Anne Hathaway Is Better Than Me

More from Hung Up this week: Book drama!

“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. “Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home.”

Waiting at home, dutifully, was the man’s uncomplicated wife. Christopher Nolan frequently mines the worries and woes of wife guys whose beloveds are prone to turning their lives inside out. Leonardo DiCaprio had to mind Marion Cotillard, tempestuous in Inception; in Oppenheimer,1 Cillian Murphy juggled Emily Blunt, icy and stern, and Florence Pugh, wanton and eccentric. The rest of the movie is usually precise enough to override the overall obviousness of the script. (Okay, Oppenheimer made the bomb, but he feels so bad about that, bad in a way no one else does, and all his friends are talking shit about him, and do you know what it’s like when Albert Einstein is bad at gossiping? And Josh Hartnett just stands there beautiful the entire time??)