Matt Williams

Christopher Nolan | 173 min | ★★★★

There is a moment perhaps two hours into The Odyssey—I will be vague about its particulars, since the film’s architecture depends on the order in which it discloses them—when an image that has flickered at the edges of the narrative for ninety minutes finally acquires its meaning, and the audience at the Metreon, several hundred people who had bought out an IMAX 70mm house at 10am on a Wednesday, made a sound I can only describe as collective exhalation. It is the sound of a formal gamble paying off. Nolan has spent three decades being accused of treating chronology as a puzzle to be solved rather than a medium to be inhabited, and the accusation has often been just. What is remarkable about his Odyssey—and what makes it, I think, the most complete film he has made behind Oppenheimer—is that here the scrambled clock is not an imposition on the material but a restoration of it. The Odyssey is the founding document of nonlinear narrative in the Western tradition. It opens in medias res; it delegates multiple books to a narrator of dubious reliability performing his own past for an audience he needs something from; it nests song within story within song. Nolan did not bring his method to Homer. He found it there.

The film’s governing device makes this explicit. We open on a bard singing the Trojan Horse to a feasting hall, and the song becomes image—the first of three iterations of the Horse, each issuing from a different mouth and serving a different rhetorical purpose. The bard’s version is heroic lacquer, all cunning and torchlight. Menelaus’s, delivered by a bruised and garrulous Jon Bernthal, gives us the claustrophobia of the belly, triumph recollected as endurance. Odysseus’s own, withheld until the film is nearly over, supplies what the first two were constructed to omit. The structure is not merely clever; it is an argument, and it is Homer’s argument—that the story a man circulates about himself is the least reliable index of what he has done, and that epic memory is a technology for converting atrocity into music. Jennifer Lame’s editing, some of the finest work of her career, lets fragments surface the way traumatic memory actually surfaces: an image on temple steps, a decapitated statue, recurring before they signify, so that comprehension arrives as dread rather than exposition. Nolan has finally put his signature device in service of a psychology rather than a plot mechanism, and the difference is total. (Yes, he also does this in Oppenheimer, but there it operates as a siphon for the story—and yes, it works beautifully there too)

Yet the same interpretive confidence that produces this structure also produces the film’s central distortion, and the two cannot be disentangled. Nolan’s Odysseus is a man in moral arrears. The sack of Troy is staged as a war crime requiring answer; the Calypso years are reconfigured as a lotus-fogged amnesia, addiction doing the work of enchantment; the slaughter of the suitors—which Homer stages as righteous, even exultant, extermination—is framed as one more violation of the guest-law by its most habitual offender; and the ending substitutes penance for restoration. The film is rigorous about this reading. Every department serves it: Matt Damon’s performance, the withheld chronology, an ending that refuses the genre’s contractual triumph. And Damon is extraordinary within it; his famous legibility, the open-faced decency that once made him the ideal Bourne, is deployed here as a mask under continuous strain. There is a late, unbroken take, essentially a confession, and it is among the best acting he has ever committed to film.

The difficulty is that this coherence is purchased by translating the poem’s moral universe into ours, and the translation forfeits precisely what makes the original worth adapting. Homer’s Odysseus is not a traumatized man awaiting the invention of the guilty conscience. The first thing he does after Troy—before a single monster—is sack Ismarus for plunder, and he narrates the raid to his hosts without embarrassment. He hangs twelve enslaved women in his own courtyard and the poem grants them one line of twitching feet. When Eurycleia exults over the suitors’ corpses, he silences her—not from remorse but from piety, the fear of drawing a god’s attention to good fortune. The poem’s ethical machinery runs on consequence, not conscience: atrocity generates divine bookkeeping, Poseidon’s grudge, a debt collected in years rather than in guilt. This is a genuinely alien moral cosmology, and its alienness is the reason to keep reading a three-thousand-year-old text—it is a dispatch from a version of humanity adjacent to our own.

Nolan, by routing everything through therapeutic accountability, renders Odysseus palatable at the cost of rendering him contemporary. The fair counterargument, which the production has effectively made through its stated debt to Emily Wilson’s translation philosophy, is that every generation has recruited Odysseus to its own purposes—Dante damned him, Tennyson made him a Victorian striver, Joyce made him an advertising canvasser—and that a scrupulously Bronze Age Odysseus would be less an adaptation than a museum exhibit. I accept the premise; adaptation is interpretation or it is taxidermy. But interpretation still incurs costs, and the cost here is doubled, because in sanding down the hero’s amorality Nolan has also sanded down his defining faculty. This is “polytropos,” the man of many turns, and the film gives him almost no turns to make. There is no Noman stratagem, no Cretan tales—those long, gratuitous lies Odysseus spins on Ithaca for people who have done nothing to deserve deception, simply because his mind requires the exercise. Even Penelope’s recognition test, the immovable olive-tree bed—a trap she lays for him, the one moment the poem’s two great intelligences meet as equals—is replaced by a pin he wore to war. A puzzle becomes a keepsake. The substitution is small and it is the entire problem in miniature: a film about Odysseus that prefers his suffering to his cunning has, I would argue, mistaken which of the two Homer found interesting. Damon endures magnificently. He is almost never permitted to be brilliant, despite the insistence from other characters that he is.

A related sanitization operates on the poem’s eros, and here the film’s fidelity to its director’s temperament overrides its fidelity to its source. The Odyssey is a frankly libidinous poem—not incidentally but structurally. Odysseus spends seven years in Calypso’s bed and one in Circe’s, and the Circean arrangement is a negotiated settlement, terms extracted at sword-point before consummation. He is washed up naked before Nausicaa with the poem entirely conscious of the tableau; the Phaeacian bard’s showpiece is a ribald comedy of Ares and Aphrodite netted in flagrante for the gods’ amusement; and at the poem’s emotional terminus, after the recognition, Athena physically detains the dawn by holding Eos and her horses at the world’s edge so that the reunited couple may have a longer night. A goddess suspends cosmology for the sake of marital sex.

The film, by contrast, is immaculate. Charlize Theron’s Calypso presides over a fog of erased memory in which nothing carnal is even implied; one could watch the entire sequence without suspecting these two characters had ever been undressed in the same room. Circe, reimagined by Samantha Morton as something between crone and demiurge, is all threat and no appetite. The reunion is recognition, grief, and a cut. One might defend this as of a piece with the amnesia conceit—a man who cannot remember himself can hardly desire coherently—and the film clearly wants Odysseus’s homeward pull to be duty and debt rather than longing. But this defense collapses on inspection, because the poem has already answered the film’s own central question, and the answer is the body. Calypso offers immortality; Odysseus declines not dying for a mortal woman on a rocky island, and the image the poem supplies as its reason is the marriage bed carved from a living olive tree, still rooted in the earth—the least abstract figure for wedded desire in Western literature. Excise the wanting and the homecoming becomes an obligation discharged rather than a hunger answered, which is precisely the colder film Nolan has made. What perplexes me is the regression. Nolan’s cinema has always been notoriously chaste, but Oppenheimer appeared to mark a deliberate correction, its sexuality awkward, specific, and thematically load-bearing. That door, it turns out, opened for one film and closed again. Hathaway’s Penelope, watchful and flinty, gives the marriage what heat it has; the screenplay gives her a symbol’s duties and a person’s face.

What finally holds the film together, across these objections, is the depth and strangeness of its ensemble. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is the revelation. A thankless role in Homer, a boy lectured by a goddess, transformed here into the film’s second consciousness: a young man raised on a legend who must watch the legend resolve into a person, and the person into something worse. Holland plays the arc entirely without his habitual eagerness; there is a scene in which he hears an account of his father’s exploits and visibly decides, in real time, to believe it anyway, and it is as fine a piece of silent acting as the year has produced. When he and Damon at last share a frame, the film goes quiet and earns its quiet. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous is a superbly petty aristocrat whose entitlement frightens more than his violence. His character also shines as perhaps the only intelligent member of the suitors, the only one who immediately realizes what’s about to happen when Odysseus plucks that bow. Morton’s hands-on transformation of men into swine—molded like wet clay, Göransson’s magnificent score curdling beneath—is as disturbing as it is technically fascinating, and a useful reminder that the film’s literalist aesthetic can produce wonder as well as constraint. Nyong’o, doubling Helen and Clytemnestra in a casting rhyme the script regrettably declines to develop, is luminous and underused—symptomatic, a skeptic might note, of a film that consistently finds less for its women to do than its women could evidently do.

Four stars, then, and not as a diplomatic average of enthusiasm and complaint. The rating reflects a conviction that the objections I have entered are objections to choices—legible, internally defended, executed with total conviction—rather than to failures of craft or nerve. Nolan has made a film about a man carrying an unpayable debt home across water, and has bent chronology, camera, and star persona to that single idea. I believe he is wrong about Odysseus; I believe the poem is stranger, funnier, more carnal and more amoral than his film can permit itself to be, and that its strangeness is not an obstacle to contemporary relevance but the whole of it. But a great adaptation and a correct one are different animals, and the history of the Odyssey in art is largely a history of productive wrongness. He made the film he intended, at a scale no one else is presently allowed to attempt, on a camera that had to be invented for the occasion, and for a hundred and seventy-three minutes at the Metreon it held several hundred people motionless in the dark. See it in 70mm while the option exists. Whatever the home release turns out to be, it will be a translation. And like most translations, it will be honorable, useful, and not the poem.