An Epic for the Ages The Odyssey

 

Daisy Dunn

An Epic for the Ages

The Odyssey

By Christopher Nolan (dir)

172 minutes

 

There is a moment in Chris-topher Nolan’s The Odyssey in which Odysseus (Matt Damon) ponders a mistake. The hero had assumed that the Cyclops was dumb – the giant certainly voiced no review of his meal of Greek soldier with helmet-­crest garnish. It is only when Odysseus leaves his cave that he realises the Cyclops could speak all along. Why hadn’t the monster said anything while they were anxiously plotting in his midst, one of Odysseus’s men asks. ‘Do you talk to ants?’ Odysseus replies.

Here is a flash of the man Odysseus was before ten years of war got into his veins. Dry-witted, clever, deceptively self-contained, he was, so Homer defined him, polytropos – a man of myriad ways and unfathomable depths. We see less of the tricksy side of Odysseus’s character in the film; the omission of the famous ‘Nobody’ trick, in which the Greek deceives the Cyclops as to his true identity, will frustrate viewers. But in taking his Odysseus from the early books of the poem – the figure weeping on the shore of Calypso’s island – Nolan creates a film that is as brooding as the deeper layers of his protagonist’s psyche. The characterisation feels somehow truer to the text as a whole than does Odysseus’s own high-spirited account of his adventures in books 9–12. 

The Phaeacians of Scheria, to whom Odysseus recounts those adventures, are notably omitted in Nolan’s version. Circe (Samantha Morton) is less seductress than intelligent yet justifiably embittered harridan, and the gods are more spoken of than seen. There have been criticisms of the film’s settings and armour since the trailer aired, but the former largely conform to the archaeological record while the latter has been altered for dramatic effect. When Odysseus and his men encounter the Laestrygonians, for example, they are struck by their otherworldliness. To have dressed them in costume authentic to the period would have been anachronistic. Nolan’s giants look medieval-cum-space age in their silver metal, as if they’ve come from the future, and that is the point. The shock we feel upon seeing them echoes that of Odysseus’s men. 

Analysing how faithful a film is to a text has long struck me as an absurd exercise; suffice to say, Nolan’s film feels Homeric where it matters. The storytelling, in particular, is characterised by an intricate web of flashbacks, such as we find in the poem. The transitions between each time frame are so seamless as to replicate the cadence of epic song. The effect is extraordinarily intimate; one feels deeply embedded within Odysseus’s world.

Nolan has woven a strong historical thread through this world. Characters speak of the decline of their times, the unravelling of civilisation, the threat of decimation and irrelevance in the face of the arriving Sea Peoples. Historians remain divided over the identity of this group, but raiding seamen have been held partially responsible for the death of the Bronze Age and beginning of a Dark Age that occurred in the period Homer was describing. The resonances with today are obvious, but they are not superficially imposed. 

In Homer’s Odyssey, the sense of impending decline is only implicit, because early listeners and readers knew what they had lived through. The poem is set at the end of the Late Bronze Age – about four hundred years before the Greek world recovered from the period of population decline and illiteracy; the Homeric epics are the first jewels of the post-Dark Age world. The monumental palaces described in the text and re-created on set were inspired by the archaeological remains of Mycenaean palaces destroyed in mysterious circumstances at the end of the Bronze Age. The historical backdrop of the Odyssey becomes part of Nolan’s plot. If the script is rather heavy-handed in these parts, one can understand why; the history is complex. 

Nolan’s interpretations of some of the more oblique episodes in the text are thought-provoking even where they are controversial. Odysseus’s seven-year stay with the beautiful nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), for example, is routinely criticised by modern readers, who want the hero to return to his long-suffering wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). To some, it is clear that Odysseus’s inertia is prompted by war trauma, but to Nolan, it is prompted more by Calypso drugging him with the memory-destroying lotus flower. Do the drugs absolve Odysseus of all responsibility for staying with his lover so long? Or does his trauma already do that? 

Those of us who grew up reading of Odysseus’s adventures are prone to overlook their terror. The film certainly re-­establishes the darkness and sinister nature of many of the encounters. These are no longer the boy’s own antics celebrated in many colourful retellings, but blood-chilling experiences, destined to drive Odysseus even deeper into despair. Scenes of cannibalism, necromancy, metamorphosis and supernatural disaster are rendered as vividly as nightmares. There is no denying the excellence of the special effects and the cleverness of the cinematography. 

The Odyssey is, I think, the best film on the ancient world to have been made so far this century. Yes, there are jarring moments, to which the colloquialism of certain lines in the script contributes – Telemachus (Tom Holland) calling Odysseus ‘Dad’ breaks any illusion of the story beginning life in stately dactylic hexameters. But there is a depth to this treatment seldom found in a screenplay so utterly devoted to the high-octane. It both looks and feels like an Odyssey for the ages.