Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey has garnered considerable acclaim and large box office receipts, while being criticized by Emily Wilson for not being Homeric enough, in favor of large visual spectacle. To give Nolan the credit he is due, it’s about time there is a major film that makes a serious effort at presenting one of Homer’s great epic poems. The literary work is 2500 years old and is among the most central of foundations of western culture. Nothing can ever compete with Homer’s own words.
The translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad by Wilson were major cultural events, attracting considerable press. They read rhythmically, lyrically, and beautifully in 21st century English, and it is fortunate that Nolan got interested in making his film based on her translations. While there are obvious limitations here compared to the source material, Nolan is able to find some of his favorite themes reflected in Homer. The result is, no doubt, more a Nolan work than a work by Homer, but this is always true in cinema, as it is a director’s medium and not a literary one. The Shining is far more Kubrick as a film than it is Stephen King, though it also took its literary source material seriously.
Nolan’s images are, at the least, a beautiful visual spectacle, but more than this, his familiar concerns of time, memory, personal identity, dark forces unravelling stable life, and the forgetting of oneself, are all at play through the story of Odysseus. Like Christian Bale as Nolan’s Batman, Matt Damon as Odysseus forgets who he is and has to journey back to finding himself. The man with a wife is in conflict with the adventurous hero, much as Bruce Wayne remains separate from Batman. The fact that there is obvious similarity between Odysseus and Batman, a certainly less important figure in classical antiquity, is indeed problematic from a literary standpoint, but the film still works as a beautiful and epic visual tale.
Nolan admires the poetic sensibility found in Homer, and his film offers the rare combining of visual poetry with massive visual spectacle. He is one of the few directors able to achieve this, and it is why Nolan is a rare filmmaker able to straddle the line between box office success and arthouse appeal. The time spent with Odysseus reminiscing about his past and not remembering all events gives the character more of a reflective personality than a Hollywood hero typically has. It’s an effort from the director to honor his source material and to find or build a more sophisticated audience.
That certainly leaves out many of the nuances of the source text, but the cleverness of the film is the way that it gets modern audiences to find the story easy to understand and be involved in. It brings the Ancient Greek world to life for mass audiences in a way that really hasn’t happened in mass culture before. There are surviving Greek plays that would be easier to make a movie out of than Homer, but even those works are missing from cinema. To Nolan’s credit, he took on a giant of a text and delivered an enjoyable and thoughtful epic, even if it can’t capture the depths of the original poem. That is why the film is an addendum to a great literary work and not a replacement.
Hopefully the success of the movie leads to many more people reading a book they should have already read. Why the other reviews are not bothering to mention that The Iliad is equally or more essential is beyond me and quite sad. The fact that so many people in America have not already read Homer is the fault of an extremely bad culture. It is helpful that Nolan is making an effort to correct that, and the movie is doing an excellent job of bringing many people to Emily Wilson’s wonderful translations. While the literary work will always be superior, this film will reward multiple viewings with details to tease out in the elaborate scenes of Nolan’s film.
The characters in his movie can’t be understood only through their dialogue but need to be understood through the poetry that cinema uniquely offers with movement within the images, plays of light, and careful props and set design. While it is not all true to the ancient Greek world, Nolan’s vision captures a wonderful tactile sense of antiquity for audiences, and the details of the scenes shed great light on the characters. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is bathed in darkness and candle light, as though living within a memory. Odysseus is frequently shown amidst fog or dimmed lighting. His cloak conceals his indentity from the world at times, just as the Trojan horse did.
Nolan’s Trojan horse may well lack the playful ambiguities of Homer’s, but does serve as a metaphor for many other suggestions throughout the film. The oft cited Cyclops is not only a Hollywood monster, but is another creature that is unsure of itself and missing something. He shares with Odysseus that he is a misfit, and Odysseus shows that he is himself blind by thoughtlessly killing him. The suggestion is that Odysseus brings about his own amnesia by way of his becoming lost in the thrill of combat, and that is indeed Homeric. The film is itself a Trojan horse, and inside of it one finds a powerful case for studying Homer and Ancient Greece.
