In waiting for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey,” I’ve felt a lot of anticipation – as I’m sure many of us have – for certain set pieces. Whether it be Odysseus’s encounter with the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus, or with Charybdis and Scylla in the ocean, there’s a certain excitement in knowing that Nolan, a great director of huge, action moments, would be taking these moments on.
But, as the film rolled on, I found myself more taken with the smaller scenes – one in particular that feels more in line with what Nolan wants to say using this centuries-old epic. When Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his crew pass by the sirens – beautiful creatures who use their voices to lure sailors to their deaths – he has his crew put wax into their ears to resist the sirens’ song. But Odysseus, angling to become the first person to have heard the sirens and lived, asks his crew to tie him up to the mast, making them promise to not let him go no matter how much he begs.
When we think of a siren’s song, we think of something beautiful, but throughout the encounter Odysseus appears to be in exceptional pain – turns out, seduction is unbearable when you can’t reach out and grab the thing you want. In Homer’s story, the sirens promise Odysseus infinite wisdom. But here, Odysseus describes what he heard as something more tactile than knowledge – it’s his desire to return home paired with his desire for glory, the idea of himself as a hero butting up against the real horrors of war. It’s everything he wants, but cannot have. Everything he is, the contradictions of which he cannot square inside himself.
He nails down the essence of the song as such: “It’s the sound of all the promises I failed to keep.”
Nolan’s version of “The Odyssey” feels like the sentimental counterpart to his previous film “Oppenheimer” – similarly anti-war, and interested in humanity’s ability to excuse abject evil in the name of cleverness or progress. When Odysseus came up with the idea for the Trojan Horse – when the Greeks faked peace in the form of a gift in order to slaughter the Trojans – a door opened that he spends the rest of the film trying to slam close. Nolan’s interpretation brings up questions of trauma, of the ways in which we give ourselves permission to be cruel to each other, of where our responsibilities lie and to whom.
These are all ideas that you can glean from the original text, but Nolan pushes them to the forefront, digging through the plethora of ideas contained by this centuries-old story of a clever, complicated man (Nolan sure does love those, doesn’t he?) trying to get back home – and does it in spectacular, blockbuster fashion.
“The Odyssey” picks up where Odysseus’ journey will end – back home in Ithaca, where his kingdom has fallen into chaos. While Odysseus makes his way back home from the Trojan War, a group of boorish suitors, led by Antinous (a gleefully evil Robert Pattinson), have taken over his home in his absence, vying for the hand of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). She is doing her best to stave them off, while her son Telemachus (Tom Holland) desperately searches for proof that his father is, in fact, alive.
Right from the jump, “The Odyssey” has a soulfulness that you don’t often see in Nolan’s films. Despite the IMAX of it all, so much of the film feels incredibly intimate. There is something so tactile about the world, with warmth and light infused in every shot, particularly in early moments where we see Ithaca before Odysseus left and the world became one ravaged by war. Damon contributes to that warmth – in an early scene, a group of young boys stare up at Odysseus adoringly as he leads a hunting party. He takes their awe in stride, authoritative but gentle and generous with a fond smile or knowing glance. When Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), his most faithful servant, is about to throw the runt of a litter of puppies off the side of a cliff, Odysseus stops him, cradling the tiny thing to his chest and adopting him as his new hunting dog. These soft, intimate moments starkly contrast with the world at war – moments where we see Odysseus alone, whether taking a beat to recover during the sacking of Troy or as a speck in a wide shot on the nymph Calypso’s (Charlize Theron) island, where he spends years trying to forget the pain of losing his crew before coming home.
But, even in these softer moments, Odysseus’ penchant for glory shines through. When he tells Penelope that King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) sacrificed his own daughter for favor from the Gods, she whispers, “That’s monstrous.” Odysseus nods, and shoots back with: “And committed.” Despite himself, he can’t help but recognize the determination in Agamemnon’s decision alongside the horror. It’s a type of grit he understands, a type of ruthlessness he recognizes – a similar kind to what will lead him to come up with the idea for the Trojan Horse, and to solidify the Greeks’ victory by leaving one man, Sinon (Elliot Page), behind to give the horse to the Trojans. Sinon, not knowing the plan and thinking the horse a true gift of surrender, dies believing the Greeks lost the war – unaware he has been lied to, unaware of his sacrifice.
Sinon’s death is one of a few moments we see once early on, and then again with a different perspective. He is shot through by Trojans coming to accept the gift, their arrows pinning him to the horse behind him. The second time we see the death, we’re inside the horse with Odysseus, his eyes squeezed shut in pain as he listens to the confused, dying words of a young man who wasn’t given the courtesy of being told what he’s dying for. The other moment is the attack on Troy itself – the first time is almost exciting, the anticipation building above the sound of Ludwig Göransson’s impossibly quick and tension-filled score. But the second time is when we finally see the consequences of a years-long siege that has rendered the Greeks vengeful and cruel. Odysseus feels he unleashed this horror – a peace-offering defiled, 10 years of pent up rage spent on innocent people.
Once the war is finished, Odysseus doesn’t go home right away. In the epic, his return is thwarted by the Gods. But Nolan makes it a point to tell the audience that Odysseus purposefully doesn’t follow Agamemnon’s way home – he takes a longer way, he and his crew hoping to see a little bit of the world before their return. That long way is also thwarted by Gods (or nature, or fate, or whatever you want to call it), but also by Odysseus’ own ego and the crew’s learned harshness.
So, why doesn’t Odysseus take the easier way home? There’s a fun meta-textual reading here, where Odysseus is Nolan himself. As songs about Odysseus and his cleverness start to permeate the world, he finds it harder and harder to reckon that myth with the man he is – perhaps Nolan as a filmmaker feels the same pressure, finding it difficult to live up to the standards he and the rest of the world set for him with each new film. But within the context of the story itself, it all comes down to responsibility, which Nolan will eventually have Odysseus tell us – he’s never been subtle, but it is “The Odyssey,” so do we really want subtle?
Odysseus views Troy as a breaking point. In offering peace and then reneging on said peace, he has not only violated a sacred contract between peoples, but has invited others to do the same. Similarly to “Oppenheimer” and the atomic bomb-sized can of worms that’s opened by film’s end, Odysseus has given men like the suitors currently invading his home permission to justify their boorishness. In the film’s best sequence, he meets with the witch and goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) after she has turned his men into pigs – their true form, she argues. Morton’s portrayal of a woman who has clearly been hurt by strange men in the past is haunting, and while Odysseus points out these men in particular didn’t do anything, her response is cutting: “They could have.” You can see in his face he knows she is right – he has seen these very men become monsters before.
He bears the weight of all of this responsibility – so, he goes on adventures and takes the long way to avoid facing up to that responsibility at home. But responsibility, as important as it is, can be crippling. Odysseus, as much as he is to blame for his long journey, is also at the whims of much larger forces – as are we all. In “The Odyssey,” Nolan tries to find the balance – guilt and pain are paralyzing factors, keeping Odysseus stuck on Calypso’s island eating lotus flowers to forget for years on end. But at the end of the day, you can make a choice to move on – to work with the cards you have now and make a better choice.
At the end of “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy stares down the barrel of the camera, knowing he has irrevocably changed the world, and we can never go back. But “The Odyssey” is far more optimistic – maybe we can’t go back, and maybe something sacred has forever been broken. But we can forge a new path forward. We can be better.
