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A Monumental Modern Odyssey

“A new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.”
In promoting his new book Son of Nobody at my local literary festival, author Yann Martel noted how the works of the anonymous Greek poet(s) identified as Homer -The Iliad and especially The Odyssey- are foundational texts of western culture; works of curious fiction that carry immense weight on how the literature of western society developed. Martel observed that perhaps a part of that comes from an apparent timelessness in the themes of these stories in which the patterns of the world as we know it three thousand years later can still be found. The personalities, conflicts, and anxieties of such works are apparent in both life and fiction -they speak as much to the present as they ever did.
Thus, like every custodian of the material before him, Christopher Nolan very intentionally speaks to the present, in his new adaptation of The Odyssey, in which the Homeric epic is cast as a personal story of one man’s grief, regret, and desire to escape the weight of his mistakes and their dire consequences for the world. One might see in there the shadow of Nolan’s last masterpiece Oppenheimer -indeed it would seem he has a fixation on the ethical dilemmas of men whose actions spelled grave implications for their worlds. This hero, Odysseus, takes a lot more of it on himself than he is necessarily taken to be at fault for. But it is a visceral spectre nonetheless, and it is at the heart of this excellent interpretation of the classical myth by one of our finest filmmakers.
Told in a mildly non-linear fashion as Odysseus (Matt Damon), under the amnesiac spell of the lotus flower, tries to recall his life and identity while stranded on the island of Ogygia with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), the iconic narrative is presented in its iconic chapters. Following the Greek victory in Troy, the King of Ithaca captains his army home via a less conventional route guided by the goddess Athena (Zendaya), only for the crew to encounter a series of fantastical dangers that gradually whittle down their forces. All the while, Odysseus struggles with ethical torment over his actions in the war, particularly his role in conceiving the Trojan Horse, and the consequences it has wrought on both his journey home and the world writ large. Meanwhile in Ithaca some twenty years from his departure, his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) struggle with the power vacuum left by his absence, and the ambitions of Antinous (Robert Pattinson), a suitor for Penelope.
The Odyssey is fundamentally a story about a man being punished by the gods on his journey home from war, and yet in no version I have encountered has there been such an emphasis on his own trauma and his guilt over the war crimes he committed during the Sack of Troy. Nolan and Damon cast him very starkly as more human than hero, even against the grandiose aspects of his relationship to the gods -and Athena especially, whom he feels particularly guilty of desecrating at her temple in Troy given her implied significance to his family and culture back on Ithaca. The weight of his sin is vividly felt, so too is his penance as his journey is coloured by the sense he is actively running away from his guilt and an accountability for the chaos he believes has been wrought on the world for his transgression.
And in this world, that does appear to be the case. Beyond Odysseus's vision of Athena, Nolan keeps the gods at an arm's length, and yet their influence on the world is viscerally felt. Though it could also be the simple, organic precedent of Odysseus's violation of Zeus's Law of Hospitality that has resulted in the more nefarious actions taken by the likes of Antinous and other opportunists. In any case it connects to Nolan's favourite theme of late -powerful figures grappling with the source of a downfall of 'civilization'. Where Oppenheimer was more direct, The Odyssey functions in allegory -analogues to climate change, fascism, and most strikingly war can be glimpsed here in modern terms (there is a reason the movie employs modern dialects for its characters), but also Nolan himself is once more personified on some level. Since at least Inception (arguably since The Prestige) he has used his movies to express a sentiment of guilt over his work and artistic drive consuming him at the expense of his family, often quite literally taking him away from them. The Odyssey is clearly his most overt encapsulation of that.
The trials Odysseus suffers through have of course their own metaphorical significance, but they are also incredibly exciting and well-executed. For the first time, Nolan really engages sharply with horror filmmaking, especially around the encounter with the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) and the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) who transmogrifies his crew. Inspired by the great Ray Harryhausen, the Cyclops is an entirely practical effect -rendered through puppetry and animatronics- while the body horror of the sequence in Circe's keep recalls Rick Baker's work on An American Werewolf in London. Nolan articulates each episode in a distinctly effective way, from the siren song kept from the audience's ears to a visit to the afterlife where spectres of the dead are caked in clay. And that is without touching on further real effects such as the Horse and the ships on the water. The IMAX photography by Hoyte van Hoytema is fittingly astounding and intense, capturing the scale of the story and its vivid world -ahistorical, some pedants might argue, but perfectly mythic.
Surprisingly, Damon's performance lives up to that -worn and weary and psychologically wounded. It is perhaps his first performance to really show his age and with that a certain gravitas in authority. Odysseus's grand stature is consciously downplayed yet Damon still inhabits his commanding weight, through a human vulnerability. It is in the last act that this is most on display, with some of the most subtle and powerful acting I've seen from Damon in quite some time. It is also the first time that Holland has truly impressed with a performance, carrying a sense of urgency and purpose -and despite his role being largely 'the son' feels more grown-up than he ever has before. Hathaway is a tremendous, steadfast Penelope, Zendaya hits the right tenor of ambiguity, and Elliot Page as the deceased soldier Sinon is a scene-stealer. Jon Bernthal (as Menalaus), Lupita Nyong'o (as Helen and Clytemnestra), Himesh Patel (as Eurylochus), and Theron each shine in their respective parts as well. But of especial note is Morton, whose emotional immediacy transforms Circe into a distinctly sympathetic figure, John Leguizamo, who is an earnest and captivating Eumaeus, and Pattinson, delivering as an excellently despicable slimeball villain with boisterous indulgence.
Through his section of the story and his craven power plays, the movie emphasizes the stakes growing higher the longer Odysseus takes to get home, the longer he puts off his personal reckoning. But ultimately it does come for him in Ithaca in an astounding sequence of revelation that answers for his burden and casts his relationship to the gods and his men in a thrillingly fascinating new light. It's in this section of the film where Nolan's sympathy for Odysseus becomes starkly more pronounced and where Nolan makes space for the figure to be a symbol of hope in a bleak world. He is drawn as an antiquated man in advance of his final challenge -an avatar of folklore more than a man in his own right- by how he is framed in deceptive humility (much like a god). He stresses atonement of his own volition and there is a veneer of hope for a restoration of his world -a far cry from the note of grim despair that Oppenheimer left us on.
Yet Odysseus is not absolved, and for his noble intents and motivations he muses on the legacy of his adventures being carried forward rather than his profound mistakes -in this he comes short of fully owning them. He wishes to still be the hero, and indeed his story has often painted him as that -the source of his trials and character flaws lost in the adventure. But Nolan is sure to remember his mistakes, his faults of cowardice and arrogance, his culpability in great violence. And by virtue in Odysseus's Original Sin having searing resonance to the state of the world now -that feels equally cursed by the gods- it suggests that our mistakes cannot be forgotten either on the road to correcting our own destruction.
Or perhaps Nolan pessimistically thinks we will. His Odyssey entertains various philosophies and eventualities, some contradictory, some complimentary. But they are enticing things to parse, and especially so wrapped in the scope and momentum of a classical movie epic that is a testament to the art of craft -Nolan's technical details are inspired and exacting, and it goes without saying that Ludwig Göransson turns in another stupendous score. A mesmerizing experience, especially on the biggest screen possible -the road movie of the year.

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