The Weight of Memory and Myth
The Odyssey is a story of a world defined only by memory. If you leave for a distant war and are gone for 20 years, of course you would struggle to recognize the son you left as an infant upon your return; of course the stories about squalls and lust and uncontacted tribes would take on mythic qualities, fluid enough to flow into whatever religious or political bent the people telling and hearing the tales prefer. Your wife will need little shibboleths to know it’s really you.
Christopher Nolan has been rightly praised, as a director, for his unparalleled commitment to practical effects and rightly criticized, as a screenwriter, for an attendantly labored approach to story. He’s made a handful of excellent movies despite his Achilles heel. But The Odyssey is the first time his devotion to the literal Real has been wielded so effectively. None of this was supposed to be photographed; the inherent contradiction in putting Homer’s epic on screen—Poseidon is either anthropomorphized or he isn’t; we see Odysseus’s face in close-up, 50 feet tall on IMAX screens—forces choices that could easily sap it of its ambiguity, and therefore of its symbolic power.
Humanity and the Architecture of Evil
Instead, Nolan uses this contradiction as an opportunity to explore the gap between what people actually fear and what they merely claim to. His Odyssey (which relies primarily on the most recent major translation, published by Emily Wilson in 2017) features fantastical, supernatural elements, but is far more troubled by the capacity of humans for evil—and for lying to themselves and others about their culpability in it. For instance, he depicts the poem’s cannibalistic giants, the Laestrygonians, as soldiers who are simply bigger than Odysseus’ men, a perfect reflection of how they must have looked in the villages they razed. In Wilson’s translation, those giants are “not humanlike.” But this is not a straightforwardly terrestrial explanation: The towering soldiers are as unreal as legendary giants, their armor presaging a new era of mechanized warfare the Greeks unleashed at Troy. That they are more plausible by degrees makes them exponentially more terrifying.
And still, there’s a pervasive sense of liminality. The Odyssey was filmed across Europe and northern Africa—in Italy, Greece, Iceland, Scotland, and in disputed Western Sahara—yet all the beaches transition gradually as if the sea and land intermingle forever. For as dutifully naturalistic as the setups are, the film occasionally takes on the feel of a stage play, where its latticework of accents, syntaxes, and acting styles are allowed to accentuate something other than strict verisimilitude. Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus sounds like Jon Bernthal, a rich boy playing thug; Robert Pattinson, who’s outrageously fun playing a real piece of work like Antinous, sneers and scoffs his way through the palace; Mia Goth’s Melantho has the proverbial face that knows about text messaging, which only makes her a more sinister presence in the wings of Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) quarters. And for all the whinging about the cast’s racial diversity, the actor who in some ways reads least as an ancient Greek is Matt Damon, whose Odysseus scans as American, which is almost certainly the point.
The Anti-War Epic
For as long as he’s been making movies, Nolan has been fixated on the effect time has on our memory and processing of traumatic events. He renders an Ithaca where most characters make assumptions about the world not based on the best information, but in ways that flatter their conceptions of self: Telemachus (Tom Holland) has his unspoiled image of Odysseus and is “sure” his father is alive, because who he is is Odysseus’ son; Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) thinks he’s likely dead, which simply emphasizes his loyalty. It’s only Penelope who’s interested in the truth at any cost. “I don’t want Odysseus’s song,” she barks at one point. “I want Odysseus!” This discrepancy between wish fulfilment and truth-seeking is simple enough to grasp when there’s a binary question, such as whether Odysseus is alive or dead. But sometimes the truth being sought or avoided is more abstract, more elemental.
Counter to Nolan’s usual ostentatiousness, the simultaneous threads of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca and the crises he faced in the decade that followed the Trojan War are cut together without ceremony. Yet there’s a powerful synergistic effect: At certain times, you can feel the recollections straining toward unreliability, but never quite getting there—the non-Laestrygonians, Menelaus’ unfounded certainty as he explains the world, the whirlpool that might not have been quite so symmetrical but certainly existed in some form. We are not receiving scraps of necessary plot, puzzle pieces that will add up to a whole: these are character notes, comforting lies people tell themselves to make things manageable.
And so The Odyssey becomes a uniquely effective anti-war movie. In 2017’s Dunkirk, even as Nolan homes in on the tragedy and hypocrisy of war, he valorizes acts of heroism within it. This is easy enough: Dunkirk is about an evacuation. Here, though, the entire enterprise is vile, and futile, and irredeemable, made worse by the self-delusion of the people who pursue it. Even though it would be two millennia before people put this language to it, throughout the movie I found myself thinking of American wars of “liberation.” The most forceful argument to this end comes during a sequence in Hades, when Sinon (Elliot Page, giving the film’s best performance) essentially spits on Odysseus’s ethical and narrative framework for the world. He can pluck his bow before firing an arrow if he wants, but the deer still gets killed.