The Odyssey ★★★★
(M) 172 minutes
Christopher Nolan has a way with a time paradox. Not content with constructing narratives that run backwards – or whatever was meant to be happening in 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet – his big-budget adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey gambles that he can take one of the oldest stories in Western culture and make it feel new.
Drums pound, eager listeners lean forward in torchlight, and a bard (Travis Scott) summons up the figure of a man trying to get home, the long way round. That man is Odysseus (Matt Damon), Greece’s craftiest warrior, on his way back from the Trojan War, while his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) waits patiently and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) seeks him in turn.
The adventures portrayed here remain fantastical enough to bring home that the goal isn’t realism or historical accuracy, any more than it was for Homer (whoever that was). Still, adjustments have been made for a 21st-century audience: the monsters are visible and the gods mainly out of sight, aside from Athena (Zendaya), Odysseus’ spectral guide.
Within those limits, there’s a bid to confront us with the archaic strangeness, even the surrealism, of the source material, in a manner far removed from a traditional sword-and-sandal epic (Pier Paolo Pasolini sometimes comes to mind, despite Nolan’s characteristic lack of interest in sex).
Beyond Ludwig Goransson’s typically assaultive score, much of the shock value stems from hallucinatory contrasts of scale, best experienced on the IMAX screen: in extreme long shot, the orange sail of Odysseus’ ship resembles a postage stamp on a vast blue envelope.
The Cyclops (Bill Irwin) is a mottled, pale giant many sizes larger than anticipated, perhaps intentionally recalling Goya’s famous painting of the devouring Saturn (and brought to life through virtuoso practical effects rather than CGI). In Homer, he’s defeated partly through verbal trickery – but as Odysseus observes, expecting a conversation with such a creature would be like expecting a human to talk to ants.
Language is the film’s Achilles heel, as it were. I didn’t object to the American accents or Telemachus calling Odysseus “Dad”, but I did blanch when Samantha Morton’s earthy Circe referred to the “primal urges” of the men she moulds into swine, a turn of phrase ill-suited to a character in myth.
Admittedly, there’s no way for this whole project to escape self-consciousness (weatherbeaten as Damon appears, something about him still suggests a boy with a knack for bluffing). Where the youthful Telemachus longs for daddy to return, Nolan’s own ambition is nearer the Oedipal one of making us see Homer as a forerunner to himself.
In hindsight, it’s evident he’s been doing Odyssey riffs for much of his career: Inception portrays a journey to the underworld, while Interstellar hinges on a long-delayed family reunion and Memento evokes the willed amnesia of the lotus eaters.
Reversing the order of precedence, here the flashbacks to soldiers crammed inside the Trojan Horse recall the nightmare images of suffocation in Dunkirk, while the horse itself is equivalent to the atom bomb in Oppenheimer, leaving the scarred Helen of Troy (Lupita Nyong’o) to lament the destruction carried out in her name.
Yet if Odysseus’ strategic masterstroke is also his burden, he remains self-evidently superior to his chief rival, the smirking coward Antinous (Robert Pattinson). War may be hell, but what kind of a man would wriggle out of the adventure?
Toiling at her loom by day, Penelope unpicks her work at night, a metaphor for Nolan’s gift for creating objects that erase themselves – or, to put it less reverently, for having it both ways. But whatever loose ends remain, his Odyssey shows that a Hollywood blockbuster made with artistic conviction needn’t be such a paradox after all.
In cinemas from Thursday
More on The Odyssey.
17 kilometres of film, $47 a ticket: How The Odyssey is resurrecting film
A sandal-wearing cry-baby with a taste for blood: Is Odysseus really a hero?
Why is Christopher Nolan such a good director? We asked him (and Matt Damon, and Anne Hathaway, and Michael Caine…)
Think British accents would work better in The Odyssey? Think again
Jake Wilson is a film critic for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
