“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy.”
Such are the words that open the epic of epics, Homer’s The Odyssey. It is a spin-off from The Iliad, the nasty, brutish, and long epic cataloging the Trojan war and the dramas of the entrancing Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and Paris, Menelaus and Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” But does Homer’s second work rightfully earn the title of THE GREATEST OF ALL EPICS? What about Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the old English poem, Beowulf? And what of the modern epics such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Lucas’s Star Wars series, or even Rowling’s Harry Potter?
The Odyssey, to my way of thinking, stands alone. Latter day epics may imitate or borrow, but it was The Odyssey that first captured the punishing weariness of adventure tempered by the inextinguishable hunger for home.
That is why there was so much pressure on Christopher Nolan to get The Odyssey right. A celebrated and Academy Award-winning director, Nolan proudly claims ownership of such works as Memento, Inception, Dunkirk, and Oppenheimer. Everything he touches, it seems, turns to gold. But the curse of the classic weighed upon him. Many an acclaimed director has heard the Siren song of rendering a literary classic into film and the film, invariably, crashing upon the rocks. How much greater the risk when the classic is one of the most widely-read, historically-revered stories covering vast geography and immense human nature?
Well, in Christopher Nolan’s attempt to bring The Odyssey to life, he succeeded.
Oh, yes, before the release, there was grousing about the people playing Helen and Sinon. Some accused Penelope of becoming a throne-seeking harpy. Others clucked that Matt Damon wasn’t majestic enough to be Odysseus, King of Ithaca. And, of course, Agamemnon, it has been said, was a cloddish reincarnation of Darth Vader.
Bah.
From my perspective, these are jots and tittles of little import. What I care about is, “Did the actors and actresses play their parts well?” And the answer is yes.
Throughout the film, the darkness is pitch. The fires are blinding. The chaos swallows and the ocean drowns. Nolan’s Odyssey is felt as much as it is seen.
Films of classic literature rarely improve upon their original. Notable exceptions are The Wizard of Oz (agreeing with Patrick Deneen and Salman Rushdie), King Lear (under Paul Scofield), and A Man for All Seasons (Scofield again). Literature blesses us with the artistry of words and the gift of our own imagination. Film, to its peril, wrests these from the viewer and imposes its own preferred image. As such, the image has to be just right. Nolan understands this and achieves wonders in trusting his audience and allowing our imagination to co-direct along his side. The Cyclops is largely obscured in darkness. Charybdis is apparent at an oblique angle and Scylla attacks vertiginously from the sky. Calypso, played by the gorgeous Charlize Theron, was never scantily clad, but exuded an undeniable aura of god-ish beauty. Even the Sirens, whom I most wanted to hear, were obscured from our ears so that we could imagine what Odysseus is hearing while lashed to the mast or what his crewman is experiencing as he jumps manically overboard and swims to his death. How did the Sirens sound? I know. I heard them in the silence. Throughout the film, the darkness is pitch. The fires are blinding. The chaos swallows and the ocean drowns. Nolan’s Odyssey is felt as much as it is seen.
Are there a few pivotal missing moments for which I longed in this nearly three-hour epic? Of course. While Odysseus spends a great deal of time munching the amnestic lotus flowers during his years with Calypso, his crew never lands on the island of the lotus-eaters. It is an important omission (corrected by Odysseus’s own self-drugging) since it shows the temptation to obliviousness (see Patrick Deneen’s American Odyssey on this note). Furthermore, two encounters in Hades were sorely missed. First, Elpenor, the common sailor whose death stirs Odysseus, prompts the war hero to offer a dignified burial for an anonymous soul. And, second, Achilles, whose shade confesses bitterly that the brief, but heroic life is unequal to the long, but common life.
But these omissions do not break the film.
You see The Odyssey is not, in the end, about gods and monsters, shipwrecks and suitors. It is about the human condition. It is about what is left after the glory of war and the surrogates for God have failed us. The Odyssey balances the tension between heroism and safety, restlessness and peace, prudent decisions that still feel wrong and threats that spare no one. It is less a story of plan and more a parable of reaction, less a tale of majestic kingdoms and more a tale of a riven household, less a narrative of warriors and more a narrative of worried men. It is old dogs and blind beggars, a lonely wife and worried son longing for a man who misses them even more. Homer’s Odyssey is a masterpiece of the vexing, inspiring, unresolvable, God-kissed human condition. And Christopher Nolan did it much honor.
For years there has been a movement afoot to cancel classic literature, especially in our high schools and colleges, as patriarchal, supremacist, exclusionary, and subliminally corrupting. As one might expect, high on the cancellation list is Homer’s Odyssey.
Again, I say bah!
Good luck with that ridiculous fool’s errand. Because Homer refuses to be cancelled. And may naysayers’ teeth gnash and hands wring because everyone is reading or watching The Odyssey. Everyone. And everyone seems to enjoy it—as they should.
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy.”