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.

1. I liked the movie. But after only one viewing, at least, I didn’t love it.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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!

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.)

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. B. D. McClay suggests Nolan adapt Ursula K. le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Let’s make it happen.

CGI animals

It needs to stop.

Once upon a time, animals in movies were real creatures captured on film. They were in the room or on the set with the actors, interacting with them, responding to them, being led or ridden or spoken to, and (in their own way) directed in accordance with the script—albeit, like human actors, subject to their own whims and fancies, and occasionally doing unexpected things, as in the final scene of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink.

Beyond their verisimilitude or personal presence to the actors, part of the power of animals on film is their unique haecceity, or thisness. The wonder of an animal in person, even at the zoo, translates to the medium of film because any animal, however tame, is its own thing, separate and apart from its ostensible human masters. This wonder extends to stunts and set pieces, because any time Indiana Jones hops on a horse or Lawrence of Arabia rides a camel, you know the actor had to take the time to learn—to be taught—how to do such a complex activity as if he’d been doing it all his life. Even something as lowbrow as Sofia’s fight-on-command dog in John Wick 3 is a remarkable testament to the trainers, choreography, and direction, not to mention the (two) dogs themselves. You can’t help but marvel even as you’re laughing.

For the most part, though, real animals in movies have been replaced by computer graphics, and nine times out of ten it’s slop. To add insult to injury, often as not the slop-CGI animals are meant to be objects of wonder. For some reason directors are especially enamored of slop Cervidae—i.e., deer, elk, moose, and other forest folk. They love their fake eyes on their fake heads, staring intently at the camera. We are meant to marvel in awe. Instead we yawn in boredom. “Really? This is it?” we ask.

The teaser trailer for Spielberg’s next movie is only the latest instance, or victim, or culprit of this cinematic crime. And the contrast came to me in stark terms as I watched Martin Scorsese’s film Kundun for the first time this week. Released in 1997 and now unavailable apart from old DVDs—I got mine via university inter-library loan—the film is the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, from age four to his exile at twenty-five years old. It marks Scorsese’s first collaboration with famed cinematographer Roger Deakins.

And you know what? In the first hour it features a regular appearance by a rat. A physical, real-life rat that finds its way around the monastery, sipping the monks’ water and tea when they aren’t looking, or when their eyes grow heavy from meditation and prayer. For the child lead, the rat is an object at once of humor, of delight, of terror, and finally of benign respect.

Yet all I could think about as I watched the little rat scurry around was: If Scorsese made this film for Netflix in 2025, that rat would be CGI.

Masterly Spielberg

I’ve written before of my love for Steven Spielberg (whose critical fortunes, having waxed and waned over the decades, seem to have settled into a sort of consensus: whatever your personal feelings for this or that movie of his from the past 10-15 years, it’s undeniable that the man knows where to put the camera), and Tim Markatos, whose writing on film you should read and whose newsletter you should subscribe to, captures perfectly what makes Spielberg so great in his explanation for placing West Side Story at #5 on his list of the best 25 films of 2021:

This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.

I will, too. “Total mastery” is right. In those areas of which he is master, the man is without peer.

Kubrick + Spielberg = ?

I had my cinephile card revoked on or around the birth of my first child (there’s only so much time in the day, you know?), but for the first dozen years or so of this century, I was something of a budding film fanatic. I watched American films, foreign films, old films, new films, art films, popular films. I had lists upon lists of directors whose whole oeuvres I devoured one by one.

I always knew I was supposed to like Stanley Kubrick but not Steven Spielberg; something about internet movie culture, or perhaps film-loving dudebro influence, or some such thing. (Maybe I missed the memo to dislike both of them.) But in any case, I couldn’t help myself: while I certainly found a lot to appreciate in Kubrick—I still remember that first 2001 viewing—I loved Spielberg. Adored him, in fact. And not just because his films are popular or entertaining or tailor-made for my tastes. Spielberg may be king of the high middlebrow, but the royalty is earned: his art, to my young eyes, was evident in all that he made. Ever since, I’ve thought that there’s nothing for a director like him to apologize for, and nothing for those who love his work to apologize for, either.

I still remember twenty years ago, the summer before I turned sixteen, dragging my parents, younger siblings, and extended family visiting Austin for the week of the Fourth to see “the latest Spielberg sci-fi blockbuster.” That sci-fi blockbuster was A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Needless to say, no one liked it but me. Better to say, no one knew what they had just watched. I had an inkling, though I knew I needed to read up and re-watch what I had just seen if I wanted to form a complete opinion.

Armond White (a longtime Spielberg lover) calls A.I. the best film of the twenty-first century. Whether or not that’s true, it’s certainly worth remembering, and reconsidering from a critical perspective. Over at The Ringer, Tim Greiving has a long essay exploring the winding route the film took to make it onto the big screen. He focuses in particular on the nature of Kubrick’s demanding, idiosyncratic development process and the shape of his collaboration with Spielberg, who (after Kubrick’s sudden death in 1999) completed the script himself and directed the film in the spirit and style of Kubrick. The result is a cinematic chimera, in every sense of the word. As Greiving writes,

It’s the end of the movie when this cinematic marriage is consummated, and when there’s both harmony and friction. The 2,000-year epilogue and Monica’s temporary return were what Kubrick wanted, not (as some critics supposed) Spielberg’s feel-good addition. Spielberg is not known for ambiguous endings, and this one is ambiguous: Does David die? Was it all for naught? Is it beautiful that a Monica clone gave him the affirmation he needed and then disappeared—or is it macabre? “For me, A.I. can be tragic, but also not soul-crushing,” says Osment, “because there’s a sense of possibility, and you don’t give a definitive answer to something like that. I really like that. That’s what 2001 did so well. That’s something that Kubrick and Spielberg share.” Robards agrees: “It was different, and chewy, and dense. It did have that Kubrick feel to it, right? Dispassionate. At the end, it was great they got together, but also it wasn’t wholly emotional. I think Steven nailed that.”

That feeling my family (and I) felt when the credits rolled was honest: emotional confusion was the point, or rather, it was the inevitable result of Spielberg channeling Kubrick. In my view, the film is unspeakably sad, and the sheen of Spielbergian family love and redemption—the light, the music, the mother and son’s one happy day in a post-human wasteland in which intelligent machines “survive” without knowledge of their own creators—is what lends it its pathos. Far from masking the tragedy, it highlights it. It gives us what we, like David, think we want. But we, who are human, know better than David, who is not. It isn’t real. Nor is he. That perfect day is artifice. It’s fiction. It’s a false “happily ever after” to a would-be fairy tale that is nothing but one long story of rejection and loss. Which only makes it the more unbearable.

That’s my reading, anyway. The depths of the film, the many interpretations it is patient of, are a testament to its unique creation, indeed to its unique duo of creators. In honor of them, give it a second watch this weekend. You could even make it a family viewing.