not seen since Master and Commander. My favorite examples of his practical approach come in the film’s two horror segments: Circe’s slow, stomach-turning transmutation of Odysseus’s men into swine, and Polyphemus’s guttural, wounded-animal screaming after his eye is burned out—two segments uncharacteristic of Nolan’s style but also possibly the two best episodes he’s put on film. Of course, the largest set-pieces in the movie are the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy that follows—each equally exhilarating and dread-soaked. And again, all of this is amplified by the IMAX scale and the relentless score behind the action.

Another standard quality of Nolan films, however, is precisely where the movie begins to stumble. Nolan is what we might call a broad-brush-strokes kind of director. Depending on how charitable we’re feeling, we might say he’s sloppy or maybe just impressionistic with his approach. Hearing this, you might think of his non-linear storytelling that he employs in almost every movie, but that wouldn’t be quite right. Even though his playing with time has an impressionistic effect on viewers, the way he structures his stories is intentional and precise. On the other hand, how he films movement is far from exact. His fight scenes are meant to provoke an emotion rather than depict any sort of coherent action. The same can be said for blocking, composition, and framing, all of which fall by the wayside if editing and sound can achieve the desired effect. (That said, the reveal of Agamemnon outside the gate of Troy is sick.) It is interesting, therefore, that a director so consumed with evoking emotions has such a hard time writing humans. Don’t get me wrong: each of the side characters in The Odyssey—Telemachus, Penelope, Helen, Eumaeus, Sinon, Eurylochus—is an intriguing and profound presence in the story. But, their dialogue is wooden and obvious. Again, they’re broad brush strokes, kinda like placeholders put into the script to move the plot forward.

The discourse I’ve seen around the movie seems to think the issues primarily lie in its historicity. And to some extent, I get that. Having all of your actors keep their American accents and use swearwords and colloquialisms can feel jarring. But if you’re worried about the faithfulness of the props and sets to the Late Bronze Age, then I think you’re confused about what movies are. Rather, you should worry about faithfulness to the story or, more specifically, the world of the story. For the given characters and plots to make sense, what has to be true of the world they inhabit? Are there elements of the plot that must occur for the rest of it to make sense? And in answering those questions, you might point to Nolan’s brand of realism. We first grew to love that approach in Batman Begins, in which the director asked what a superhero looks like in a totally grounded world, but we would be right to be skeptical about applying that same approach, about starting your movie with the words “In a time of apparent magic,” when the entire story you’re telling is premised on the involvement of gods and demigods and monsters. 

This leads into a bigger issue: the historicity of moral outlook. I wrote last week about the idea of virtue in the ancient world and the moral landscape that they inhabited. It should be no surprise that bygone peoples do not share the same ethical convictions we have today. It is arrogance to suppose that if we could really look inside the hearts of men and women of the past that we would find they were just like us—that they would agree, for instance, that slavery is wrong, or more relevant for our story, that one ought not slaughter the citizens of foreign cities. Whether movie creators think this of their historic subjects, that they were just like us, or whether they simply write them that way for modern audiences is hard to say. But in either case, it frustrates me. (Chief among offenders were the later seasons of Game of Thrones.) And I must admit, I was frustrated at first with The Odyssey. While Homer certainly recognized the costs of war, the PTSD and regret that shoot through Nolan’s depiction are completely foreign to the source material. At times, it even feels like the movie dislikes its protagonist (a critique that has been levied against Emily Wilson’s translation of the Greek poem, which Nolan has acknowledged as a reference)—which I imagine makes it hard to tell his story.

My feelings on the mismatch between the moral outlook of Homer’s Odyssey and Nolan’s Odyssey evolved during my viewing of the movie and afterward as I considered more what Nolan was trying to do. There are at least two constellations of themes that dominate the film. The first has to do with Odysseus’s impiety toward the gods and desire for control of his own life. The second, and more substantial, theme has to do with hospitality, with relentless reference to the “Law of Zeus” (and reference to the legend of Zeus and Hermes disguising themselves as ordinary travelers in need of hospitality), and reciprocity or playing fair. This latter theme gets amplified in the final act, via the deception of the Trojan Horse, to encompass society, warfare, and the nature of civilization. I must admit that, while I was watching the movie, these two themes felt distinct from each other, with separate resolutions. But a friend pointed me to the scene just before the fight with the suitors in which Antinous grabs the disguised Odysseus and accuses him of reckoning himself a god, to which Matt Damon turns around and says, No—I am Odysseus. A few things are happening here. Failure of hospitality becomes associated with delusions of divine grandeur; thus, Odysseus’s desire to supplant the gods’ control of his life is equated not only with impiety but impropriety, and a recognition of his humanity is thereby a recognition of the gods’ control and the rules of hospitality. The movie’s message, when stripped of its pagan metaphor, becomes clear: sociability, reciprocity, cooperation, truth-telling—in a word, hospitality—is fundamental to all relationships, especially those among strangers and those necessary for civilization to function, and placing ourselves above or outside those bonds of hospitality brings disastrous consequences for all such relationships. 

Recognizing the message of Nolan’s story leads to respecting his way of telling the story, which in turn leads to respecting his decision to alter the story (including its moral outlook). This is a hard pill for me to swallow, but a necessary one: Nolan can do whatever he wants with the source material, as long as the new story works. And this leads to my final concern—does Nolan’s vision for the story work? Do his alterations to Homer’s Odyssey ultimately cohere? While I think my description of the movie’s moral thrust holds water, I fear that the final act of the movie actually undermines the whole thing. The film wants us to see the Trojan Horse as the ultimate violation of hospitality—a “gift” and offer of peace that’s really the prelude to massacre. It is this civilization-ending deception dressed as friendship that haunts Odysseus, and that the movie wants us to see as his great sin. But compare this to the sin of the suitors. They eat food that isn’t theirs; they’re rude to a stranger; someone kicks a dog. That’s the full charge sheet—real breaches of hospitality, but domestic-scale ones, practically comic set against the wholesale slaughter of a city. Yet the film’s climax doesn’t treat their deaths with the same haunted ambivalence it gives Troy; it plays the slaughter as catharsis, as justice finally arriving, blood we’re meant to feel good about. Even if this final fight is a good time, it just doesn’t take. I think it’s the seam where two moral worlds—Homer’s and ours—got stitched together and didn’t quite hold.

My quibbles here are consequences of an excellent film, the sort of film that deserves to be quibbled with. In nothing I say do I want to distract from how grateful we ought to be that such movies of such high quality get made at all. But my quibbles are also a reminder not to turn a blind eye to storytelling faults, nor to be hospitable when the gods of film disappoint.