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Tomorrow, our film critics, Justin Chang and Richard Brody, will discuss “The Odyssey” in a live chat starting at 1:30 P.M. E.T. Read Chang’s review here, and Brody’s below. Join us with your questions, and remember to obey Zeus’ law!
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The director’s Homer adaptation presents a modern, relatable Odysseus, rather than trying to understand the ancient world on its own terms.
It is probably viewers who haven’t read Homer who are likeliest to enjoy “The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation. This is not for the obvious reason that much is left out—putting any extended literary work onscreen inevitably involves omission and compression—but because of a more pervasive absence: the gods. In the poem, the first scene is of a council in Zeus’ palace, on Mt. Olympus, at which the gods argue over Odysseus’ fate. In Nolan’s film, people refer to the gods, but there are no divine debates on Olympus, and, indeed, the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who actually appears is Athena (Zendaya), watching over the action intermittently.
Instead, Nolan unfolds a purely human drama. As the film opens, Odysseus (Matt Damon), a leader of Greek forces in the Trojan War, has been away from his homeland of Ithaca for some twenty years—at war for ten, wandering since. While he has been delayed by a series of encounters and obstacles ranging from Calypso’s enticements to the man-eating Cyclops’ rage, his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), has been fending off the attentions of scores of Ithacan noblemen, who are demanding that she marry one of them and are living lavishly on the royal household’s store of food and wine as they wait. Her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), an infant when his father set off for war, is now a young man intent on driving out the suitors—a primordial coming-of-age plot. And, when Odysseus finds his way home, father and son join forces to battle the usurpers.
Told in this way, with divine intervention at a minimum, the story remains an exciting adventure filled with passion, terror, tenderness, and wonder, but it lacks the particular thrill that comes with reading Homer, a sense of the gulf that separates modern minds from Bronze Age ones. Homer depicts a strange and troubling world, in which human existence is continuously subject to the deliberations and whims of deities who have motives of their own. By suppressing this continuity between the natural and the supernatural realms, Nolan omits much of what makes the Homeric age so different, including the ambience of the divine and the distinctive moral realm that goes with it.
I had wondered how Nolan would handle some of the other archaic aspects of the story, such as its violence and its ritualism: sacrificial ceremonies with animals gushing blood; the supernatural fury of a monster consuming men who scream in agony as they’re eaten; the chopping off of hands and genitals; the reliance on torture; the deep satisfaction taken in cruel vengeance. How would Nolan deal with the extravagant expressivity of the Homeric world—as when people rend their clothing in anguish or when Odysseus (in Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the poem) is “sobbing and rolling round in grief”? Or with the realm of picturesque fantasy, as when Athena, with Telemachus, in Book I, “flew away like a bird, up through the smoke,” thus revealing her divinity? But, rather than trying to take the audience inside the ancient Greek mind-set, Nolan chooses a slimmed-down, almost naturalistic approach, tamed and tempered. Violence is rendered largely generic with quick-cut battle scenes merely hinting at gruesome deaths; sacrifice, seen only briefly, is surgically clean; vengeance is bloodless and horror-free, meted out very sparingly; tears drop with maudlin precision down a single cheek; and grief is expressed with the stiff-upper-lip silence of modern martial valor.
Nolan advances his vision, however crowd-pleasing and anachronistic, with vigorous confidence and unimpeachable clarity. The dialogue, terse and contemporary, puts his distinguished cast of actors in their comfort zone and turns ancient, iridescently complex figures crystalline and hard-edged. As Penelope, Hathaway has a laser gaze to match; she borrows a sublime gesture from classic Hollywood when, informing Telemachus that he’s not yet enough of a man for a big fight, she momentarily glances down mockingly from his eyes to his body. Menelaus, the king of Sparta, gets, from Jon Bernthal, an oddly apt New York white-ethnic outer-borough accent. As Helen, who is somewhat uneasily married to him and whose abduction led to the Trojan War, Lupita Nyong’o rises to a quiet pitch of fierceness when she laments being used as a justification for death and destruction. In the role of the enslaved swineherd Eumaeus, who is deeply devoted to Odysseus and intensely protective of Telemachus, John Leguizamo exudes worldly wisdom and rough-hewn poise, an inner nobility contrasting with the venality of the lordly suitors. Samantha Morton’s bluff, country-tough performance as Circe almost sells the script’s revisionism, which transforms Homer’s enticing-voiced singer and dangerous seducer into a moralizing critic of manners, who says that she has turned Odysseus’ men into pigs because they ate like pigs.
The actor whose performance is most closely bound to Nolan’s conception of the character is Matt Damon, as Odysseus. Homer’s character, notorious as a schemer, here comes off as plain and direct—a gruff, practical tactician, rather than something more energetically inventive and morally dubious. It’s a role that calls for a performance that’s both muscular and glib, powerful and mercurial, but Damon follows Nolan’s premise by making Odysseus impassive and burdened.
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