I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the theater three times, and the same for his Interstellar (still his best movie); I could have seen them both many more times. Others, like The Dark Knight Rises and Inception, were incredible experiences to have at the movie theater.
After watching The Odyssey on opening night, though, I had to remember that sometimes his movies fall flat. And when The Odyssey falls flat, it hurts that much more: it is a foundational story which, in the hands of somebody like Nolan, could have been a generational event. As it is, the most spectacular moments in the movie are far outweighed by what doesn’t work.
To get the good parts out of the way, there many memorable set pieces: the Trojan Horse being pulled inside of Troy and set upright; the two times the destruction of Troy becomes the movie’s focus; Samantha Morton’s section as Circe, which should be made available as a standalone short film. Best of all for me, there is Odysseus and his men going to the Underworld and then being chased back to their ships by their dead comrades. And then there’s the prelude to the final slaughter of the suitors: here, during the montage of men trying unsuccessfully to string Odysseus’ bow, the suitors finally feel like they’ve stepped out of Homer in their mix of mockery, shame, and unrelieved testosterone.
But these moments are few and far between. I could tell in the first five minutes that something was wrong. Tom Holland as Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, is almost always awful, and seems to be reading his lines mechanically from cue cards just offscreen. There is an unearned villainy to Robert Pattinson’s portrayal as one of the evil suitors: he wants us to dislike him and believe that he’s been hanging around the palace for years, but I don’t buy it. He just looks like the young vampire from Twilight, all grown up and pretending to sneer.
And really, nearly every problem I have with the movie comes down to casting. Not the click-bait nonsense over Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, or Elliot Page as the Greek warrior, Sinon (whoever started and went along with that made up controversy deserves to be swallowed by one or more Homeric monsters). Page actually does a good job of disappearing into his role, but few of the other actors ever do. Damon still looks and sounds like Will Hunting saying “How do you like them apples?”; Anne Hathaway as Penelope is just off Devil Wears Prada 2; there is no reason for Charlize Theron to be playing Calypso; and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus just made me think, “Oh, that’s the Punisher, and that’s Wayne from The Walking Dead.” Only John Leguizamo as the blind swineherd Eumeaus comes off convincingly, and with great pathos.
I’ve rarely had this problem before. I think of Damon’s performance as an early CIA spy in the 2006 movie The Good Shephard. Spending most of the movie in a suit and tie, and always clean-shaven, in that movie he still somehow doesn’t look or sound like himself. And yet with Nolan’s Odyssey,the costumes and makeup, and even the astounding sets, rarely left me convinced that I was taking a peek back into the Bronze Age.
Maybe it’s a problem with the script? If so, it’s possible that nobody, even unknown actors from Greece, could have pulled this off. Maybe Nolan, who previously adapted the Batman comics and a huge biography of Robert Oppenheimer, finally met his match with Homer. Maybe I’m too attached to Homer, or mythology, and see how impossible it is to turn great poems into acted-out dramas. It’s like wondering how a film version of the Book of Job, or Dante, would work out: there just aren’t actors, or directors, who could do it.
Maybe—and this feels most right to me—Homer’s poem and Nolan’s movie are both episodic, and just as few people need to read all of Homer more than once, and only go back to their favorite parts, maybe this is how I should view Nolan’s movie. Maybe this is where I see Homer done right most of all, even if it makes for a disappointing movie overall.
I also know that I’m clearly in the minority about the movie. It may well be setting off the imaginations, especially, of young people all over the world, who may not have been familiar with Homer before. It may get people to actually read Homer, too, which would be spectacular. For all of these reasons, I can’t bring myself to not recommend the movie—after all, a so-so Nolan film is still better than nearly anybody else. And if anything, The Odyssey’s overwhelming success will pave the way for another—hopefully better—movie from Nolan in three years or so.
Let me know what you thought in the comments.
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