At the Jerusalem Film Festival this week, I had several conversations about why serious movies have gotten so long lately, and here comes the movie event of the summer, perhaps of the year: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which just opened in theaters worldwide, clocking in at a solid three hours.
If any story can justify that running time, it’s The Odyssey, and while I didn’t wish the entire film were longer, some sequences felt rushed. Although I had high hopes that the movie would be a great adventure story with the depth that comes from this classic hero’s journey, which has lasted and been reinterpreted for millennia, I found the movie curiously uninvolving. There is much to admire here, but little to enjoy.
In Nolan’s hands, it has turned into a story that is mainly about the disillusionment of its hero, and it pounds home an antiwar message, especially toward the end. The feeling the film evokes is similar to Oppenheimer, Nolan’s last film, another portrait of a disillusioned hero who is haunted by how his work has bolstered military force and caused suffering.
I had hoped that The Odyssey would allow Nolan’s showman side to get a little more play, and that the movie would be so visually mind-blowing and emotionally resonant that it would trump his tendency to go for obvious moral lessons. Some of it is visually mind-blowing, but there is little genuine emotion.
Let’s get a few points out of the way. I’m not a historian, and while some have criticized the armor the soldiers in the movie wear as being anachronistic, it looked Greek to me. It’s all to the good that many of the characters have American accents; I think the idea that the gravity of classical tradition should be represented by British accents is absurd; once they are speaking English, who cares what accent they speak it in?
There are apparently only a few actors in minor roles in The Odyssey who have Greek heritage, so the whole “authentic casting” piety goes by the wayside when it comes to a film by Nolan, and that’s fine.
Matt Damon anchors Nolan's epic
Matt Damon plays Odysseus as the kind of cowboy role he would have been cast in had he been born 40 years earlier, a little like John Wayne in The Searchers, another battle-weary hero who took years to come home. Damon as Odysseus brings to mind another Damon hero, Jason Bourne, because like Bourne, who was turned into a fighting machine against his will, Odysseus is cunning and resourceful, a survivor. Damon gets us rooting for him from the first moments.
The movie emphasizes Odysseus’s survival skills and lauds his instincts and decisions that protect his soldiers. Damon convinces us that he is a true leader who cares deeply for the men who, tragically, he cannot save.
After Odysseus hatches a scheme to get his men out of Cyclops’s clutches by hiding among his flock and loses some men to the giant, one of his soldiers says they should honor the fallen men by going back to recover their bodies. Odysseus snaps: “They died trying to escape; we can honor their memories by escaping.”
At times, as he stood with his matted, gray beard, gazing out dazedly from his island retreat with Calypso (Charlize Theron) he recalled Jeff Bridges as the Dude in The Big Lebowski.
But otherwise, there is nothing of the crazy spirit of that movie, although The Odyssey has echoes of such epic dramas of the big and small screen as Game of Thrones, Gladiator, and 300, and the epic poem has sparked Nolan’s imagination. One undeniable highlight of the film was Cyclops, who is portrayed as a kind of mutilated old man; in the film, he is as fascinating as he is horrifying.
The strongest and weakest moments
The Circle sequence is another high point, and Circe is well-played by Samantha Morton. This sorceress’s vulnerability is foregrounded, rather than her treachery, and the fact that she turns Odysseus’s men into pigs because she can see their base, animal nature is probably the moment when Nolan’s antiwar message best jibes with what we are seeing.
Later on, in a flashback, we see Odysseus leading the troops out of the Trojan horse and into Troy, and war is shown to be a meaningless hell, with men and women cut down and women raped.
We see the horrors that haunt the hero and his men, both what they have seen and what they have done. But the Circe interlude illustrates this point far more effectively than the rather clichéd battle scenes. And it gives a sense of what the movie could have been like if Nolan had allowed his imagination, both narrative and visual, to run wild, instead of sticking to the by now conventional trope of denigrating militarism.
The movie rushes through the sirens, and instead of Nolan’s interpretation of how they sound, we get Damon, tied to the mast, hollering. I was curious to see how Nolan would portray the sirens, but they are just figures on distant rocks glimpsed through the mist, and there is nothing sexy or alluring about them. I guess that is because that would have been too much fun, and the director seems to be tamping down his impulse to give us any enjoyment.
The large cast is quite good, and they capture the essence of the characters. Anne Hathaway has the mostly thankless role of Penelope, and makes us feel for her predicament. Tom Holland is a little bland as Telemachus, but he is likable enough. Lupita Nyong’o does not get much screen time as a miserable Helen of Troy, who criticizes the Greeks’ expansionist motivations that were presented as a mission to rescue her. She has a brief dual role as Clytemnestra, but she makes an impression and I wished she had had a bigger part.
Jon Bernthal, of The Bear and The Walking Dead, is one of the standouts as Menelaus, and he seems very real as a flawed leader. Robert Pattinson is suitably weasel-like as Antinous, one of Penelope’s vilest suitors. Himesh Patel, who portrays Eurylochus, is Odysseus’s right-hand man and is convincing as a brave soldier. Zendaya plays the apparition of Athena who appears to Odysseus and gives him some aphoristic guidance, and she seems happier than she usually does on screen.
Elliot Page, formerly Ellen Page of Juno, plays Sinon, whose sacrifice haunts Odysseus, while Benny Safdie is appropriately commanding as Agamemnon. John Leguizamo, James Remar, Bill Irwin (the original Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street), Iddo Goldberg, Rafi Gavron, and many other fine actors appear in small roles.
Worth the three-hour journey?
For many, the real drama when seeing the movie will be about when to go for a bathroom break, since the movie is being shown without an intermission. Obviously, you will want to see the opening and the finale, but the finale really goes on, as the movie uses the old trick of having the villains suddenly growing spines and attacking the hero in a restrained fashion, one by one instead of all at once.
I would recommend heading for the restroom just as Odysseus arrives in Ithaca. If you feel the need earlier, you might want to head out just after the Circe sequence. The bottom line is: Whatever moment you choose, whoever you are seeing the movie with will be able to fill you in on what you missed with about three whispered words.
In the end, despite the gorgeous visuals and imaginative special effects, there is less in The Odyssey than meets the eye. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s exaggerated and unfair but nevertheless insightful criticism of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, that they, “share a stunning visual intelligence and a numbingly banal view of human experience.”
Yes, war is hell, we can all agree on that, and some of us know that far better than we would like to. But living under corrupt and brutal regimes is also hell, and people have violent impulses, and that is also a key part of the tragedy depicted in Homer’s poem. But tragedy is complex, and the movie is one-note.