Watching The Odyssey

The great Odysseus takes the long way home. 

I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in IMAX on Friday. I am a Nolan fanboy, as my reviews on Memento, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer attest. I went to the theater, the exact same theater I saw Oppenheimer in three years ago, ready to be surprised and amazed. I had my doubts, to be honest. I did not think the source material could be tamed into a watchable film. To some extent I was right, but not like I expected to be let down. And I was actually amazed at various parts of the film even if the whole thing didn't make me applaud in the end, which half the sold-out theater did.

But I left the theater unwowed. It was raining and I rushed back to my car without feeling anything except I did not know how I felt. It wasn’t a bad film. The anti-woke controversy of casting a transgender warrior and a black Helen seemed ridiculous. They were both well-acted but they were only on the screen a small amount. Both were obviously minor roles. The big deal made about it made me laugh as I fought through Atlanta’s Friday afternoon five o’clock traffic back toward home. I wanted to like it.

It is film history. The first feature film shot completely on IMAX cameras, which involved an Odysseus-like effort to make happen. That part is truly impressive, of course. As was the invention of black-and-white IMAX film stock for Oppenheimer. This time it was silencing the loud IMAX camera so that dialogue could be recorded. But that's another story entirely. It was film history, that's the point. I can save the emailed digital ticket for my grandchildren to add to their collection, if such a thing ever happens.

Taking a larger perspective, outside my suspicions about doing Homer for a contemporary audience, Nolan taking this on can be seen as almost inevitable. Fractured chronology, disguise, memory, a hero who survives largely by controlling the story other people believe about him. Somebody wrote his movie 2,800 years ago and just waited for him to notice. I guess they'll want a royalty check. So far, the movie is wildly successful, in IMAX theaters anyway.

Nolan did not conquer Homer. The story is too much for a 2:45 film. But Nolan's compression is nevertheless impressive as a feat unto itself. It is still on my mind the next day and the next day. The more I think of his screenplay, the more I see a bit of a triumph actually. There is plenty of epic adventure in this film. But, as I have said before, Nolan leans heavily on his actors. The film can be seen as five major threads. The adventure is just one of them.

Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Calypso are all running alongside each other while the famous episodes get compressed down around them. They are the recurring scenes that matter most. Nolan is ruthless with event. He is not ruthless with relationship. The Cyclops gets an episode. Circe gets an episode. The Sirens get an episode. Each one can be extraordinary on its own, and then the ship has to shove back into the water because Ithaca is nowhere in sight. The four character threads are not episodic at all. He compresses everything else and leaves those four to stand alongside the adventure. It actually works pretty well.

Anne Hathaway is the best performance in the film. Penelope has a structural advantage nobody else in the cast gets. Odysseus is moving through incident after incident for two and a half hours. Penelope waits. That waiting can accumulate in a way the adventures can't, because Nolan can't dramatize ten years of a woman holding a kingdom together, he can only keep cutting back to her, and Hathaway has to make each of those returns feel like more time has passed and more has been worn away. She's stuck trading most of her scenes with a suitor who's basically a slick predator circling the palace, and with a son who isn't quite matching her intensity, and she still carries it. With her powerful performance, I think she has a great chance to be up for a third Oscar nomination. Some critics have called her the most credible female character Nolan has ever put on screen. Maybe. She was good in Interstellar too. It's comparable.

Matt Damon is carrying something harder. He is literally the gravity and reason for the story. Troy, the dead, Poseidon, guilt, lost men, lost identity, seemingly countless burdens, and he internalizes all of it differently than Homer, who gave us a more extravagant character. That's the real cost of compression. Homer gets books to build that grandiloquence. Outside his scenes with Calypso, Damon must act episodically. It is unavoidable given Nolan's approach to the material.

Yet Damon never lets the viewer down. He's steady, exhausted in the right way, commanding when the scene needs it, and believably confused when he has lost his way. My one complaint with him isn't really him. It's the dialogue. I was able to predict the exact line the character was about to utter at almost every critical juncture. Word for word. This is one of the film's glaring problems. It is a script weakness. But perhaps a necessary one given what Nolan is trying to do here. Predictable dialogue is the fastest way to resolve things and get to the next thing. This film is big and it is also in a hurry, though it depicts the passage of a decade in time.

Calypso benefits from the four-thread structure the most, and it's the smartest structural decision in the movie. She isn't a stop on the itinerary the way Circe is, or the Cyclops is. Every return to that beach is a solid existential thread, perhaps the best acting on Damon's part. Odysseus is confused there, damaged, unsure of himself, and she becomes this suspended space where his identity drifts round and round, while the rest of the film keeps charging forward as an epic.

Charlize Theron is Calypso, and she's right there with Hathaway at the top of this cast. Nolan himself has talked about how hard the part is to solve. Calypso has been read so many contradictory ways across the history of literature and art, seductress, prison keeper, genuine lover, obstacle, that he needed someone who could hold all of those readings at once. That's Theron's job in every beach scene. Nolan does not lean into any of the sexual material here, and yet Theron conveys a marvelous, mysterious, erotic charm. She is beautiful, alluring, and unknowable while they walk in the sand.

In Nolan's version, Calypso is there to be the place where Odysseus's memory gets undone and redone, scene after scene, and Theron plays that suspension itself, distance, intelligence, faint danger, without ever tipping into villain or victim. Nolan gave her a genuinely strange assignment, and she's the only actor in the film asked to embody something structural rather than dramatic. She pulls it off. There's a real psychology sitting underneath those beach scenes, and it's worth pulling apart.

In Homer, Odysseus sleeps with Calypso for seven straight years and the poem doesn't blink about it. Nolan cuts the sex entirely. What he keeps instead is the lotus flower, and he turns it into something closer to a clinical addiction than a magic garnish. Calypso isn't just feeding him flowers to keep him docile. She's using them the way a caregiver manages a shattered patient, easing him off the trauma of Troy because she can see he isn't ready to face it yet.

It plays like PTSD, plainly, an amnesiac veteran being nursed through the parts of his memory that would break him if they came back too fast. Only by working back through his men, piece by piece, does he recover any of it, and only by touching something of Penelope's does that last, most protected memory return. So the whole relationship is really about memory and identity, not romance and desire. Calypso is holding the pieces of a man together while deciding how much of himself to give back to him at a time.

And that's exactly why she comes off as the most erotic person in the movie despite there being no sex on screen at all. She's playing want, restraint, care, and control simultaneously, and that combination is inherently charged whether or not anybody takes their clothes off. Damon can't generate that same charge because he's not playing desire. He's playing a man having an honest-to-God identity crisis, memory in pieces, name half-forgotten, trying to figure out who he even is before he can want anything. You can be erotic and lost at the same time, it's just Nolan finds confusion more interesting than sex. Very Brit of him.

Telemachus seemed weak to me. Tom Holland does an acceptable job and doesn't call attention to himself really. But that is part of the problem. This character is deeply conflicted and eager for his father's return, and he has a little adventure of his own in the film. It's Telemachus, not Penelope, who recognizes his father first, the same moment the old dog finally gets to see its master again before it dies.

Unfortunately, the result is the most episodic of the four major characters, all that incident and none of the real accumulation Penelope and Calypso get. His performance is not as convincing as the other three either. Part of it may be the script, great as it is. Nolan’s screenplay gave him plenty to work with, arguably more plot than anyone but for his father. I don’t think Nolan got what he needed as a director out of this part of his film.

For all its spectacle, my favorite scene is a different perspective. He uses sound, or rather silence. For the Sirens. Nolan puts the camera and the sound design inside Eurylochus, or whichever crewman he uses, wax packed into both ears so as to not hear the magical song. Odysseus is more like Homer's version in this instance. He demands to be tied to the mast so he can listen to their song. As the man plugs his ears with wax, the sound goes quiet. Then Odysseus begins to scream. He continues screaming with more intensity, struggling to free himself from the mast. This is the madness of desire brilliantly shown to us by Nolan through no sound at all but for the musical score which supports the moment. You see but you do not hear.

Then the screaming stops, and that's how the crewman knows the danger has passed. Not relief. Just silence resolving into a different kind of silence. That is vastly better than giving me some gorgeous supernatural song and letting me judge it on its own terms. Making me infer it from a man losing his mind in front of me is the better idea, and it's the only place in the movie where the technique is doing the storytelling instead of decorating it. The IMAX camera is irrelevant in that scene. The sound design is the whole idea. Really a brilliant moment.

The Trojan Horse aspect is gritty and realistic too. Stripped of storybook sheen, heavy, crude, something men actually built and left on a beach, which is actually a cool thing to see. A large number of Trojans pull it out of the sand for real. Well done. This scene has enough extras in it. Very believable and impressive.

Still, unlike with the Trojan Horse, the battle seemed sparse. Not enough extras. He should have gone bigger still, the way The Lord of the Rings films did with their digital armies. It made me long for Barry Lyndon, actually. Stanley Kubrick had about that many extras in his beautiful period piece, or fewer, and that battle felt bigger to me. It felt bigger because it was Kubrick. This is a minor failure for Nolan, plain and simple.

And the towers of Troy burning and collapsing the way they do in this movie look impressive when the screen is all you can see and it's filling your whole field of vision. But stone doesn't burn like that. Stone comes down slowly, through sustained battering or through sapping the foundation, not through a few minutes of fire and collapse. I forgive all of that, however. Films are compromises. Nolan has to draw a crowd. Burning fortress towers falling at night are a super cool thing to see. Want to see it again?

Nolan does his usual trick with the timelines, mixing the adventure with the four character threads, his signature style really. For example, there's a moment early in the film that means nothing on first viewing and then weaves back to it near the end, at which point four separate storylines converge and the whole thing clicks into place. Splendid retrospective comprehension. Nobody beats Nolan at that game. Where you don't learn something new so much as see it in its full context. Where you were lost before, now you see it as a linchpin moment.

Of all the elements of the film, the musical score is probably the weakest link. It is not catchy, memorable, or provocative. That was a surprising disappointment. Usually, Nolan is great with his musical composers. The score for The Odyssey is just mediocre. It unimpressively suffices.

But, as I said, I left the theater not feeling wowed. I'm not sure I'm wowed today thinking back on the film after only one viewing. Hathaway and the script (despite the predictable dialogue) are the stellar aspects of this film. Technically, it was epic enough. Yet I had this empty feeling that did not expand into a coherent appreciation for the film until later, ruminating over it. Recalling it after having slept on it.

I knew it wasn't a bad movie, but it also didn't feel like it was worth the effort. The excess of it all was really bothering me. I'm glad it is a historic film, fully shot in IMAX. I'm glad all those technical challenges were solved. I'm glad Christopher Nolan is pushing the limits of his heart's desire with IMAX, effectively his playtoy now. It truly earns the gigantic screen treatment. But IMAX does not make this a better film. When I consider that, the technology becomes abruptly superficial in a grotesque and excessive way despite its historic context.

Still, the script pulls it off where I suspected it might fail. Maybe Homer can speak to the average moviegoer today.  Nolan is a masterful writer for screen, especially in this case. Taking on the foundation of western literature yet not doing Homer exactly, but telling all the essentials in less than 3 hours. Nolan does channel Homer into the Now. He has become our Muse, as in the opening words of my more traditional version of the Odyssey: "Tell me of the storm-tossed man, O Muse, who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy."