Nolan’s Odyssey
If, as Ross Douthat once remarked, Sohrab Ahmari’s broadside against David French was a full-employment bill for conservative pundits, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s epic is the same for writers of every kind—not just pundits or film critics but academics, classicists, linguists, translators, historians, journalists, and even theologians. I’ve read very little of the discourse, partly because I was in a national park without internet for the first week of the film’s release, partly because I saved a dozen reviews for later reading only for my browser to crash. (And partly, as always, because I’m not on social media, and there’s nothing like social media abstinence to protect you from the hive mind.)
I’m sure little of what follows is original, but I couldn’t resist the urge to scribble it out. Full spoilers below.
I liked the movie. But after only one viewing, at least, I didn’t love it.
No living director does spectacle like Nolan. Not Steven Spielberg, not James Cameron, not Sam Mendes, not Gareth Edwards, not Ridley Scott. The only comp is Denis Villeneuve. No wonder that Villeneuve’s next movie is Bond—Nolan already made his Bond movie with Tenet.
Nolan is good for the movies. It’s great to have event tentpoles that take over the globe for the sole reason that a name-brand filmmaker made it. Viewers recognize his style within seconds. He left behind superheroes fourteen years ago—the summer the first Avengers came out. He’s one of the good guys.
Film-critical schadenfreude in taking Nolan or his fans down a peg or three is juvenile. You don’t have to love or even like his work. But the meta-discourse surrounding him is silly: fanboy tone-policing is always unbecoming. Let people enjoy popular art that gives them pleasure!
Nolan has never been highbrow, always upper-middlebrow. That’s a description, not a criticism. Perhaps more than any other aesthetic form, film’s sweet spot as popular art is upper-middlebrow spectacle: big stories, big stars, big sound, big action—handsomely told and gorgeously produced and carefully choreographed. That’s Nolan in a nutshell.
In March of last year I offered notes toward a definition of Dad TV, and I closed with this observation: “Dad TV is nothing more than a set of variations on The Odyssey. Which suggests that Christopher Nolan, currently adapting Homer’s epic into a film, is the chief auteur of Dad Content for our time.” Having now seen the adaptation, not only is it true that Nolan is the Dad Content Auteur of our time. He was always telling one version or another of The Odyssey the whole time.
What works? The braided narrative, Ludwig Göransson’s score, the men turning into pigs, the practical cyclops, the horse, the shipwreck, the dolphins, the visit to the dead, and the slaughter of the suitors. The actors who shine brightest are Samantha Morton’s Circe, Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, Robert Pattinson’s Antinous, John Leguizamo's Eumaeus, Bill Irwin’s Polyphemus, Himesh Patel's Eurylochus, Benny Safdie's Agamamenon, Jon Bernthal's Menelaus, and James Remar's Tiresias.
Three things didn’t work: an untwisted Odysseus, a de-paganized odyssey, and Nolan’s infamous squeamishness about sex. Each of these was a deliberate decision by Nolan, and each was a mistake.
That’s not to say that Nolan had to be “faithful” to Homer. It’s an adaptation. I had no problem with his handling of the gods. As David Denby has written, “The gods belong to poetry, not to cinema.” Invariably they’re cheesy or campy or CGI-fake. Moreover, Nolan’s intention to twist an ancient tale for his own purposes, or even to tell it against itself, is perfectly defensible. Critique of the film that merely claims it’s false to the original is incomplete; every adaptation is a betrayal, just as every translator is a traitor. The question is which decisions were made, and why, and whether they work.
Odysseus doesn’t work because he’s reduced to a traumatized, grief-stricken soldier who doesn’t know what he wants. Where is Odysseus the wordsmith? the mischievous riddler who thinks up the Trojan trick? who talks himself out of every bind and into every woman’s bed? Where is the fun? It’s not Matt Damon’s fault, because he plays the character that Nolan wrote on the page, but this man is a sadsack bore who’s good at killing and little else. Even had Nolan kept every other decision in the script, changing this would have elevated both the film and the performance in a substantial way.
What we needed was Mr. Ripley, not Jason Bourne; fast-talking characters who B.S. their way out of tough situations like Will Hunting, Colin Sullivan, and Mark Watney, not staid soldier Jean de Carrouges. We see this side of Damon’s Odysseus once he’s in disguise on Ithaca, but by then it’s too little too late.
Far be it from this moralizing Christian viewer to suggest that Nolan needed more sex in his movie. But whether or not he depicted it—as he awkwardly does in Oppenheimer and nowhere else in his oeuvre—he needed sexual tension in the film. He needed romanticism. He needed eros. He needed all these brave brawny men and beautiful women to evince an ounce of attraction to one another in an otherwise dark, brief, painful, somber world. Homer’s epic concludes, quite literally, in the phallic arboreal bedchamber of his hero’s house, the bridegroom finally lying down with the bride who has faithfully and chastely awaited his return for two full decades. Nolan gives us the violent catharsis, with barely a hint of the erotic. Mars is placated, but not Venus. Homer is well aware what’s on Odysseus’s mind when he returns home. Whereas for Nolan, it barely registers. Odysseus’s homecoming is neutered, and for no reason at all.
As for the underlying themes of the story, Nolan distills and Christianizes them into a tale of empty violence, selfish glory, hard-earned penitence, faith, and self-expulsion. The great hero of the Trojan war must go away into voluntary exile, because his crimes follow him, and he broke the greatest of all laws: the presumption of trust and the gift of hospitality. In the end, we do not celebrate Odysseus but honor his final gesture by mourning his prior acts. Perhaps his son can bring about a more just world.
I can imagine a version of The Odyssey that makes this point. For starters, though, Nolan would have to avoid his penchant for telegraphing—literally having a character recite out loud in the film’s closing moments—the exact thematic message he wants to get across. For another, Nolan wants to have his cake and eat it too. If he really wanted to baptize Homer, he wouldn’t give the audience the pleasures of the suitors’ slaughter. He’d make Odysseus a martyr! But that would be a bridge too far. So we glory in the violence then learn our lesson for doing so: violence solves nothing, and indeed the bloodlust of men is the death knell of every great civilization. Maybe! But then why all this spectacle? Why the clever rapport and trickery of Odysseus’s vengeance (“all of it”)? Why the fine-tuned, slow-burn, delicious comeuppance for wicked Antinous? Because it wouldn’t be The Odyssey without that.
As it is, the gods who rule the world of Nolan’s film are distant, elusive, vicious, yet providential and possibly disposed to mercy. I think Zendaya’s haunting memory may well also be Athena in disguise, which—again—is a pointed Christian-theological decision: the divine is found in the suffering; the god incarnates as a victim. But even here, with the roof somewhat retracted on Nolan’s cinematic world, there’s just not much more to say. The magic remains “apparent” and the gods inscrutable, if they exist or speak or act at all. This quasi-Christian non-commitment saws off the branch this subversive Odyssey is sitting on. Or to use a different image, it falls between two stools.
Regarding Nolan’s markedly immanent cinema, I wrote last year in an essay about aliens and supernatural phenomena: “It is telling that when Christopher Nolan, probably the world’s most famous pop-culture time-obsessive, made a movie about life in the universe, the only life in question was our own. In Interstellar, Nolan bent time and space only to turn humanity in on itself (incurvatus in se), the finger of Adam and the finger of God extending from one and the same outstretched arm.” Homer’s god-drenched epic makes only the smallest of dents in this transcendence-skeptical armor. Whatever story he’s telling, Nolan always keep heaven at arm’s length.
Regarding the film’s ethics, Freddie deBoer writes that Nolan imposes “a conventional modern Christian morality” onto the story. Something like that is right, although my modest dissent is that Christian morality (modern or not) needn’t be conventional or aesthetically boring—as I say, Odysseus baptized is Odysseus the martyr. (The Christian Odysseus is Saint Peter: eager to fight, then a runaway and a denier, then a glorious preacher, then crucified upside down in Rome itself.) But Freddie’s comment rightly draws out the fact that, at a meta level, Nolan’s retelling of pagan Homer is just one more corroborating cultural artifact for Tom Holland’s narrative of Christianity’s triumph in and over the West. It’s unclear whether Nolan is himself religious or knows that he’s making Odysseus a proto-Christian, but he doesn’t have to be a believer or know what he’s doing to do it: that’s the point.
I’m sure I’m the thousandth person to say this, but: Robert Eggers should have made this film. Or at least written the script.
Seeing this film brought home to me, once and for all, that Christopher Nolan does not like violence. He hates it. Other directors of war epics and action films glory in the guts and blood: Ridley Scott, Mel Gibson, David Ayer, even Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan. Not Nolan. For the most part, for Nolan, the blood doesn’t spurt. The swords slice into cloth and hidden folds. Nolan cuts away instead of showing you the awfulness. Zendaya’s Athena haunts Nolan as much as she haunts Odysseus.
Put more broadly, Nolan’s films are violent spectacles about men burdened by the violence they or their society deems necessary to keep order and peace. Compelled to violence, these men come to hate it as much as Nolan does, and what they learn when they want to rid themselves of the world’s violence is that it is built on lies. So in order to free the world, and themselves, they must at once forswear violence and expose the deceit it protects or that the violence itself is propping up. (They tend to do so through final, apocalyptic violence.) That’s Robert Oppenheimer, that’s Bruce Wayne, that’s Laertes’ son. And like Batman, Odysseus must exile himself for the sake of the common good.
Nolan’s protagonists are antiheroes who become heroes by renouncing what made them great or glorious in the eyes of the world. They’re sin-eaters who die outside the camp. They’re old men, full of regrets, who hope to make atonement before it’s too late. (See too Al Pacino’s detective in Insomnia.)
It was, I must say, disappointing that, as with The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan once again telegraphed both the ending and the final image in the first ten minutes of the film; that it was more or less the same ending as TDKR; and that the same actress features in said closing scene/shot. I know Nolan’s style is a spiral, evoking and echoing across his films, but that kind of direct repetition was regrettable to see.
None of the above is meant to dismiss the film. As I said, I liked it, and it’s full of virtues. I’m glad it’s so popular, and I’m glad it’s proving the grifters and trolls wrong (again). There are things Nolan does that no one but Nolan can do. I’m going to see it a second time in theaters. Nolan’s creative collaborators are the best on the planet. I can’t wait to hear the score again. I’m eager to spot the little grace notes I missed the first time around. I’m no Nolan hater: I was fifteen years old when I took my girlfriend to see Memento in Austin and the guy in front of me had to buy our tickets for us, since it was rated R. I’ve been a fan of his work ever since. It’s just that he took on what is, outside the Bible, the biggest story in the world, and he didn’t hit a home run. It’s shocking it’s as good as it is. And there’s always next time.
B. D. McClay suggests Nolan adapt Ursula K. le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Let’s make it happen.
