The Odyssey
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s Odyssey
Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Himesh Patel, John Leguizamo, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Lupita Nyong’o
Classification PG; 172 minutes
Opens in theatres July 17
Critic’s Pick
Homer’s Odyssey, in which a warrior named Odysseus embarks on a long arduous journey back to his wife, Penelope, casts a Trojan horse-sized shadow over Christopher Nolan’s entire body of work. Think of the homecoming narratives in Interstellar, Dunkirk and even The Dark Knight Rises, or the men haunted by memories of their wives in Memento, The Prestige and Inception (at least in The Odyssey, said wife, played by Anne Hathaway, gets to be alive).
Think also of the way Homer’s storytelling toys with time, Nolan’s favourite obsession, beginning in the middle, and weaving its narrative backward and forward.
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Maybe these connections speak to Nolan’s affinity for The Odyssey as a foundational text. Or maybe they’re just indicative of Homer’s status as foundational to everything. We’re talking about a fantastical tale that’s older than the Bible, the primal scene of epic storytelling. There’s love and betrayal, slaughter and sacrifice, a cyclops and a cyclone, sirens and shapeshifters. The challenge when it comes to Homer’s Odyssey is its all-encompassing poem – about gods and the mortals they toy with – that refuses to conform to modern storytelling sensibilities and tastes.
From left, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus.Melinda Sue Gordon/The Associated Press
Few filmmakers could even dare tackle it. Nolan is perhaps best suited to it, not least because he has the necessary hubris to take on Homer. Even if his reach often exceeds his grasp, it’s hard to fault Nolan for consistently aspiring to make modern-day equivalents of classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (as he did with Interstellar) and All Quiet On The Western Front (Dunkirk). He also has the blank-cheque resources after conquering the box office and the Oscars with Oppenheimer.
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The Odyssey, which serves up awe-inspiring spectacle but is at its best when quietly contemplative, isn’t merely an opportunistic follow-up to Oppenheimer. It’s also a meaningful one. Just as Oppy was the father of the atom bomb, Odysseus is the chief architect behind the Trojan horse, a weapon bringing a decisive end to a drawn-out conflict. The Odyssey lives in the aftermath that Oppenheimer addresses from a distance. Matt Damon’s Odysseus goes from front lines of the carnage to living with the weight and consequence of his actions throughout the eponymous decade-long journey home.
For better and for worse, Nolan makes us feel the wear and tear and despair of that journey. Long stretches of his Odyssey can be creaky and ponderous, so much calcium built up in the knees as it lumbers along from one 3,000-year-old obstacle to another. But there’s accumulating gale force to the time spent, the film managing to patiently draw us in for its breathtakingly emotional final act.
The Odyssey opens with Nolan free-flowing between memory and mythmaking. A bard, played by rapper Travis Scott, recites the Song of Odysseus, essentially the story of the Trojan horse, which has reached Ithaca’s shores without the hero himself. Eight years have passed. Penelope, who makes the movie spring to life whenever she’s on screen, is keeping vulgar suitors at bay. Robert Pattinson has the time of his life as Antinous, the most monstrous and hilarious of the suitors who occupy Penelope’s dining hall while angling for her throne. Hathaway plays Penelope as delicately passionate and fierce, her sacrifice over the past two decades, since Odysseus first went out to sea, wearing her whispery but resolute voice thin.
For better and for worse, Nolan makes us feel the wear and tear and despair of the journey in The Odyssey.Melinda Sue Gordon/The Associated Press
Odysseus, looking like a schnauzer with his harried salt and pepper beard, moves stubbornly, sometimes arrogantly, through the story. His soft-spoken guilt is occasionally interrupted by pettiness that tips into vengeance. He’s stranded on a beach with Charlize Theron’s nymph Calypso, lost in her spell, haunted by visions of the deity Athena (Zendaya), while trying to make sense of time and place. As with Homer’s text, so much of his trials and tribulation come framed as flashbacks, as memories being pieced together. But in Nolan’s film that means Theron’s Calypso is reduced to a narrative device. And Theron isn’t the only Hollywood heavy who seems grateful to appear in a small thankless role for Nolan.
The Odyssey feels caught between being too brief to give certain passages and characters such as Calypso their due, but at the breaking point in terms of holding our attention. I would happily indulge more time with Samantha Morton’s Circe, a witch whose hostility toward men feels worthy of a beat or two more, especially since it’s such a useful mirror to what Penelope endures. And perhaps more room would make those confrontations with the cyclops, the giants and the violent weather wrought by Poseidon more thrilling than dutiful.
Nolan covers for dull stretches by calling attention to his craft and designs: the Picasso-like formation of the cyclops’s face, for instance, or the trees dancing menacingly around Odysseus’s men as the giants entrap them. The rich and earthy images throughout are consistently worth soaking up. This, after all, is the first movie shot entirely on Imax 70mm, Nolan’s preferred format pushed beyond its limits with real seafaring cinematography that took quite a bit of technological innovation to capture. The making of Nolan’s The Odyssey aspires to be as monumental as the story being told.
Matt Damon (left) as Odysseus.Melinda Sue Gordon/The Associated Press
That gambit alone makes the long, arduous journey worthwhile, leading as it does to stunning images that will stay burned in my memory, whether it’s the Trojan horse parked deceptively lopsided on a beach or Odysseus shoring up on Ithaca as if dragged in by the mist.
But what makes me want to take this trip again is the way Nolan moves through Homer’s epic, the filmmaker’s usual tinkering with time giving way to new visual rhythms. In earlier work, basically everything from Memento to Tenet, Nolan’s storytelling puzzles would set up a satisfying surprise or reveal, at times tempting parlour-trick status.
In The Odyssey, Nolan moves through past and present, not searching for reveals in a 3,000-year-old text that can’t be spoiled, but as a poetic and emotional catharsis, a way of navigating guilt and grief that resonates powerfully, perhaps as much as it ever did.