If Nolan wrote the Odyssey, the first line would be “Tell me about a powerful man.” That’s the first thing the film explains to you: Odysseus is powerful.
But powerful isn’t complicated, and Nolan doesn’t want to write about a complicated man, as evidenced by his omission of the “nobody” scene that the Odyssey has historically been so famous for. Nolan wants to write the same film that he’s written before: one about a powerful man.
I had a professor who liked to say that the bible was the oldest story in the world: the archetypal story of excellence that gets told again and again and again. I’ve had other people tell me that the oldest story in the world is the Hero’s Journey, or the etiological explanation for the world, or even the homecoming that the Odyssey is supposed to be, but it’s not. The oldest story in the world is that a man gets angry. A man gets angry, and he hurts a woman.
It’s a mundane story, and it’s the one that gets told again and again and again, and it’s the first line of the Iliad, the sister story to the Odyssey: Tell me, Muse, about a man who got angry.
The story Nolan tells is not of a complicated man, it’s of an angry man who hurts a woman. And it’s boring. I’ve watched men hurt women in film and in books and in real life and anywhere there is a story to be told, and it’s so commonplace that it puts me to sleep.
This is most evident in the scene where Odysseus “outsmarts” (and I use that word very loosely) Circe by threatening to kill her sister, who, by this point in the film, is a bird.
But I expected the Odyssey to be a Nolan-style blockbuster, so why am I so critical?
Christopher Nolan spoke in several interviews before the debut of the film about how he wanted his retelling of the Odyssey to be inclusive- and certainly he achieves this in some ways, but unfortunately, he does actual feminist retellings of the Odyssey a disservice when he claims that his is one of them.
What Nolan made was a sanitized, socially acceptable version of the Odyssey, where women shout at men but can’t do much else, and appear only as accessories or paragons for men to seek after. Nolan’s downfall is that he can’t conceive of more than one kind of power- the superhero kind- and both the women of the Odyssey and Odysseus lack that kind of power in the text. That’s what makes it interesting.
Anne Hathaway plays her role as well as ever, but the way Penelope is portrayed is laughable. Her weaving looks terrible, and she displays none of the cleverness that attracted Odysseus to her in the first place. Nolan wants to write a Penelope that isn’t afraid to bear her teeth, but he ended up with a grieving wife that’s more bark than bite, the exact opposite of how I would have liked to see Penelope portrayed.
I was originally excited to see that the new Odyssey movie would focus more on Ithaca than Odysseus, but when this is the Ithaca that we see, it’s barely worth it. One of the most memorable scenes was with Lupita Nyong’o, and the double casting of Helen and Clytemnestra. She speaks a wonderful five lines before disappearing from the film completely, leaving the men to have a real conversation.
The other most memorable scene goes to the excellent monologue that Elliot Page delivered in his role as Sinon- a part I was originally confused about, since even I couldn’t remember who exactly Sinon was- but Elliot page truly outshone every other character in his role.
After all the talk and subsequent failure to make a feminist Odyssey, I was surprised to see that Nolan was able to make an inclusive leap that many filmmakers have been unable to: he cast a transgender man in the role of a man. There is no hesitancy with Page’s role as a man, and no insinuation that he belongs to a different category of man than Odysseus does: Page simply plays the role of Sinon, a boy sent off to the Trojan war too young. I find myself thinking that the complicated man referenced was not, in fact, Damon’s character, but instead the previously-unknown Sinon.
In fact, Sinon was the saving grace of the movie. When Odysseus shoves the lot that Sinon drew into Antinous’s mouth as he dies, that truly felt like the resolution of the movie. I barely remember the reunion he had with Telemachus and Penelope, because the movie felt like it was already over by the time he had Antinous on the floor.
The Odyssey could have been a great movie. It could have even been a good movie, but Nolan was hampered by his one-dimensional idea of what strength is, and tried to fit Odysseus into a category that he doesn’t belong in. Call me back, though, when Christopher Nolan debuts his Aeneid blockbuster- I think he could really get some mileage out of that.
