The Critics on “The Odyssey”

Good morning! Is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey good? In the “yes” camp, we have Kyle Smith. He writes that it is “among the year’s best pictures”:

Many of Mr. Nolan’s set pieces are marvelous, even glorious. The end of the Trojan War is one of several climaxes, yielding one of the most brilliant action scenes of the filmmaker’s celebrated career. There are other intense interludes, such as a chilling confrontation with the risen dead, a battle with the armored giants the Laestrygonians, and a match of wits with a Cyclops (Bill Irwin and digital magic make the figure truly, indelibly weird) who imprisons Odysseus’ men in a cave and snacks on their heads. Samantha Morton gives the film’s most beguiling performance as a passive-aggressive Circe—she seems more like a kindly social worker than the sexy witch of legend—in a breathless scene in which Odysseus seeks to understand why his men have disappeared. Charlize Theron is appropriately enchanting as Calypso, whose charms waylay and confuse Odysseus.

Manohla Dargis reviews it for the New York Times and likes it, too. She writes that it is “polished to a high gleam, turning a 3,000-year-old poem into a smart, thoughtful film with Old Hollywood allure.”

Amy Nicholson calls it “epically satisfying” in the Los Angeles Times. Peter Bradshaw gives it five stars in the Guardian. So does Robbie Collin in the Telegraph. So does Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com. John Podhoretz raves in the Washington Free Beacon: “It’s possible that this is the single-greatest cinematic adaptation of a great work of literature in the 113-year history of the motion picture as a popular art form.”

In fact, most critics liked the film. One who didn’t was Stephanie Zacharek in Time. She calls it “muddy and underwhelming”:

The poem, packed with events, with description, with magic and all manner of deceptions, is episodic by nature. How do you make this story flow and glide on-screen? Maybe you do it not by trying to pack everything in, but by cutting away, by focusing on the most potent, exciting, and moving details. You might do something along the lines of what Uberto Pasolini did with his underseen 2024 picture The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, which takes the final stretch of The Odyssey and weaves it into a graceful, moving whole. It doesn’t help that Nolan’s Odyssey—even when viewed, as he hopes audiences will see it, in IMAX—looks muddy and underwhelming.

Justin Chang gives it a mixed review at NPR, calling it “thrilling but uneven”: “Visually, Nolan is clearly pushing himself. The film was shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras, and the images of Odysseus’ ships at sea are stunningly majestic. There’s a ferocious intimacy to the action scenes, some of which play out in near-total darkness, illuminated only by flickering firelight and set to Ludwig Göransson’s pulse-pounding score. Nolan brilliantly re-creates the famous Trojan Horse deception, masterminded by Odysseus himself, in two gripping set-pieces, culminating in the total destruction of Troy.”

David Rooney laments several “dull interludes” that “stop the narrative dead in its tracks” in the Hollywood Reporter but adds: “When the movie’s engines are fired up, however, it’s muscular filmmaking.”

In First Things, Anatoly Grablevsky praises Nolan’s visual storytelling and skillful use of detail but also finds it too simplistic: “It might seem unfair to criticize a three-hour film for failing to convey fully the depths of a plot that, as Aristotle observed in his Poetics, is highly complex. Although Nolan generally does a good job of trimming down the source material by eliminating and combining certain plotlines—most notably, Odysseus does not end up on Scheria with the Phaeacians but instead tells his adventures to Calypso—the director also inserts material of his own devising. Not only do many of these additions take up time, but they also detract from the story.”

In other news, Melanie McDonagh writes that Muriel Spark is “an elusive character for a biographer” in the latest issue of Portico:

She was often bored by facts, which she found inadequate to explain the human condition, and played with narratives, including those to do with her own life. . . . The job of Spark’s biographers is also made difficult by the sheer size of her archive. The McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa houses forty-two-and-half linear feet of document boxes. The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh contains another one-hundred-and-fifty feet of shelf space dedicated to Spark’s papers. She threw nothing away. Her archival material includes her books (her annotations on John Henry Newman’s Apologia are a fascinating insight into her own religious development), her correspondence (including letters to the Inland Revenue), her notebook accounts of income and expenses, invitations, telegrams, and proofs of her articles.

James Bailey’s new bio, Like a Cat Loves a Bird, tries to capture something of her varied character but fails. McDonagh writes that the book is “unsatisfactory for its patchy treatment of Spark’s life as well as for its infelicities of style and Bailey’s maddening use of the historic present.” It also gives too little space to her Catholicism:

Bailey’s chapter on Spark’s conversion to Catholicism is all too brief, though the author notes that, for Spark, it was the logical extension of her becoming an Anglican. “If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic,” she remarked. More to the point, it provided her with the firm creedal base from which she could develop as a writer. Bailey quotes her: “When you’re at sea you like to have a compass so you can know where the needle’s pointing north, and then you can go on from there.”

Yet, remarkably, this account nowhere mentions Newman, whom Spark largely credited with her conversion. “It was by way of Newman that I turned Roman Catholic,” she wrote in her forward to Newman’s selection of his sermons. “Not all the beheaded martyrs of Christendom, the ecstatic nuns of Europe, the five proofs of Aquinas, or the pamphlets of my Catholic acquaintance, provided anything like the answers that Newman did.”

Neither does Bailey mention the idea of sacrament, which fascinated Spark. She argued in her 1953 essay “The Religion of an Agnostic” that Marcel Proust had a sacramental view of the world, and she corresponded with a Benedictine monk, Fr. Ambrose Agius, about the sacraments. Later, Fr. Agius received her into the Church.

Nic Rowan also reviews the book for the Wall Street Journal and finds it unsatisfying: “Readers of Mr. Stannard’s biography will find much of the material in Like a Cat Loves a Bird familiar, albeit presented in a highly condensed form. In a postscript, Mr. Bailey calls Muriel Spark a “roadmap of Spark’s life” to which he referred frequently in writing his own book. What Mr. Bailey does not mention is that his book’s subtitle, The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, and its basic organizational structure is also borrowed from Mr. Stannard. Muriel Spark was originally conceived as a biography that would ‘suggest her multiplicity, her feline quality and affinity with the cat’s graceful independence, her capacity to reinvent herself, to melt into the shadows or to come out spitting when threatened.’ Mr. Stannard eventually abandoned the idea because, as he wrote, ‘this would be to define her artificially.’ Mr. Bailey would have done better to heed the observation.”

Keith Miller reviews Amit Chaudhuri’s Château Rouge: “It’s a charming enough book about Chaudhuri, if he interests you; but it really has very little to say about Paris.”

I review Paul Mariani’s latest—and possibly last—volume of poetry for World. It is one of this best:

All art is history. Not only is it obviously part of the past once it has been created, but it is also itself a way of remembering. Many readers may recall William Wordsworth’s remark in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but fewer may remember what immediately follows: “it takes its origin,” Wordsworth continues, “from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Poetry records what was felt or happened in the past—or some version of it—before it is lost.

This is particularly true of Paul Mariani’s latest collection of poetry, Sing Me a Song, She Said (Slant Books, 74 pp.). The volume is divided into three sections. It is centered by a verse drama that revisits the speaker’s tumultuous childhood in Queens and early adult years in the city. The “she” in the title is the speaker’s mother, who regularly asks her son and others to “Sing me a song, a song. Just once before I die. / A song with love in it … and memories.” The son can’t do it, at least not while his mother is alive, but this volume is that song, though it contains more than love.

The mysterious death of two Medici family members seems to have been solved after 400 years:

In 1587, Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici and his wife, Bianca Cappello, died within hours of each other after days of agony. At the time, logic dictated the culprit to be malaria because the couple had shown symptoms of the illness, including a telltale intermittent fever. But rumors of an assassination immediately spread, pointing to Francesco’s younger brother and rival, Ferdinando, as the perpetrator.

Ferdinando was next in line to the throne, but he was at risk of being passed over in favor of Francesco’s illegitimate son, Antonio. What’s more, Ferdinando had visited the grand duke and his wife at their residence just before they fell ill, further bolstering the suspicion that he poisoned them with arsenic to ensure his own rise to power.

The couple fell ill in a Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, an area dotted with marshes and rice fields — ideal habitats for mosquitoes that can carry malaria. Nonetheless, the murder rumors endured, likely aided by the Medici family’s history of murder and assassination attempts.

Since 2004, when exhumation and analysis of skeletal remains began for 49 Medici family tombs as part of the Medici Project, various studies have confirmed malaria as the cause of Francesco’s demise. However, other studies published as recently as 2006 used toxicological investigations to determine that the couple were indeed victims of arsenic poisoning.

A new study led by Serena Tucci, an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and jointly conducted by Yale and the University of Pisa, Tuscany, used DNA extracted from the skeletal remains of Francesco and another one of his brothers, Giovanni, in an attempt to settle the debate once and for all. . . . Giuffra and her colleagues found genetic traces of plasmodium, the parasitic protozoa responsible for malaria, in samples of bone material from Francesco’s ribs. “DNA is certain,” Giuffra said. “It solves the problem and the doubts. I think this is a definitive answer.”

Christine Rosen revisits About Last Night:

During the opening credits of About Last Night, we hear before we see two men having a conversation about a one-night stand. F-bombs proliferate, there is a crude, offhand discussion of female body parts, and a considerable amount of speculation about whether the female in question might, in fact, be a prostitute. “Was she a pro?” one man asks. “You think she hadn’t been around? Hadn’t done the route?” the other responds.

I still remember the shock my teenage self experienced hearing grown men talk so bluntly about something we had been raised to believe was very, very serious (sex) and how cavalier they were about the woman involved. And yet the scene was nearly impossible to forget, even before the two men talking, played by an almost-too-pretty Rob Lowe and a swaggering James Belushi, are shown on-screen.

It turns out this scene was my first exposure to something else as well: the compelling, profane, and pitch-perfect writing of playwright David Mamet. The movie was an adaptation of his 1974 play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Alas, that opening scene was the only bit of pure Mamet we get in the movie. Critic Roger Ebert gave About Last Night four stars in his review, but Mamet always disavowed it and publicly expressed his regret at selling the rights to the play so cheaply in his youth.

Anatoly Grablevsky reviews Alexander Lee’s The First Ghetto:

On March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Most Serene Republic of Venice issued a decree that redefined the relationship between Jews and Christians in the city. The edict stipulated that, “in order to avoid many disorderly and unsuitable situations,” all Jews residing in Venice had to relocate to a cluster of houses “in the Ghetto,” where, forbidden from owning real estate, they were mandated to pay their Christian landlords a third more than the going rate for rent. This newly established Jewish quarter, located in the city’s northern district of Cannaregio, was fenced off with high walls, and Jews were only allowed to venture out during the day; even then they were obliged to wear a special yellow hat at all times so as to be clearly identifiable. At dusk, the gates of this city within the city were locked by Christian guards, paid for by the Jewish community (said to be for their own protection). Heavy fines were prescribed for Jews caught outside of the Ghetto at night.

That wasn’t all. Once immured, Jews were constantly reminded that they were a foreign and unwelcome presence. As an example, in 1553 the authorities raided the Ghetto and seized any Jewish writings they could find. Copies of the Talmud and other Hebrew texts were then piled up in Piazza San Marco and, at the behest of the papal nuncio, burned.

Reading about these degrading measures today brings to mind more recent “solutions” to the Jewish question, but the road leading from Cannaregio to the ghettos of Warsaw and Łódź is a windy and uncertain one, as becomes clear by the end of Alexander Lee’s incisive new book, The First Ghetto, an engaging and illuminating account of six hundred years of Jewish history in Venice.

Jeremy Black reviews Jan Rüger’s Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany: “I like this book a lot. As an account of Anglo-German relations from the eighteenth century to the present, it draws very ably on a very wide range of sources, both British and German, and has the great benefit of being very well written. Furthermore, the political dimension, which is especially good for Rüger’s core period of the run-up to World War One — and is, more generally, highly instructive from the late nineteenth century — is ably counterpointed with the cultural and intellectual. So we get Richard Wagner going to London in order to deal with the financial ruin he faced in 1877, and the inspiration British visitors found in Weimar Germany. There is also the range of the personal from the ‘Poor Palatines’ to the ‘hare chase of Celle,’ Victor Klemperer to Christabel Bielenberg, the Queen’s controversial visit to Dresden in 1992 to President Steinmeier at the Cenotaph in 2018. There are some wonderful photographs, notably Hitchcock on set in Munich in 1925, and some great quotations, not least George VI thinking Coventry looked ‘just like Ypres after the last war.’”