A Spirited Debate About The Odyssey

With @11am Saturday.

The Odyssey is so dang long, and this post is too.

Matt Damon and Zendaya in The Odyssey.

A second Emily Wilson review has hit Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation. Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, translated the Odyssey in 2017, and Nolan cited her work as an inspiration to his own. When Wilson reviewed the movie for the London Review of Books, she didn’t seem pleased: The movie, she wrote, “lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors.” She found it shallow and “gimmicky.” And two twist the knife: “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

A week later, another Wilson essay appeared in The Atlantic. This time she was harsher on what she perceived as Nolan’s collection of little hypocrisies. The movie conflates the Golden Rule (“Zeus’s Law”) with the idea that we should follow the Golden Rule because the person on the receiving end might actually be a god in disguise. Being a bad host and being a bad guest are both punishable by death. “Nolan shot the Calypso episodes in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people,” Wilson points out. “The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.”

My favorite review of the Odyssey, however, is John Paul Brammer’s. He’s funny on the good parts (Matt Damon being ripped) and precise on the bad. The movie is best at being a relentless endurance ritual, and kind of lackluster beyond that. “Nolan as director is a lot like Odysseus as captain in the film. Ruthless and efficient,” JP writes. “Odysseus never jokes around with his crew. Where’s the camaraderie? The salty sea banter? There’s a relentless dourness to The Odyssey that feels quite contemporary, and is at odds with the Aegean sunniness that saturates the Greek epics.”

With all of those thoughts in my head, I went to see The Odyssey again because I wanted to talk about it with my friend Ezgi, aka 11am Saturday. She is the biggest Nolan fan in my phone. I’m mostly ambivalent about The Odyssey (but devoted Hung Up readers will recall that my eyes still see Oppenheimer); Ezgi is pro. We met in a Google Doc to discuss Christopher Nolan’s absent-dad epic.

It's 3am. Do you know where your cinephiles are?

Hunter: This is a movie I have a hard time taking seriously. And I want to! Every trailer struck me as a pre-AP English Lit lecture, but I didn’t think I’d like Oppenheimer and I still think about that movie nearly all the time. Nolan’s Odyssey, by contrast, has very little of that movie’s complication. I think Robert Pattinson, John Leguizamo, and John Bernthal are giving the only dynamic performances here in a group chat of oversimplified ideas. I mean, starting a movie with Travis Scott and his big-ass veneers? I have never related to Anne Hathaway more than when the movie started with Travis trying to rap, and she said, “A song? From him?? Cut that shit off.” (I’m paraphrasing.) What was your expectation coming into the movie?

Ezgi: I was similarly entranced in Oppenheimer as you know (a film for gossips and haters), and once Al Pacino’s eyes saw Oppenheimer at The Oscars, I forgot about Nolan for a bit and didn’t follow The Odyssey pre-production (and racist meltdowns) super closely. What finally piqued my interest was the IMAX prologue they showed before Avatar in December, which was essentially the entire sequence of Jon Bernthal retelling the story of the siege of Troy to Tom Holland’s Telemachus. I agree that the trailers that came after felt dull compared to the electricity of that sneak peek, especially on IMAX. My only other prior interest in the story is that I’m from the West coast of Turkey, where there’s a Trojan Horse statue in the city that used to be ancient Troy (Canakkale), and as a child I fully believed the horse with soldiers hiding inside was a true story. TL;DR, I didn’t have a ton of expectations going in, but knew I wanted to see that Troy sequence again at the very least.

H: The movie worked best for me in those Troy sequences and Samantha Morton’s Circe scenes. (Is it a coincidence that in the wake of Time’s Up, two movies this year mine the paralyzing fear that a man’s good intentions are being misunderstood by a terrified woman? That’s quite a bit of Obsession.)

I want to accept Nolan’s thesis here: Odysseus sees the battle of Troy as a victory of his own honor and wit, but only after his journey can he understand that their war was not a just campaign. The gods had been talking to him all along, showing him his own hubris and begging him to notice it. That’s how we arrive at “To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire.” What happens after that — exacting vengeance on a room of Mr. Steal Your Girls — seemed to renege on that earned wisdom. What makes his vengeance more honorable than Agamemnon’s? Y’all will see each other in Hades. That is one of the larger oversimplifications that resonated with me in Emily Wilson’s review. What did you make of her POV?

E: I think that’s one of the stronger points Wilson makes in her review in terms of inconsistencies within the script – I found the final scene to be the weakest, when Penelope and Odysseus sail off to the Unknown West, and he mansplains the concept of a song to her. Even after all he internalized about the breaking of Zeus’ Law, he returns home and brutally fights the suitors, and still gets to live happily ever after with Anne Hathaway. In the previous adaptations of the story, Odysseus sees this as a necessary evil — a restoration of order in his own home — but he also has no life-altering epiphanies about his culpability in breaking a fundamental, unspoken rule of humanity.

To me, squaring this required a certain amount of projection on Nolan’s intentions as a storyteller. I personally don’t think Odysseus is actually morally vindicated at the end; he’s still the monster he helped create. There is no redemption for him, no matter how convinced he is in his confessional with Penelope. Nolan programmed a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey days before The Odyssey was released in LA’s newly restored Director’s Village theater, and I don’t think the similarities between the two films are a coincidence. I think he believes that violence against one another is in our nature, and even though we implement guardrails (Zeus’ law back then, actual laws now) to keep ourselves in check, we will no doubt break those rules again and again, and meet Benny Safdie in Hades (I also don’t think it’s an accident that all of Odysseus’ men are in Hell, even Sinon, the “bravest man he’s ever known”).

H: One of the biggest laugh lines in this movie for me was Odysseus’s shock that Agamemnon was in Hades at all. Girl, obviously!

While some of Wilson’s gripes with the movie were as simplistic as her critique of Nolan’s main shortcoming — of course the food looked bad … it was supposed to! — I really think she tore. I want to believe you that that final scene is intentionally sort of hammy, but I think Nolan gives a blockbuster audience their tidy blockbuster ending. Odysseus leaves Ithaca to honor his dead soldiers, but not any other dead soldiers; Telemachus fought one guy in one room and gets to be king. And why is he king at all? Because his dad told him to. The third act felt like a neater, tidier Oppenheimer: yes, he did something bad, but he feels bad enough about it to justify a happy homecoming. It all felt so false!

I do break with Wilson’s review on the movie’s execution. This movie looked much more sophisticated than an episode of Game of Thrones, which was an especially funny comparison for her to make. Nolan is good at making movies! Some of the most stunning shots that stood out to me: Peering at Penelope and Antinous from behind the shroud, the blood-red sails on the ships as they cross a blue-black ocean, the flow from the fire flames whipping the faces of the Trojan soldiers.

But that was … it. Okay, the Cyclops sequence was different than I expected. (That Cyclops’ cave reminded me of Hannah Bronfman’s apartment … one window …) The rest of it felt so muted. Where was the emotional center? It wasn’t Penelope or Telemachus. It wasn’t even hating Antinous! Eumaeus and Sinon were the most emotional performances, but their motivations were too slight, all things considered. Certainly nothing between Penelope and Odysseus felt like it held any weight.

E: I don’t disagree! I think there’s a case to be made that this movie’s technical achievements overshadow the narrative intent behind it. When Oppenheimer bravely used every minute of its runtime to invite us into J. Robert’s psyche, The Odyssey in comparison feels more interested in the external forces that you would assume would change a guy radically. I agreed with your take in a previous post that Matt Damon’s talents best shine when he’s playing a guy who’s always possibly up to something (The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Departed), although I enjoyed flickers of that coming through here and there (“Ten years on this fucking beach. Let’s go home.” is an incredible way to start this movie TO ME, even if it wasn’t for Wilson).

I left my first screening of the movie thinking a lot of it worked for me, but that I probably wouldn’t see it again in theaters (or 6 more times, as was the case with Oppenheimer). But then I spent days thinking about it and wanting to see it again, and on second watch found the dynamic between Damon’s Odysseus and Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus to be a compelling anchor as they hop between islands. That might be why the Sirens sequence was my favorite – Patel listening to Damon recount the sirens’ song with that equally wistful and doubtful look in his eyes as his trust in him weakens with each new horror they face.

I also can’t help but appreciate Nolan’s audacity in changing such a notorious story, however clumsy the execution. Yes the conclusion is similar to Oppenheimer in that Odysseus regrets his invention that won his people the war, but I think Nolan goes beyond that to say that war anywhere is war everywhere, and that maybe we’ve told the version of this story that sees war as a “necessary evil” enough times already.

H: I was talking to someone last week who said that Nolan is pretty notoriously not an actor’s director. It reminded me of something Mia Goth said on a red carpet: she watched Robert Pattinson come to Nolan with a question about his character, and Nolan said the answer is up for him to decide. You can see performers in this movie who can do that work (Pattinson and Samantha Morton) and performers in this movie whose character motivations are straightforward enough that they can pull off something more sophisticated than exists for them in the script (Leguizamo, Himesh Patel, Anne Hathaway in some scenes).

Is that what makes Tom Holland particularly unconvincing here? There’s a sinkhole between wanting to know his father and thinking he’s ready to be king, that swallows that performance whole. It also doesn’t help that one of his most frequent scene partners is Pattinson, who is so completely in control here, devouring Zendaya’s husband in every scene they have together. (Anne Hathaway comes out the worst in this script. She fights through the most wooden and expository lines in the entire script.) I said this on the pod, but I would’ve much preferred Elliot Page as Telemachus. There was a finer sense of desire and responsibility (and desire for responsibility) that I think would’ve worked better.

Nolan’s Odyssey is not a particularly interesting movie about war, but I am interested in its ideas about divinity and deities. Odysseus relying on the gods while defying them at every turn, rejecting immortality as he selfishly grabs for it, is one of the more compelling ideas here. All this amounts to is a movie for, and about, endurance. More than I thought “God, that’s so good,” was “God, I’d hate to be shooting there.”

E: Or “God, Matt Damon’s biceps look gigantic in this scene where Zeus and Poseidon are striking him down.”

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