How can one review a thousands-of-years-old poem, given the movie treatment by one of the biggest movie directors working today, who, himself, is a myth in his own right? Let’s find out together!
This movie is big, but not just in scale, and not just because of IMAX. It’s got big ideas, the biggest our human mind can comprehend: the human experience, our purpose in life and how we make sense of it. It’s a real dark night of the soul portrayal of how we’re doomed and how we are the ones doing the dooming. For a poem this age, the themes lie just below the skin of every one of us in 2026; a compliment to a work conceived of in a different time, where a completely different world was before us, that endeavors to tackle what will be true of humans through any examination of time. Nolan knows this and his enormous effort to give audiences a gift of their own experience, one that stretches across millennia, is something I can’t fully process yet. This might be because I am close in age to both Nolan and Matt Damon, whose own reflections are much like my own, I'm not sure. They both put everything on the line to make this movie and it cracked me open.
This is also a lot of movie (and a 2:52 runtime). And a movie about paradox. So many paradoxes. And conundrums and a lot of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Impossible decisions. Nolan leans into all of them, giving the audience a lifetime of riddles to consider. And he makes it all urgent and necessary and irresistible. I am already the mark for his movies but this one shook me to my core and I still haven't fully recovered from my first viewing, four days ago.
Do you remember the scene from Ratatouille where the food critic, Anton Ego, was transported to a childhood memory of his mom serving him a warm meal of ratatouille? That’s what happened to me when I was watching this. I traveled through a portal back to a time in fifth grade when I was first introduced to Greek mythology. I would pore over those stories while my mind worked overtime creating images of characters and surroundings. I was consumed by all of it to the degree that in my free time, I daydreamed about what it would be like to live among gods, goddesses and demigods. I wrote stories with the characters, trying to find new outcomes for Echo or Pandora, and the like. I could have gotten lost there forever. Looking back now, it would be the most creative and imaginative I would ever be in my life. I didn’t understand how the world worked yet, I didn’t get that the trials the immortal and mortal go through speak to their deep interpersonal obstacles or how their virtues were their vices. And I would have never believed I’d be watching a movie with some of my favorite stories one day, (maybe not with Athena’s eyes but) with a world weariness that more closely hews to Matt Damon’s Odysseus or Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. One of the reasons I like Nolan so much is because our worldviews about humanity are similar. Or at least I also agree that gravity swallows light and that our reach exceeds our grasp so much of the time.
Without spoiling the details, the end of the movie hits as hard as “I believe we did” from Oppenheimer. Maybe even harder. The changes Nolan makes in his adaption to serve to the themes he has pulled out of the poem (and adjascent works) are poignant and fitting. (I am starting with the end of the movie as an homage!) Nolan does favor hopeful endings in his own way. A theory I am working on is that The Odyssey is the third of a trilogy (with Oppenheimer and Tenet preceding it.) But The Odyssey is the prequel to Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer is the prequel to Tenet. So it’s a trilogy in reverse. (Tenet is still running backwards, while we are moving forwards, right?) The trilogy is about the simultaneity of time, bad decisions and men ruining themselves because they can’t help it, or because they’re petty, or both.
The Odyssey checks all of these boxes, held in a frame of Zeus' Law, an unwritten rule of Greek society regarding hospitality and treating others as you would have yourself treated. Zeus’ Law has as many loopholes and complexities as you can imagine a law of hospitality would have in the hands of humans. (There’s a canyon between the letter and spirit of the law.) This law, and its violation, is embedded in the movie’s inciting incident and its climax. A thought – a trick – Odysseus’ ultimate transgression wasn’t burning Troy to the ground. It was using his capability to create art, this uniquely human gift, to lie and cheat his way inside the gates of Troy. What we thought, what we think, was a clever tactic, the Trojan Horse, worth a million retellings of just how artful and ingenious an idea to win a war, is the ultimate act of humans abandoning not just Zeus’ Law but using our greatest gift to this world for petty gains and retaliation; a compulsion to scratch an itch too far under the surface to ever reach, as the sirens’ song tells Odysseus. And, to make matters worse(!), he gave the gift of the Trojan Horse to Athena as a peace offering. (This is beautifully told through the eyes of Sinon, played by Elliot Page, a soldier who is lied to by Odysseus and used as a sacrifice to sell the story of a wooden horse left on the beach as a gift.) We’re good and truly doomed. Odysseus doesn’t have a home to return to in the end. He killed the world and it will take many generations to rebuild it, and only when our mistakes have been forgotten.
Don’t you dare, what happens if, and you have no choice but to… defy the gods. All three reprises are all contained in The Odyssey (and in Odysseus). Because a world, governed by gods judging your every move and creating your fate out of their approval or disapproval, creates a false sense of order. Not least of all because it’s impossible to follow all of the time, in every circumstance. You are forced into an endless loop of cause and effect, without even knowing if you’re properly assigning the right effect to the right cause. ("But cause has to come before effect" says the Protagonist in Tenet. "No, that's just how we see time.") The suitors in Penelope’s palace, Odysseus and his men at every island stop, the reasons beyond the Trojan war are all understood through one perverted lens or another of "defy the gods." Odysseus is haunted throughout the movie by Athena (played by Zendaya). (She actually functions a bit like Mal in Inception.) It is left ambiguous if the goddess Athena looks like Zendaya, to all who know her, or if she is a representation of a woman beheaded in Troy who takes the form of Athena now in Odysseus’ mind out of his intense guilt about what he has wrought (any god can be disguised as a human).
During his journey home, from the encounter with the Cyclops (Bill Irwin) to visiting the home of Circe (Samantha Morton), he is pushed further to a conclusion that to live by the gods’ rules is to threaten his own survival. Life is full of knots you must tie, you better tie yourself to things exquisitely. Much of the movie’s structure revolves around Odysseus landing on Calypso’s island after losing all of his men and his ship (Calypso is played Charlize Theron). She helps shift his pain to his body, knowing he can heal, and away from his mind, what she's not sure he can heal, with the help of the amnesiac lotus flower. There is a play of remembrance and forgetfulness performed beautifully here that highlights a theme of The Odyssey. The gods tell us: you better remember, but you also better remember to forget and forget to remember. Engage in the play of what your mind is always doing anyway and tie yourself to this process elegantly. It is on Calypso’s island that Odysseus is finally able to remember the war and his subsequent journey after. He wills himself to go back to Ithaca, with the advice from Calypso, ahead of his journey home on a raft he's built, ‘You’re used to being in control of everything, but you can’t control this.’ (Reminiscent of the line Rabi says to Oppie, "You're the great improviser, but this you can’t do in your head…”)
When Odysseus returns, he is disguised as a beggar. He is slowly reunited with Eumaeus (played by the wonderful John Leguizamo) and his son, Telemachus (played by Tom Holland), but the matter of the suitors, who have leveraged Zeus' Law to their own benefit for years, is still to be dealt with. (Of the dozens of suitors in these scenes, Corey Hawkins as Polybus and Robert Pattinson as Antinous are standouts.) Odysseus, in diguise, sits below Penelope to understand more clearly where his queen is in this moment of time. (In another layer of the metaphor, a servant washes his feet, the same one who sewed up a wound from a boar many years prior and recognizes him.) But this metaphor is woven through the movie as much as Zeus' Law is. The Trojans are below Odysseus' army when they are in the horse mounted in the city. Odysseues' army is below the Cyclops and this vantage point inspires their eventual escape. And, how else could the gods seek to truly see mortals, if not in the guise of an outcast from society?
The audience has the clearest view of Nolan from our seat in the theater. He said recently, "The movie isn't finished until the audience tells me what it is." He wears his heart on his sleeve in The Odyssey, on the biggest screen possible, with all of his perfection and all of his imperfections.
Non-linear thoughts:
*There is so much left out of this review about the movie. I didn't want to go too long and I am anxious to hear other's thoughts in the comments.
*For the format-heads, I have seen the film twice. Once in DOLBY and the other in 70MM. I may pop back in the comments after I see it in IMAX 70 MM on Friday night. (At 2AM, no less. It was the only show I could manage to get tickets to!!!)
*So many lines written made me think of the GIF of the pen writing fire onto the page. This might be my favorite script of Nolan's so far.
Four out of four wooden pins used to give someone back their shame.
Loved your review, Heather. I was also touched by Nolan’s making Xenia (hospitality to the stranger) a big theme to the film, and yes, that is so relevant today, where things fall apart when being nice to others is not always the rule. Yes, Odysseus used his craftiness to find a way to win the war, but was that not the only way to end it? Without a general mutiny against Agamemnon? These days I think a lot about forever wars.
ReplyDeleteI’ve studied that period (co author of Clytemnestra: The Mother’s Blade, plus 5 more novels in the Tapestry of Bronze) so I was very interested in accuracy. The ships looked right, which was a joy. Some clothes were wrong, but the bare breasts of that period would be scandalous for today’s audiences. And the giants in the very medieval armor kicked me out of the experience.
Some of Nolan’s choices were fantastic. I loved the scene with Circe. We really got the feel of what it was like to be inside the Trojan Horse (the idea that some men drowned at high tide never occurred to me). The most startling choice was for the land of the Underworld, which I understand was somewhere in Iceland. So bleak! Absolutely perfect.
I’m still letting the movie settle with me. I’ve only seen it once, and in a regular-sized movie theater (but I go so rarely, it felt like IMAX). I have my doubts about this Telemachus making a good king, so I’m not sure it’s really a happy end for the people of Ithaca. But I did like the idea of Odysseus and Penelope literally sailing into the sunset.