Daniel Mendelsohn
Aristotle, for one, wasn’t all that impressed by Odysseus’s adventures. In the seventeenth chapter of his Poetics he observes, apropos of the relationship of a story’s “essential” meaning to its constituent episodes, that
the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away
from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch
for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such
that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting
against his son. But after a storm-tossed journey he returns, and after
revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies.
That is the essential; everything else is episodes.
This summary will strike many as odd. Where, you wonder,
are the famous adventures that most people think of as the meat of the
great epic—the numerous escapades that showcase the ingenuity, wiliness,
and derring-do of Homer’s hero during his decade-long return from the
Trojan War? The Lotos-Eaters, who eat of a flower that erases memory?
The seductive nymph Calypso, who holds him prisoner for seven years,
offering to make him immortal if only he would stay with her—an offer he
movingly refuses in favor of returning to his aging, mortal wife? His
yearlong dalliance with the witchy Circe, who turns his men into swine?
Or his lengthy sojourn among the effete Phaeacians, with their opulent
wealth and glittering palaces, their taste for dancing and music—one of
the many cultures that the epic presents as a tempting alternative to
Ithaca—whose royal family the hero, deploying his famed rhetorical
skills, wheedles into bringing him home?
Nor is there any mention
here of the voyage to the Underworld, where, in one of the epic’s most
moving moments, Odysseus attempts—and fails—to embrace the wispy ghost
of his mother, of whose death, during his long absence, he had been
unaware. And no mention either of the lengthiest of the adventures, the
encounter with the one-eyed giant Cyclops, whom clever
Odysseus—repeatedly celebrated by Homer as polymêtis (“greatly cunning”), polyphrôn (“having many kinds of intelligence”), polymêkhanos (“able to contrive many solutions”), and poikilomêtis
(“of multifaceted wiles”)—vanquishes by means of an artful pun on the
word “nobody,” the false name he gives the Cyclops when they first meet.
All this, in Aristotle’s summary, is reduced to “a storm-tossed journey.”
In part this is because he rightly emphasizes the importance of that other, far vaster part of the Odyssey,
what he calls “the situation at home”—the crisis that the hero’s long
absence has created for his city, whose political institutions are
collapsing; for his wife, Penelope, who is besieged by the Suitors; and
for his young son, Telemachus, who strives to live up to the grand
reputation of the father he never knew. These constitute what
screenwriting courses refer to as the “stakes”—the crisis that must be
resolved by the hero’s eventual return; otherwise the homecoming has no
point. Only four of the epic’s twenty-four books are devoted to the
adventures, which are narrated by the notoriously smooth-talking hero
himself before the mesmerized Phaeacian court: his greatest feat of
verbal artistry.
But the main reason Aristotle gives short shrift to the adventures has to do with the epic’s structure. In the section of the Poetics devoted to the Odyssey, he’s primarily interested in the workings of plot. The Odyssey’s
plot is one that he admires as being “complex” (the many ups and downs
of its characters, the multiple scenes of recognition with which the
poem concludes) and commends because of its “double thread”: the
ascending arc of its hero’s rehabilitation and eventual triumph, twined
around the descending arc of his enemies’ downfall.
While satisfying to Aristotle, the very complexity of the Odyssey’s
narrative, constantly moving as it does between past and present,
reminiscence and action, Ithaca and those far-flung voyages, is no doubt
what has made it so difficult to bring successfully to the cinematic
screen—this despite the fact that the adventures in particular seem to
cry out for big-screen, special-effects treatment. The problem isn’t
merely the vast amount of incident that needs to be covered. Homer also
has a distinctive way of embedding his elaborate narratives within other
narratives. Stories nest within stories; lengthy conversations are
reported within other lengthy conversations. The most famous instance of
this technique occurs in book 19, when an elderly housemaid who is
bathing the feet of the disguised Odysseus recognizes a telltale scar
that the hero had incurred during a boar hunt in his youth. At the
moment she realizes that the “beggar” before her is her long-lost
master, the narrative grinds to a halt in order to loop back through not
one but two embedded flashbacks, first to the boar hunt and then to the
day of the hero’s birth, before circling back to the present.
How
to represent any of this—the structure and the technique as well as the
vast tale itself—in the course of two or three hours?
One answer is that you can’t. It is no accident that the most scrupulously faithful dramatic adaptation of the Odyssey has been not a film but a miniseries: the meticulously detailed eight-part L’Odissea
(1968), a French-Italian coproduction directed by Franco Rossi. The
miniseries, a form that is itself episodic, solves the problem of how to
weave many episodes into a larger pattern that is never extraneous to
the “essential” theme of the story—Odysseus’s homecoming, its nature,
origins, and ramifications—as Aristotle recommends. The great length
permitted by the genre allowed the writers of the series to evoke even
the most minor characters and incidents.
But
a movie—even a very long movie—inevitably has a much harder time
twining the threads, organizing the episodes in a way that does not (and
this is the trick) feel “episodic.” It says something that of the very
few movie adaptations of the Odyssey that have appeared, two—Ulysses
(1954), an antic and amusing Italian production starring a
swashbuckling Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano as the royal couple and
Anthony Quinn as Antinoüs, the loathsome leader of the Suitors, and,
more recently, The Return (2024), with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette
Binoche—make deep cuts. The former eliminates most of the adventures
(presented as flashbacks while Odysseus gazes out to sea during his stay
with the Phaeacians) while compressing the situation at home to a bare
minimum.
The Return, on the other hand, cuts out the
entire first half of the epic and starts with the hero’s return home.
This naturally eliminates not only the supernatural elements—the gods,
the nymphs, the monsters, the divine dalliances, and the spooky
encounters—but everything in Homer that establishes the stakes.
Informed, perhaps, by recent approaches to the Homeric poems as
proto–case studies in PTSD,
the film recasts what Aristotle saw as the hero’s triumphant arc as the
grim tale of a traumatized veteran. (At one point Odysseus himself
openly sneers at the idea of “heroes” when someone asks about the war.)
The Ithaca to which this Odysseus, played by a wiry, scowling Fiennes,
comes home reflects his depressed state: a scattering of dun-colored
huts inhabited by meanly clothed peasants, its palace a dreary pile of
stones. You wondered why he was so eager to get back.
To do all of the Odyssey
justice—justice, that is, to its structure as well as its content—it
would seem that you need a director who is not only capable of producing
a visually engrossing spectacle but also adept at handling complexly
embedded narratives. Which is why, soon after the release of The Return,
some people, myself included, were elated when it was announced that
the British American director Christopher Nolan was working on a movie
adaptation of the epic.
Nolan, after all, made his name by twisting narrative threads in ways you wouldn’t be wrong in describing as polymêtis. His first feature, Following
(1998), tracks an aimless young Londoner who likes to follow random
people around—harmlessly at first—until one of them turns out to be a
sly cat burglar who ensnares his stalker in a dense and finally deadly
web of lies and illusions. Memento (2000), which won him
widespread acclaim, highlighted what was to become another entrenched
theme of the filmmaker’s work: the relationship between memory and
guilt. An amnesiac (Guy Pearce) bent on finding and killing his wife’s
murderer must rely on an elaborate system of photographs and notes, some
tattooed on his own body, as a means of retaining consciousness of who
people are, where he has been, and what he has accomplished in his quest
for clues. Here, too, it turns out that the protagonist has been the
victim of an ingeniously plotted scam.
What was so intriguing about Memento was
the technique Nolan employed to suggest Leonard’s fragmented mental
reality and to recreate it in the audience. The film has two narrative
threads: a black-and-white sequence that follows events in chronological
order and a color sequence that moves backward in time. As each
proceeds, the audience comes ever closer to being able to put the pieces
together in a way that Leonard can’t. Such toying with chronology has
become a hallmark of Nolan’s work, not least in a marvelous venture into
sci-fi, Interstellar (2014), an
astronauts-saving-the-inhabitants-of-a-dying-Earth extravaganza in which
time, literally bent out of shape (there’s a black hole), moves at
different rates for various of its characters, with sometimes very
moving results. I doubt that I was the only one in the theater getting
teary-eyed during the scene at the end between the still-young
protagonist (Matthew McConaughey) and his now elderly daughter.
Guilty characters with dark pasts resurfaced in other Nolan films, most notably the Dark Knight trilogy, the opening chapter of which, Batman Begins
(2005), depicts Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) as a man who,
because of his failure, as a boy, to prevent the murder of his father
and mother, feels no less “guilty” in some ways than are the outlandish
villains he constantly battles. Nolan’s psychologically somber Batman
films were ecstatically received as a shrewdly contemporary reimagining
of the old franchise and had huge international success, but to my mind
they lacked—perhaps of necessity, given their pop nature—the stimulating
structural ingenuity of some of his other films. In The Prestige
(2006), an obsessive and ultimately murderous rivalry between two
turn-of-the-century London magicians—one of whom has caused the death of
the other’s wife—results in deliciously inventive plots-within-plots
that allow the director to play at length with favorite themes of guilt
and innocence, illusion and reality, human action and its sometimes
unforeseen consequences.
And in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer
(2023), another guilt-ridden hero (Cillian Murphy, playing the morally
tormented leader of the Manhattan Project) is caught in knotty webs of
both his own and others’ making. Here Nolan topped Aristotle by having
not two but three discrete plot threads twining around one another: one
follows Oppenheimer’s participation in the development of the atom bomb;
the second looks forward to the Star Chamber–like 1954 government
investigation of Oppenheimer, whose security clearance has been
threatened by his early ties to the Communist Party; and the third, set
in 1959, focuses on Senate hearings on Lewis Strauss’s nomination as
commerce secretary and his involvement in revoking Oppenheimer’s
clearance back in 1954.
Nolan’s penchant for convolution can lead him astray. I’ve never quite been able to figure out precisely what’s going on in Inception (2010),
a stylish fantasy in which futuristic criminal “extractors” wreak
high-tech havoc on their marks by stealing their inmost thoughts from—or
implanting new thoughts in—their subconscious, a feat they manage to
achieve by entering their victims’ dreams. (Or something.) Still, the
rendering of the dreams was so visually arresting that I’m not sure I
cared. And the director’s virtually nonverbal World War II epic Dunkirk (2017) left you understanding nothing about that historical disaster, but it was gratifyingly eye- (and ear-) popping.
Whatever
its flaws, Nolan’s work indicated that he might indeed be the right
person to take on Odysseus, another multifaceted hero characterized at
once by admirable cleverness and dark behaviors, and the Odyssey,
a text characterized by temporal disjuncts and narrative playfulness.
The result, a $250 million, three-hour-long behemoth, the first movie to
be shot entirely in the IMAX format, is, like Batman Begins, a darkly psychologizing updating of a classic; like Memento, it toys with themes of memory and forgetting while, like Oppenheimer,
it twists a profusion of narrative and temporal arcs. And like the sack
of unruly winds that Aeolus, the divine custodian of the winds,
entrusts to Odysseus in book 10—only to have it opened by the hero’s
suspicious crewmen, with disastrous results—it is in the end a mixed
bag: at once a vehicle for the director’s virtues and, as with The Return,
a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a
work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly
archaic.
It’s not that Nolan isn’t aware of the values of the original. In an interview that appeared in The New York Times a month before the movie’s release, he spoke about his early, formative love for the Odyssey,
which he first encountered as a stage production he saw as a young
schoolboy in London. What marked him particularly, he recalled, were the
image of the Trojan Horse—the clever invention of Odysseus that allowed
the Greeks to infiltrate Troy, which is mentioned several times in
Homer’s text and is the subject of a song sung by the Phaeacians’ court
bard—and the episode of the Sirens and their song.
Small wonder, then, that the film, in all its IMAX
glory, is often visually impressive and, even more interestingly, that
from its opening to its closing scene it finds ways to remind us that
epic was considered to be a form of “song” and hence was something its
original audience experienced aurally rather than visually. It’s a nice
touch that Nolan’s film begins with Phemius, the court bard in
Odysseus’s palace, rapping rhythmically on the floor with his stick as
he intones words with well-known connections to the tales of Troy—“a
face [i.e., Helen’s], a man, a song”—and, even more, that Phemius is
played by the rapper Travis Scott: the director’s sly nod to the oral,
improvisational origins of Archaic epic.
As you’d expect, Nolan’s
own “song” effectively replicates the imbricated textures of the
original. Because of the nature of epic narration, with its vast arcs,
many famous “reveals” necessarily stand cheek by jowl with the
backstories that set them up. When, in book 17, Odysseus approaches the
gate of his palace for the first time in twenty years and spots his
faithful old hunting dog, Argos, now flea-bitten and lying atop the town
dung heap—a powerful analogue for the haggard warrior himself—the poet
pauses to give you the story of how Odysseus acquired and trained Argos
as a puppy, what good a tracker he was, and so forth. Similarly, there’s
a climactic moment at the end of book 21 when Odysseus finally reveals
his true identity by wielding a magnificent bow that he alone is strong
enough to string—he plucks its twanging string, Homer tells us
meaningfully, just the way a professional bard does with his lyre—and by
shooting an arrow through twelve ax heads that have been lined up: a
trick, the poet has recently told us, that he used to perform in the
bygone days.
Nolan inserts space between the backstories and the
reveals in a way that’s appropriate to a dramatization and finds ways to
give the tension between past and present interesting visual textures.
Early on, an image of the now decrepit Argos, abused by the arrogant
Suitors (led by Robert Pattinson’s sneering Antinoüs, in a
faded-pretty-boy turn), melts into a flashback of the young hero meeting
his frisky puppy; a bit later we’re watching a younger Odysseus (a
heavily bearded Matt Damon) performing his arrows-through-the-axes trick
as Penelope, smiling indulgently, looks on. And Nolan has found ways to
slip the twanging of the bowstring early enough into his movie that
when the returned hero plucks the bowstring at the end—the prelude to
the climactic slaughter of the Suitors—the moment has just the right
shivery power. Since Nolan started dropping trailers, the Internet has
been aflame with discussions of the “accuracy” of the costumes, ships,
armor, and diction of the movie, but the most authentic thing about this
Odyssey may well be its densely braided narrative textures, which succeed in replicating Homer’s artful weaving.
Weaving, as it happens, is crucial in the Odyssey.
Even people who have never read the epic are likely to have heard the
story, recalled by an irritated Suitor in book 2, of how “sharp-witted”
Penelope, every inch as ingenious as her husband, had held off the
Suitors for three years by promising that she’d marry one of them when
she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laërtes—and
then, by night, unweaving what she’d woven by day. Nolan places this
scene in the “now” of the homecoming story: Penelope (Anne Hathaway, in a
portrayal that wavers nicely between sharp authority and anguish)
explains her weaving process to Telemachus and then, gesturing to the
palace and the city beyond, as if her civilization itself were a giant
artwork, makes an observation about the relationship between form and
content of which Aristotle himself, you suspect, would approve: “The
structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.” Like
the sly self-reflexive depictions of bardic artistry in the Odyssey,
the queen’s remark seems like a comment on the way Nolan’s elaborately
textured structures are meant to serve his long-standing themes.
While
Aristotle gives the adventures short shrift, Nolan certainly doesn’t;
the movie has great visual panache. In the Underworld scene, the hands
of the dead, whom Odysseus has been instructed to summon by means of a
creepily bloody ritual, wriggle upward, unnervingly, from beneath the
black sand of the shore. The storms at sea—scenes to which Homer devotes
some of his most memorably descriptive poetry—are impressively scary.
And Nolan’s rendering of the Cyclops episode is unlikely to be topped,
the huge IMAX screen powerfully conveying the inky
immensity of the giant’s lair as the Greek warriors, puny in comparison
with their tormentor, anxiously wander through it. (All this is helped
by some very effective sound design: the entire theater shakes when
Polyphemus makes his entrance.) In this version, it’s not just the
Cyclops’s (Bill Irwin’s) vision that’s wonky: some of his features have
been violently twisted ninety degrees, so the famous “one sole eye” sits
vertically in his forehead, blinking side to side.
Polyphemus
isn’t the only character who gets a makeover. In Homer, Circe decorously
taps Odysseus’s men with a magic wand to transform them into swine;
Nolan gives the scene a repellent physicality, as the witch (a decidedly
unglamorous middle-aged Wiccan type, played with earthy relish by
Samantha Morton) violently uses her hands to massage their faces into
snouts after they pig out on the stew she’s served them. In one of a few
feminism-inflected moments, Circe bitterly suggests that the
transformation reveals rather than conceals who these men really are:
“They raped and pillaged across the world for you! Filthy soldiers with
empty bellies and hot blood. Look at them and know your own men!”
It
has to be said that whatever Nolan’s taste for optical extravagance,
the production design here is disappointingly unimaginative: the
drearily sepia-toned sets and costumes, sooty in the flickering
torchlight, look like they’ve been rented from the Game of Thrones
warehouse. In Homer, the palace of Odysseus’s old comrade Menelaos is
so opulent that Telemachus, who’s come to interview the indulgent,
rather sentimental Spartan king about his father’s whereabouts, openly
gawks: “Look at the bronze that flashes throughout the echoing
palace,/At the gleam of gold and amber—Look! Silver and ivory, too!”
Here Menelaos is a thuggish warlord who, it would seem, has enjoyed
beating his wife, Helen—the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o, in a
bit of casting that launched a thousand tweets—half of whose legendarily
beautiful face is covered with deep scars. This Menelaos (Jon Bernthal,
sounding vaguely Tony Soprano–ish) guffaws that perhaps that famous
face would now launch only five hundred ships.
If the film has a
single unifying visual motif, it is, unsurprisingly, the Trojan Horse,
which made such an impression on the young Nolan. When we first see it,
in an opening flashback to the end of the war, the huge black
contraption is sticking out of the sand by the seashore, left there to
be discovered by a group of gullible Trojan warriors. Odysseus has also
left a young Greek soldier named Sinon (Elliot Page) to ensnare the
enemy by claiming that it is a gift from the (allegedly) retreating
Greeks. The Trojans seize the Horse and kill the naive youth, whom
Odysseus had kept in the dark about the Greeks’ master plan. In Nolan’s Odyssey,
the only significant encounter the hero has in the Underworld is with
the ghost of Sinon, who reproaches his commander for his duplicity—the
negative side of his great cunning. The final image of the film
reiterates the point: the Horse’s unseeing eye, recalling that of the
Cyclops, staring out from the smoking rubble of Troy—the deadly
aftermath of yet another of Odysseus’s clever schemes.
But then, the only side of Odysseus—and indeed of the Odyssey—that you get in Nolan’s film is the negative one. “I wanted the film to be accessible,” he has said.
I wanted the world of The Odyssey to feel like a world
that a modern audience could relate to. We didn’t want it to look or
sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take
their cues from certain periods of art and music, like Neoclassical
painting from 18th and 19th century Europe or Romantic Era orchestral
compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the
story.
As with The Return, “earthy, modern, relatable”
here translates to a focus on psychological angst and a grim “realism”
that shrewdly channels a contemporary impatience with notions such as
“great men” and “heroism.” In this Odyssey, there is no cleverness, no humor, no wily charm. In this Odyssey,
the hero doesn’t trick the Cyclops with his brilliant “nobody” pun; he
and his men just poke the giant’s eye out and make a gridiron-inspired
run for it. (“Run low through the entrance and then split wide!”) This
Odysseus has no sparkling repartee with his divine patroness, Athena—a
delightful leitmotif of Homer’s text—because the crucial part in the
epic played by that awesome goddess, with her creepy “owl-eyes,” has
been whittled down to a couple of scenes in which Athena (Zendaya,
swathed in what looks like Jil Sander) bucks him up during his moments
of religious doubt. “Look! Who’s moving those clouds? Who’s moving that
water?!” The dialogue, alas, is pedestrian throughout.
Nor can
this Odysseus charm the Phaeacians with his seductive talk and beguiling
storytelling, because Nolan has eliminated the Phaeacian episode
altogether—a real loss, given that long episode’s enchanting portrayal
of the feisty teenage princess Nausicaa, who discovers the shipwrecked
hero and saves him, and of her adoring parents. This Odysseus does not
break down in tears at the apparition of his mother in Hades, because
that tender moment, too, has been excised, along with the most crucial
encounter he has in the Underworld. The ghost of Achilles, who had given
up long life in return for eternal glory, tells his old comrade that he
would rather be alive, the lowest servant of a poor man, than king of
all the dead: a ringing endorsement of the Odyssey’s hero, who stops at nothing to survive.
Nolan
deletes all this while retaining material that adds little to his story
or its themes. A confusingly extended scene of a battle with a race of
cannibalistic giants called the Laestrygonians, a relatively
uninteresting episode in book 10, adds nothing, except perhaps an
adrenaline rush for the eighteen-to-twenty-six crowd.
Worse, this
Odysseus does not make his moving rejection of Calypso’s offer of
immortality because Nolan, taking a leaf from the Kirk Douglas version,
portrays Odysseus as being an amnesiac during the seven years he spends
with her; he doesn’t even know he has a wife to return to. In a
conflation of two canonical adventures, Nolan has his Calypso (Charlize
Theron)—here apparently not a goddess but an ordinary mortal—confess to
her lover that for all those seven years she’s been feeding him Lotos in
order to ease his mental anguish. “You want to remember, but what if
remembering destroys your happiness?” she murmurs—one of several
Yoda-like utterances that Nolan attributes to a character who, in the
original, is the mistress of an impressive rhetorical style. (Homer’s
Calypso, faced with Zeus’s order to give up her captive, rages against
the male double standard for female sexual behavior in a memorable
speech that has lost none of its freshness—or pertinence.) The whole
point of the Calypso episode is that Odysseus remembers the wife, and
the life, he has left behind: when we first meet him, in book 5, he is
staring out to sea, “sitting there; nor did his tears/Ever dry, since
the sweetness of life was trickling away/As he grieved for his
homecoming.”
What this Odysseus does remember is the Horse and
everything that Nolan wants it to represent. The climax of his
adaptation is not the triumphant achievement of the long-deferred
vengeance and restitution of the hero’s identity but a moment the
evening before, when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, converses with
Penelope. Losing hope, she insists that the husband she remembers would
have found a way to come home if he were still alive. Rueful, Odysseus
replies, “It’s not always an easy thing, a homecoming. What if the
Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if he saw things?… What if, when he
opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city
in one night?” This triggers an extended flashback to the atrocities
committed by the Greeks during the fall of the city: the rapes, the
beheadings, the desecrations of shrines. For these crimes, Nolan’s
Odysseus feels a crippling guilt:
We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their
home. We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a
fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world
entire…. What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through
fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that
followed…what if he knew exactly what he’d done?
As this resounding speech echoed in my ears, it occurred
to me that it sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer—who, after all,
gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered
enemies—but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. This
tormented, guilt-ridden Odysseus, stripped of humor and wit,
seductiveness and cleverness, is a sibling of Memento’s anguished amnesiac, of Batman, of Oppenheimer, men tormented by pasts they wrestle with in different ways. Speaking to the Times on the eve of his movie’s release, Nolan acknowledged how, as he read various translations of the Odyssey, he realized that it was the “ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”
But
whatever his lifelong fascination with the epic, Nolan has merely
remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on
Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer. Is his new
vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and
distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its “essential” in
any way Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: “The
structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.”
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The British Actor Tim Curry Dies at 80
