THE ODYSSEY

Rating: 5

There is a reason Homer’s ODYSSEY has lasted for so many millennia. Its themes, its imagery, its all-too human portraits of heroes and deities who are less than perfect have sparked imagination and found purchase with whatever the zeitgeist is at any given time. And so it is with Christopher Nolan’s adaptation. It is a selective thing, judicious and brutally intellectual in its harvest of the epic, as brutal as the civilization it depicts, and just as insightful as the bard himself in presenting a story for the ages.

There is no bag of winds, no land of the lotus eaters (though the historically accurate blue lotus makes an appearance), and no Nausicaa finding a barely alive Odysseus, quondam king of Ithaca, washed up on the shores of her kingdom to tell the story of how he fought the Trojan War for ten years and then the gods for another 10 in order to return to Ithaca and his beloved queen, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Fear not, the omnivorous Cyclops (Bill Irwin), remains, and most portentously, Circe (Samantha Morton), who does not so much turn men into beasts as reveal their true nature with her transformations. Nolan here is less interested in magic than he is with what happens when civilization collapses, how it happens, and what is left to the survivors who remain to pick up the pieces.

He’s also interested in telling a ripping good story. And he does. We may know the ending of the story, but how we get there has a tantalizing sense of uncertainty that keeps the suspense at its maximum, whether Odysseus is fighting yet another storm at sea (it’s what you get for ticking off Poseidon), or remembering how he came to be shipwrecked on the island of the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) with no memory but with the company of the goddess Athena (Zendaya) to prick his conscience while engaging in theological discussions about the nature of divinity.

Nolan tells the story in a collage-style of narrative, same events from differing points of view all leading up to Odyseus’ original sin, the one that presages the end of civilization as he knows it and explains his subconscious reluctance to return home. He also shifts back and forth from Odysseus’ adventures to the present-day situation in Ithaca, where his palace has been overrun with suitors for the putatively widowed Penelope. In keeping with Zeus’ Law, the one that keeps civilization running smoothly, she is obligated to entertain them as she would a stranger who might be Zeus in disguise. For their part, they are eating her out of house and home while baiting her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), into a fight that will eliminate him as Ithaca’s heir and install one of them as its new king. With time running out when Penelope’s delaying tactics are exposed by a treacherous servant (Mia Goth), Telemachus, a callow youth chafing to prove himself, sets out to find out what happened to his father, and loyal servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) clings to a last opportunity to rid Ithaca of the suitors.

Nolan takes us through an uncanny valley with his forays into the magical, in keeping with his opening statement that this is a time of apparent magic. It is commentary and annotation to the story, demonstrating Odysseus as a clever man, but not a wise one, a man of practical expedience rather than honor. In the most recent translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson (who reportedly hates this adaptation), the epithet she uses is complicated, and Nolan has chosen that aspect in his interpretation, making the story modern even as it delves into the mythic. And he has chosen Damon as the avatar. A stalwart, practical man who evokes in us confidence even as he makes unfortunate choices. Someone who can stand at the threshold of Hades with courage and vulnerability in the disconcerting landscape that is neither day nor night, and, even more disconcertingly, not underground.

But it is Circe who is the key and the depiction by Morton is one that encompasses not just the sailors seeking food after their long voyage, but the masculine nature that will shortly plunge the world into darkness. With Penelope’s grace note of complaint that 20 years on Ithaca’s throne counts for nothing, Circe’s barbarism is not something that arose in a vacuum but rather was spurred by her lived experience that transmuted her into the embodiment of female vengeance. Morton dives fearlessly into the psychosis of trauma, transmuting herself from helplessness into a cool and powerful condescension in a performance that is as timeless as oppression, and as vivid as the thirst for retribution.

The reason for her trauma finds perfect expression in Antinous (Robert Pattinson in a magnetically wicked performance), the chief suitor with the suitably dark secret who is all ego and no humanity. When he leads the suitor’s feast, there is no mistaking the echo of Circe’s meal to the sailor who will shortly find themselves mangled into the form of pigs. And by extension, the expression of a universe of oppressors and oppressed. Pure genius with sublime agility. Something also found in Nolan’s decision to show us the face of Helen (Lupita Nyong’o), which Homer never described, but to keep from us the fatal song of the sirens, plunging us into the deafness of sailors with wax in their ears to keep them, leaving us only the sound of their heartbeats, the savage reaction of Odysseus, safely tied to the mast, and the sailor who gleefully plunges to his doom after succumbing to temptation by removing the wax.

Most powerfully, Nolan has given us Agamemnon, high king of all the Greeks (not called Achaeans here), the brother-in-law of Helen whose expedition to retrieve his brother’s wife from Troy is less about the glories honor and more about mundane issues of trade routes. Portrayed by Benny Safdie, he is a looming figure in black, whose face is never completely revealed, towering over events in a helmet that is more than just the horse’s mane of his generals. It is also the horse’s spine, a death’s head ushering in the end of the Bronze Age and the resulting chaos with the, ahem, dead certainty that he is doing what is best for everyone.

THE ODYSSEY deigns not to represent a specific time and place. It is, instead, the apotheosis of myth with ancient images and tropes mingling with classic story making it all the more universal and immediate. Nolan has molded the story to fit the times with the same deft assurance as Circe reaching into a sailor’s throat and molding a snout. It is a film of signs and portents magnificently imagined and then realized. We may no longer sit around a hearth to listen in rapt silence to a bard chant the tale of Oddyseus, but Nolan has given us the simulacrum of what it must have been like and it is mesmerizing.