The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) is a big-budget, lavish, prestige production.  A lot of A-list stars appear, disguised by beards or disfigured by the scars, cataracts, and make-up simulating old age.  The movie, despite its almost three hour length is briskly paced, and never even remotely dull.  It's something that you admire from a great distance, strangely inert and remote -- not because the story chronicles events now 3500 years in the past, but, because the movie is so carefully made, its stewardship of Homer's epic poem so cautious, its attempt to be relevant to modern times so strained, that one is put-off by the production.  I enjoyed the picture and recommend it, and, certainly, don't intend the churlish critique of the movie by Emily Wilson, the famous translator, published in The London Review of Books, but I must say that the exercise feels academic in some ways, without real urgency, and, ultimately, unnecessary.  

The acting in the film is perfunctory at best and, at worst, bewilderingly bad.  Brad Pitt, playing the hero, a man of many minds and devices, seems, more or less, hapless.  In fact, he's like a modern man wandered into a world with an ethos that he can't understand, let alone embody -- the actor looks palpably bemused by the various threats that he encounters and he is afflicted by self-doubts that make him seem woefully weak and ill-prepared for the challenges that the script hurls in his way.  He confers with Athena (played by the dark-eyed Zendaya) as if she were his therapist at a provincial Veteran's Administration hospital catering to those with PTSD.  Pitt had to bulk up for the role but it's unpersuasive -- he's a brawny circus strong-man but weak as a wet noodle.  He's improbably contrite over the slaughter during the sack of Troy and, generally seems clueless -- it's pretty obvious that he doesn't want to get back to Ithaca that much and, no sooner back home, immediately sets forth again on a quixotic quest to sail into the setting sun.  This part of the movie is cribbed from both Dante and Tennyson's poetry, but without the emotional resonance in their verse:  Odysseus at the ending of the movie just seems confused as to his objectives.  Nolan has it that he wants to set up a shrine somewhere to the heroes that died on his trip -- pretty much all of them -- and went unburied.  Dante and Tennyson, by contrast, give the old Odysseus a last  spectacular adventure, a sort of Bronze Age space shot through the Pillars of Hercules and to the Isles of the Blessed or Mount Purgatory, a heroic venture but one that is inevitably doomed.)  The film engages in lengthy and repetitive meditations on Zeus' law -- that is, a law of hospitality that in essence requires that one treat strangers as if they were "gods in disguise", in other words, a pagan version of the Golden Rule.  None of this is particularly illuminating since the movie doesn't really dramatize the violations of Zeus' law for which the over-tender Odysseus feels crippling remorse.  The sets are gorgeous and the exterior locations smitten with Mediterranean light feel vivid and inexorable -- the sea even seems "wine-dark" sometimes.  The monsters are  impressive, particularly the hideous cyclops with his one eye inserted like a vaginal slit in his gnarled face.  (The film can't use the famous pun and jest by which Odysseus derides Polyphemus -- if you are asked who blinded you, tell them that it was Nemo, that is, "no man."  The joke works in the Odyssey because Polyphemus is not alone and merely one of a tribe of aggressive Cyclops monsters; here the poor fellow is like a Norwegian bachelor farmer, dwelling absolutely alone except for his sheep, in his cave)  The battle scenes are impressive until the final slaughter of the suitors which Nolan totally botches.  Penelope is good, both desperate as well as resolute and Telemachus comes off better in the movie than in the actual epic -- he seems less callow in the film. Samantha Morton gives the best performance, I think, as the matter-of-fact witch who turns Odysseus' men into the swine that they already were.  She literally kneads their faces like dough to make them into pigs and she's wonderfully casual about her malevolence -- she is like an aggrieved housewife inflicting revenge on the patriarchy and I thought her scenes were among the best in the movie.  A lot of ink has been spilled on the casting of a beautiful black African actress, Lupita Nyong'o, as both Helen and her treacherous sister Clytemenestra (they are twins).  Nolan is far shrewder than his critics -- he uses the actress in a way that doesn't appeal to her beauty, but rather that exposes her as either a badly scarred victim of the Trojan war (her famous face slashed and one of her eyes almost put out -- presumably by the vengeful Menelaus -- or as a serpentine villainess who wrathfully hacks poor Agamemnon to death.  In these roles, the woman's exotic features, her mask-like face, and her blackness itself becomes symbolic for a female power that is deeply alien both destructive and frightening.  (Again, in his casting, here Nolan improves on Homer.)  The scenes in Hades have an appropriate unearthliness although I certainly would have wanted to see the ghost of Achilles (who would rather be a pig farmer's thrall than the King of the Shades) and Odysseus' mother -- both of whom appear in the epic when the hero ventures into the Land of the Dead.  Nolan doesn't know how to set up suspense before the final bloodbath in which Odysseus with Telemachus butchers the Suitors.  By this time, the audience is getting restive and we are anxious for the final murderous rampage to begin.  Homer has Odysseus shoot his arrow through no less than 40 ax handles; Nolan is content to stage this test of strength and accuracy with a mere dozen axe-handles propped together to make six openings through which to fire his arrow.  (Here Nolan again improves on Homer who insists upon a level of prowess in his hero that is wholly unbelievable.)  The slaughter of the suitors is poorly choreographed and badly conceived.  Nolan thinks he can cover the improbability of the sequence (one man and his 20 year old son against forty) by cutting so fast that you can't follow the action.  Nolan puts his camera in the midst of the chaos and spins it around, using mismatched quick cuts that are completely uninformative.  This is the opposite of the presentation in Homer in which every slash and every arrow's flight is precisely detailed and the gore involves real people whose characters have been developed in the poem so that we know not only how but who is dying.  Nolan just wants to get the obligatory massacre done and he stages a violent frenzy that doesn't make any sense.  (He should have brought in a Japanese samurai-movie director to stage this scene -- Japanese action directors know how to show one swordsman defeating a host of enemies; Nolan has no clue.)

The movie's dialogue is slangy and informal.  This is okay as far as it goes, but sometimes results in laughable lines:  at one point someone says, apropos the sinister sea people:  "But we're the most advanced civilization of the Bronze Age."  I probably am quoting the line wrong and, perhaps, I misheard it -- but this is a specimen of what the language in the film sounds like.  I have a recommendation:  a movie like this should either be filmed in archaic Greek or, better yet, presented as a grainy silent film complete with Soviet style montage, intertitles, and iris effects.  The Odyssey would have been much better if the movie had been directed by Guy Maddin, the great Canadian filmmaker, shown on distressed black and white film, equipped with a heroic score and no dialogue at all.  Somehow, no matter how hard you think about it, you can't quite get your mind around this IMAX wide-screen technicolor production starring Brad Pitt.  The Odyssey is a great work of art, but its ethos is totally alien to us today -- there are some points of contact, but, by and large, the world depicted in the epic is impenetrable and unavailable to us today.  Nolan struggles to make the picture relevant and, even, contemporary but, really, just ends up highlighting how remote from us Homer's world of vengeful Gods and monsters is.