Nolan’s The Odyssey

Did you like The Odyssey? I went yesterday to see it, fearful that it had been overhyped. It is hard to know when something is genuinely good and when a global group think declares it so.

So I waited a bit to write this.

** Contains spoilers about the film choices **

First, let me say I enjoyed it - but not as much as my husband. My appetite for battle scenes is small and I liked the family drama element the most. Definitely one of the best films I’ve seen for a long time so my criticism comes after admiration for the achievement.

As Nolan’s version of the story, it did a good job of shaping a rambling, digressive story, was full of images that I will love revisiting in my imagination, and some stand-out performances. Hearing how practical effects were used rather than CGI makes it even more of an achievement. I preferred Dunkirk, but this is now my second favourite Nolan film.

The cast was excellent, though as a Brit I noticed the American accents. I guess they had to pick a place for accents to rest, but I’ve got used to English English being considered ‘historic’. Shows me how foolish that is because, duh, why not?

However, I have two significant reservations.

There was one choice that undermines it as a film about war. Though there was space given to the experience of women - Penelope asking why her years of experience in the absence of her husband could not be respected, Circe turning men into pigs as that’s what she considers their true nature (as well as big cats and deer - not sure what that was about), Helen clearly a mistreated wife, Clytemnestra seeking revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter - Nolan avoided the real grit about sexual violence in war, implied but not admitted to.

The most graphic sexual moment comes when Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, which is unsettling as it is the woman committing the violence. Odysseus himself plays worried dad, not raunchy hero, on the way home. He is the sex thrall to Calypso; it’s his entrapment, not the women of Troy, that gets the screen time. In the story of Troy, the women of the royal family are taken as slaves, poor Cassandra sent off with Agamemnon and killed with him - that was only hinted at with some background actors being led off to ships. The representative victim that becomes in Odysseus’s mind Athena is beheaded - the stuff of nightmares, but it seems a young woman would more likely be carried off and abused as a prize of war. Nolan is avoiding depicting an issue which is a huge and terrible part of conflict past and present.

Nolan’s thesis for the film is to give serious attention to the effects of war on the men who are part of the violence and how they can no longer fit in at home. So when he reaches the island with the ‘sweet nymph’ Calypso, it feels more like Matt Damon is trapped on a beach with his therapist rather than in the thrall of sexy creature. The tone is different in the poem. Odysseus tells Calypso that his ‘quiet Penelope…would seem a shade before your majesty’ but he still wants to go home. After that, Odysseus and Calypso ‘revel and rest’ - Matt Damon didn’t seem to be doing much revelling and struggled to recall he had a wife. It became about his mental state and Calypso as a warped care-giver.

That hints at my other reservation - the absence of humour. It was three hours of people being very stressed and unhappy. I spotted one joke - Circe turning her sister into a crow so they could get on better. I could’ve done with more of that to add some light to the shade. Though, at the end, Odysseus and Penelope sail west like Frodo and Gandalf, leaving poor Telemachus in charge when he’s only had his Dad for five minutes - and he’s facing the end of civilisation. I don’t think it was supposed to be funny but I did wonder…

What did you think?