Joel on Film

We all know—or, by now, should know—the story of the part of the Trojan War, fought some 1,200 years before the time of Christ, wherein a phalanx of men was smuggled into the city of Troy, by way of a hollow wooden horse, to win the war. The historicity of this part of the story (as well, for that matter, as most of the rest of it) is and has been for some time an open question, and that is partly due to the oral tradition of passing down stories by words, by song and, in the most famous case here, by poem (specifically, by the Greek poet known mononymously as Homer). The Odyssey was the result of that particular translation of the myth, and within it lay, to some degree, all remaining works of fiction in the history of storytelling.

The boldest idea in The Odyssey—which is a bold and significant filmmaking achievement on its own—is that, far more than merely being an adaptation of that story, writer/director Christopher Nolan has used the medium of the cinema to give us another interpretation. The difference between those two concepts—of adaptation and of interpretation—is minuscule but absolutely crucial here. The first presumes that Nolan only wants to copy and paste the text, fill in the roles with talented actors, and coast on the strength of the poem, which really is an epic read in all the ways fiction can be, through to the end.

Nolan, a supremely talented conductor of spectacle and storytelling, easily could have done that, and it likely would have been a particularly fine, or even thrilling, adaptation. There is a possibility, though, that such a movie would not quite have served his particular interests, which have been proved over his career to be related to time, memory and the immortal ambitions of mortal, often solitary men. In one way, it could have, since all of those concerns are present here, but his interests might have been diluted in a straightforward presentation of the literary material.

That’s where the second concept, of interpretation, comes in, because we are a couple of millennia removed from the type of oral or eventually written recitation that catered to simpler audiences in a simpler time. The mythic nature of the Trojan Horse story, specifically the gambit that allowed entry and (in Greek terms) victory, has now been so far removed from the actual fog of that war for those men that it’s likely no one today feels anything like awe or the pull of tragedy when considering an ancient war like the one that took place in Troy. By the end of Nolan’s film, we feel it, and that’s another among the significant achievements here.

It’s also in part because Nolan sees the character of Odysseus, the protagonist of the poem but more importantly the progenitor of the wooden-horse idea, as a tragic and haunted one, separated from everything he knows on his journey back to the kingdom of Ithaca, where his wife and son are in the suspended animation of waiting for something to happen to them. The story picks up here, as Ithaca’s queen is faced with a number of suitors, who wish to take her hand in a marriage of convenience before the missing Odysseus can be pronounced dead. If the absent king (an ennobling Matt Damon in a great performance of shouldering burdens) is confirmed dead, his son and heir apparent Telemachus (Tom Holland) will take over, but a lot is riding on that decision, as well as a looming deadline for Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway, devastating in a towering portrayal of grief) in the form of her son’s coming-of-age.

Even the complexities of these characters falls oddly upon the screen, because their tradition is steeped in a kind of distant grandeur, somehow narrowed in focus by Nolan even as his camera (guided by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) captures vast, widescreen spectacles of the journey home. It’s about the various adventures had by Odysseus and his men (Hamish Patel plays his chief lieutenant, a man caught constantly between loyalty and doubt), to include run-ins with a cyclops and a platoon of giants and a man-eating monster. It’s also about the poor people caught up in the political boondoggle of a missing king, a timetable for crowning a new one, and what happens when the old one returns—if, of course, he ever does.

Back home, Penelope faces those suitors, led by the pompous Antinous (Robert Pattinson, treating the scenery as a multi-course meal), and Telemachus faces his own certainty of his father’s survival, egged on by a pair of helpers (mostly the blind Eumaeus, played by John Leguizamo, who paradoxically loved his old master like a son). In the wilderness, Odysseus, after having endured a decade on the beach with his men, finally sets course for home without any idea how to get there. Along the way, he encounters pitfalls like those monsters already mentioned, as well as a witch (played by Samantha Morton, quietly terrifying a single-scene cameo) whose powers were clearly borne of molding clay and a healing nymph (played by Charlize Theron) whose good intentions are hindered by a selfish deception.

The true battle occurs within for Odysseus, as his time away from home—almost two decades, as one will recall of the poem—has rendered the life he lived into fragments of distant and bitter memory. In a pair of scenes as impossible to describe as they are indelible in their effect, Odysseus is visited by shades of the dead in a vast and barren landscape from which they arise from the dirt, before being instructed to listen to siren song (the sound design in this sequence is particularly striking, as it falls in and out based upon the shifting perspectives within the scene). The climax is a flashback to that fateful incursion upon Troy, where we thoroughly receive the shock of how brutal the violence must have been, though the scope of it, fully deglamorized by Nolan, is the true shock.

The supporting cast, already established as a deep one, extends even further as the story progresses, to include Jon Bernthal and Benny Safdie as brethren warriors who accompany Odysseus on his mission, Lupita Nyong’o in a dual role as the wives of those brothers, James Remar as the blind prophet of the underworld, Elliot Page as a soldier who makes the first sacrifice of the Trojan Horse plan and, in a small handful of appearances that are increasingly tragic before arriving at a truly devastating reveal, Zendaya as the goddess of wisdom Athena, who appears to Odysseus any time he truly needs it. Every actor in the ensemble gets a moment to shine, too, because Nolan is a generous director, who understands the appeal and the reach of this material. This is not merely a case of pointing and recognizing an actor in the foreground or background of a shot but a deeply woven cast of characters, all of whom have a specific purpose here.

That purpose is to reconstitute the Odyssey in a subtly modern landscape of moral and political reality, which strips the character of the obvious mythmaking to find the troubled and haunted man underneath. The Trojan Horse might have been a tool used for victory, but The Odyssey, through bold assertion and with spectacular vision, examines both the speculative veracity of the term and the literary implications behind who has been allowed to tell this story, using these details, in a fashion that might betray its many, many nuances and contours in favor of sanded-down mythmaking.

Rating: **** (out of ****)