Were Christopher Nolan to never make another movie, The Odyssey would serve as an ideal final statement. It feels like the culmination of an entire career’s worth of work, and you can see all his other features woven into the tapestry he weaves. Yet its most important influence comes from its immediate predecessor, with Odysseus (a stellar Matt Damon) consumed by guilt as much as Achilles was by wrath and rage, as much as J. Robert Oppenheimer was by the forces he helped unleash. It is, for lack of a better word, ballsy to use one of the classics of all human literature to expand upon a theme you already won dozens of Oscars for, but Nolan pulls it off – it is breathtakingly cinematic (with stunning cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema), deeply felt, well-written, and, astonishingly, very, very fun. All of the controversies surrounding this movie will evaporate by the end of the first reel, or at least they should. Then again, who knows where the first reel really ends — that breakneck pace he found in Oppenheimer is mirrored here, and these three hours fly by.
For all of the bashing that Nolan’s endured at the hands of those angry that the Greeks aren’t speaking in a faux-Elizabethan meter (and let’s be real, it would be a tinny echo of the Bard rather than anything resembling, should a translation be agreed upon, “Homeric verse”), his script is smart. It’s intelligently structured, placed in a fascinating historical context, and has surprisingly potent dialogue, with the occasionally tinny aside. It has its adaptational alterations, which will undoubtedly piss off those expecting an appearance from Nausicaa or Nestor, but most of the cut beats find their way back into the narrative. The action begins, per tradition, in medias res, though it’s done with economical parallel narratives, with Telemachus (Tom Holland) and his quest to find out his father’s fate juxtaposed against the end of Odysseus’ time on Ogygia. The Lotophages’ drug of choice is repurposed – the memory-obliterating flower is how Calypso (Charlize Theron) keeps him on her island for seven years – and his side of the narrative involves his piecing back together exactly what brought him and his men to ruin as he emerges from the fugue state.
You know the basics – after the Fall of Troy, released from service by Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) following ten years of conflict, the king of Ithaca and his loyal soldiers made their way across the Aegean and surrounding seas, where they get into plenty of trouble. You’d think the men would be in good hands, as, after all, they are in the service of the quick-witted and clever man whose thinking won the day for the Greek forces, but alas, with a great intellect comes hubris of equal strength. Achilles had his heel; Odysseus has a forthright faith in his own abilities and, importantly, righteousness. Yet the latter quality is slowly deflating, and with it goes the man’s competence, replaced by a nagging sense that he was wrong. That his clever solution to bring the war to a close was less a checkmate than it was a wholesale abandonment of the rules and, more importantly, the game itself. One can win a game of chess in a number of ways – Odysseus has come to think he did so by slitting his opponent’s throat during a stalemate. Those strictures are what separate civilization from chaos, and his actions may have condemned the world he knows to a bitter, fiery end.
Nolan enhances this quality by placing the Trojan War in the late Bronze Age, the agreed-upon temporal setting of Homer’s tale, in which the Mediterranean was undergoing a brutal, protracted collapse caused by invaders from the sea. Their influence is whispered about inside Ithica’s palace, where Penelope (Anne Hathaway), Odysseus’ long-suffering wife, is finding it harder and harder to resist the calls of the suitors who have decamped in her home for years, given that someone needs to raise an army to fight off these “sea people.” This anxiety informs Telemachus’ quest to Sparta, where he meets with its king (Jon Berenthal), hears of his father’s bravery and cunning from a first-hand witness, and is pressed to seize the throne as soon as possible – to forestall the worst, should the “Sea People” come. Odysseus has seen their havoc as well – on his first stop on his way home, the townspeople burned their homes upon seeing the Greek ships, rather than let the invaders take all they held dear, thinking these men were the long-heralded horsemen here to take all they knew and loved from them. The urgency this brings – as well as a third-act recontextualization of the entire conflict – informs Odysseus’ altered narrative and gives his guilt weight. This is incredibly interesting, and let’s be frank: Nolan cannot do more harm to the historical record than, say, Graham Hancock, so please don’t come at me with shouts of where the Sea People were actually from.
I’ve mentioned this several times over the years: historical accuracy is extra credit, not the work that earns one the grade. Blockbusters like this are a chance for experts to compete with one another to see who can be the most pithily pedantic, where all film critics somehow become professors of classics, and all professors of classics become film critics, and so on and so forth. I can understand how someone would be frustrated by how, say, Gladiator or The Woman King present the historical record– the latter was, after all, only a few hundred years ago – but the Odyssey is a foundational text significantly older than the New Testament. Were it not written down when it was, it would likely have been told differently, iterated upon by generations of speakers. Artists working with this story are merely participating in a tradition spanning thousands of years, and Nolan’s contribution is to make it cinematic as all hell.
No disrespect to Kirk Douglas or Armand Assante, but the most famous cinematic versions of the Odyssey are O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the one that Fritz Lang was trying to make in Godard’s Contempt. It’s somewhat surprising to think this, given the number of films we’ve had over the years adapting Greek myth for the screen, but the anxiety of influence is a real phenomenon – it’s easier to tell a generalized version of Jason and the Golden Fleece than it is to adapt a capital-C classic that one can buy in green-backed hardcover from the Loeb Classical Library. Nolan sidesteps this by making a film that acknowledges all of his influences, stitched together in Homer’s framework, yet without any of it feeling derivative. The breadth of the cinematic language he uses to tell this tale is astonishing, and the fact that the man got Universal to spend a quarter-billion on a blockbuster that features allusions to Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Malick, Harryhausen, Jan Svankmajer and countless others that I’ll probably notice when I see it again later this week is proof positive that Oscar wins do buy luxuries.
His use of practical effects work is just flat-out stunning, with the surreality of, say, the Cyclops (played to perfection by the master Bill Irwin) made all the more affecting by how real it is. Each fold of wrinkled and aged skin, each mole, each impossible-to-digitally-replicate detail on a human body – these attributes give the scene its discomfiting uncanniness. It’s so good that an allusion to Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” doesn’t feel like an overplayed citation of iconic art – it feels like an echo, resounding through the ages, a collision of greats, perfectly matched and mixed with precision. The best body horror of the year may be found in the sequence in which the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) quite literally molds some of the Ithacans into pigs, and it’s in that scene that I saw the echoes of Svankmajer, an iconic stop-motion artist whose work often focused on human faces. I mean, there’s also some Brian Yuzna in there, so all you Society fans can get ready for the gross-out shit. What it is is a spectacle with uncommon weight to its images. It’s found in the mud-and-blood-covered faces of those in Hades, depicted here as the hell to Malick’s heaven in The Tree of Life. It’s found in the hulking frames of the silver-clad Laestrygonians emerging from the forest, who can punch men through the trees that seemingly rearrange themselves into ad hoc cages.
Most importantly, it’s found in the final act, in which Nolan pulls off a prestige worthy of Michael Caine’s admiration, tying the ultimately literary shaggy dog story into a moving and enthralling conclusion. All of the work he’s done in the first two hours – of making us hate the fucking suitors, pity the family Odysseus left behind in Ithaca, and mourn a fallen world along with the unwitting architect of its destruction – culminates in a ferociously entertaining series of payoffs, executed with pinpoint accuracy. I pity the fool who gets up and leaves at the end of hour two, because they’ll miss out on the cheers from those who stayed. My audience ate it up – there were no less than seven random eruptions of applause and cheering throughout that last hour – and I bet yours will as well. At the end of the day, it’s a very simple story. A man wants nothing more than to go home, gets lost, and ultimately winds up back in the arms of his beloved. What matters is the telling. So, listen up, folks: a master is talking.