This may be a bizarre description of any film by Christopher Nolan, but at times The Odyssey seems understated. The movie doesn’t avoid the story’s lurid monsters, or the characters’ struggles against the ocean and other myth-sized enemies, but inside that cacophony is a man who just wants to get home.
Part of the magnificent ambiguity of The Odyssey is that the superhuman/mythological Odysseus is also a guy, humbled and grounded by the desires and imperfections of all human beings.
The movie allows the metaphors of one of humanity’s great stories to live and breathe and have their power without the film telling us what things mean.
As both Homer’s poem and Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey show, it’s really hard to get home when you’ve been away for 20 years fighting a war tortured by its own ethical and moral problems.
A 21st-century person may not have to fight her or his way out of a cave occupied by an immense one-eyed humanoid being – the Cyclops for The Odyssey.
But it’s no stretch to understand that we all have demons to vanquish before we can reach that state – whether literal or imaginary – that we consider home, that place where we can rest and maybe even let down our guard in a world of shifting realities and dangers.
Like Homer, filmmaker Christopher Nolan shows that these immense adventures and struggles are within Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, often looking gaunt and lost, his hair graying.
Both the poem and the movie encase events within stories Odysseus tells about himself and his complicated journey from Troy to his home in Ithaca.
They’re internal, and subjective, because Odysseus tells them to Calypso, a minor goddess who has kept him on her island by drugging him for three years.
So The Odyssey is both a great adventure story set in a wild physical world, and also a psychological and metaphorical story of a man trying to regain himself.
So, with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Christopher Nolan shoots much of the film dark and murky. The twisted one-eyed Cyclops is nearly the same color as the walls of his cave, as if he emerges from the very earth. It’s especially frightening if a monster is part of the fabric of the world instead of an intruder.
Circe (Samantha Morton) at first seems a frightened lonely woman, but ordinary, until she feeds Odysseus’s hungry men. They begin to growl and snort, and soon Circe leaps atop them one by one, like a mad sculptor, yanking their flesh into pigs. Yet, it feels somehow natural rather than magical.
I’m a sucker for recognition scenes. Homer’s give you the chills and Christopher Nolan honors them.
Odysseus shows up in Ithaca disguised as a derelict so he can ambush the many men pursuing his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) His dying dog, Argos, tossed on a dung heap by the scornful suitors knows Odysseus instantly. And then aged family retainer Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), followed by Odysseus’s old nanny who notices the unmistakable scar on his leg. Then Odysseus’s son Telemachus.
And finally Penelope, the most skeptical, of course. Her husband went off to a questionable war twenty years ago, leaving her unprotected and vulnerable to those greedy suitors.
The film renders these moments with intimate tenderness and tremendous respect for the revered 3000-year old material that Christopher Nolan had to wrangle into a movie.
The Odyssey is a very good film. And it also has a terrific publicity machine behind it.
The gushing is, I think, overstated. It’s a very good film, which is good enough.
