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****/**** starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron screenplay by Christopher Nolan, based on the epic poem by Homer directed by Christopher Nolan
by Walter Chaw The bookshelf of my childhood includes The Chronicles of Narnia, Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix, Ray Bradbury’s short stories, Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series, Robert Lynn Asprin’s MythAdventures, a whole lot of Asimov and Ellison, Piers Anthony’s Xanth and “Incarnations of Immortality” series, William Sleator’s House of Stairs, a Chinese manga of Journey to the West, and Bernard Evslin’s The Adventures of Ulysses. I read each of these volumes multiple times and draw from them still when I’m trying to reverse-engineer a familiar sensation I get from new creations. They’re my first connection with the collective, this shelf of pre-YA and YA treasures–and, aside from the Xanth books (which have aged poorly), they’re what I encouraged my children to read as they were finding their way from childhood to experience. I pushed The Adventures of Ulysses especially hard and, later, Richard Lattimore’s scholarly, ethical translations of Homer’s 12,000-line poem, split into 24 books for ease of study and presented as what a close friend and mentor once called one of the only two stories that comprise the Western canon. The other? The Crucifixion.
I am protective of The Odyssey and The Iliad, in other words. I look for echoes of this shelf in everything I experience, and it’s usually Homer that I find. I wanted to equip my kids with the same provisions I had shored my ruins against. I took four years of college Latin to read Virgil’s The Aeneid (the Trojan side of the story, essentially) in its original form in order to understand the tragedy from the loser’s perspective. I taught myself enough Homeric Greek to tentatively sound out a few highlights from Homer. To my shame, I lack either the intellectual or linguistic rigour to go deep in a language with a different alphabet that was never really intended to be spoken. (By comparison, Latin’s a breeze.) For a while, I made these stories (and Ovid, Hesiod, and Aeschylus) my personality: a stopgap for insecurity and self-loathing; a shield and armour against confronting who I was. Throughout my first screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I found myself chewing the insides of my cheeks to prevent myself from overreacting to details glossed over or missed altogether (no, it’s Elpenor to whom Odysseus speaks first in the Underworld, then Antikleia, his mother), because for me to feel whole, this material once had to be more mine than anyone else’s. It’s mine the way a well-chewed binkie is mine. A plush bear, a rubber pacifier. Of course, it’s only mine in the sense that this story is all our stories.
If Homer were alive today and given the task of writing The Odyssey, he would adapt it to contemporary sensibilities and social mores, because the intent, inasmuch as anyone can glean it from these poets, was to provide a gateway to the lessons embedded in our collective unconscious. (The Coen Brothers recognized this in their very fine Depression-era adaptation, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) Several times throughout The Odyssey, Odysseus (Matt Damon) laments that the gods don’t speak in terms we can understand. Maybe not, but Nolan does. This is the job of the artist. While I could quibble about the American accents (Homer wrote in a form of Greek that was purposefully elevated from spoken Greek), I appreciate the instinct to meet the audience where it is. The invocation to the muse in Paradise Lost, after all, is a mission statement: the poet seeking to explain the ways of God to Man. This is why I love the casting of Damon as the cleverest of Greek heroes, since he is at his best playing Will Hunting: a smart yet unsophisticated guy discovering that intelligence is merely another sick joke of a genetic mutation. That wisdom brings no profit to the wise. Sometimes, you’re so smart, you break the world.
The mark of a good adaptation is not that it plays every note, but that it honours every beat. But a great adaptation takes the material and makes something new from it, and so it is that Nolan does what I believe Homer did with the songs and folktales of his region. The Odyssey is an urgent diagnosis of who we are as a species at this point in our social evolution. Crucially, Nolan, like Homer, uses the key art form of his time to tell his version, in the largest format currently available. He has made a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar horror movie about how the moral abomination of “winning” has destroyed our notions of morality, along with our essential decency. The “law of Zeus” is invoked throughout The Odyssey: a maxim that calls for welcoming strangers into your home with decorous hospitality and deference, lest you burn down the foundations on which a society is constructed. If you play by no rules, you’re bestial, swine, good for nothing but the slaughter you’ve earned. If you are able to see The Odyssey in a theatre–in a dark cave–do so. We are a species made of stories, and these archetypes told in these holy spaces are not just emotionally and psychologically bracing, but biologically important for our continued survival. Am I making too much of this? If you think so, you’ll have to find your own way out. Go with your gods, I’ll go with mine.
I assume you know the story of Odysseus; what I’ll say is that Nolan leans heavily into the great trickster’s shame. He has failed as a leader of his men; he has failed the modern world by loosing inhumanity upon it. His arrogance and boastfulness have doomed them, and his attenuation of a relatively short journey home into a ten-year journey is due more to self-sabotage and avoidance than to mere misadventure. He confesses all of this to his lover, Calypso (Charlize Theron), and then again to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). The entire segment of The Odyssey he spends among the Lotus Eaters becomes a war veteran’s self-medication in the company of a woman who has healed his body but can’t heal his mind. When she finally weans him off the drug, he starts to remember the atrocities he committed during the war (and as Homer describes them, they are terrible indeed), as well as the family he abandoned. He laments the engines he’s designed to breach Troy’s impregnable defense–literally the Trojan Horse, though philosophically, the idea, which humanity came to internalize, that all’s fair in love and war. Is it? Doesn’t thinking so lead to rape and murder? Appropriately, the Horse is a hollow effigy full of shit and piss that the soldier Sinon (Elliot Page) tells the Trojans is a gift in tribute to the gods. What the Trojans don’t know–and Sinon doesn’t, either–is that it’s packed with Greek heroes hoping the Horse will be dragged to the centre of the heavily fortified Troy, thereby enabling them to open Troy’s gates.
Sinon’s story isn’t told in Homer, but it is the foundation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, which sees the Greeks as dishonourable, nay, despicable people who have waged an opportunistic war at the behest of a mad king and his love-stoned brother. Virgil details what Homer mentions: the sacking of Troy and the violation of the common laws of respect. Women and children are massacred in an orgy of bloodshed that night. The face of one of the young victims becomes the face Odysseus sees when he speaks to his Goddess of Wisdom (Zendaya). This is the fruit of his knowledge of good and evil, his albatross: the crimes against humanity that he contrived on this beach with his cleverness. “I saw,” says The Odyssey‘s Odysseus, “ten years of rage unleashed in one night.” Meanwhile, the poem: “The War God rages at all, and favours no man.” As the Greeks set fire to the thatched roofs of Troy’s innocent civilian population, a certain generation will think of the things we did in Vietnam. The current one will think about what we’re doing in Palestine.
Nolan’s The Odyssey is not difficult to understand. Indeed, the design and function of this myth is that it’s easy to understand. Odysseus travels from island to island on a journey of horrific attrition: starving and in need of fresh water, met at every stop by creatures from the Id who thin his men down until he’s the only one left. The cyclops, Polyphemus (Bill Irwin), is the standout, boasting a design that suggests a mix of Francis Bacon and Balthasar Permoser, but what of Circe (Samantha Morton), who takes Man’s composition as mortal clay literally in her violent manipulation of the crew’s corporeal forms? What of the sirens who perform not a song of empathy, playing at Odysseus’s self-pity (as Homer depicts), but instead sing of Odysseus’s manifold failures as a human being–of the people he has disappointed and betrayed, the anguish of loved ones who invested their faith in him, never suspecting that he is not only no god, he’s not even a very good man? I love the immensity of The Odyssey. It’s Wagnerian in this way: a single theme treated with the weight of cathedral bells calling the penitent to worship. Nolan has always been good with monumentalism. At three hours, the picture is both an eternity and a moment. Our moment. The Odyssey‘s final message is that civilization will rise again: the essential, evolved element in our nature that has driven us to seek safety amongst one another–this ineluctable truth that we must value our neighbours as we value ourselves–can only be ignored for so long. It’s burned into our hearts. We just need to remember who we are.
