Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek?
Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good “coming home” story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: “nostos.” If you throw in their word for pain (“algos”) you get “nostalgia”, and on that note modern pop culture is littered with many a nostos. Star Trek IV is literally subtitled The Voyage Home, while hit 1980s-1990s TV show Quantum Leap sees physicist Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) forced to inhabit a different person’s body in every episode, “hoping each time his next leap will be the leap home.” Film nerds have worked out that if you combine The Odyssey, The Martian, Interstellar and Saving Private Ryan, Hollywood has spent more than $600 million bringing Matt Damon home.
Remember, Odysseus is the bloke who invented the Trojan Horse, so he knows a good trick or two
As satisfying as a good nostos is, that can’t be the only reason Nolan has decided to tackle Homer (whoever he/they may have been, but that’s another story). If you look at the director’s back catalog, his films are obsessed with narrative trickery: Memento unfolds backwards, Dunkirk jumps between three different timescales, Inception is/isn’t all a dream, and Tenet is so complex it feels as if it confused Nolan himself. This slipperiness is the secret sauce of Homer’s Odyssey. The poem’s narrative leaps about more wildly than a sea nymph, dripping with flashbacks, simultaneous action across multiple locations and giant switches in viewpoint. It’s astonishingly sophisticated, and the overall effect is to make you unsure who and what you can believe. Which brings us to our eponymous hero.
You’d think Odysseus would be catnip to Nolan, because he has peppered tricksters throughout his earlier films. When the Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight tells contradictory stories about how he got his facial scars, he’s mirroring the King of Ithaca, who offers multiple explanations for why he was away for so long. Did he spend seven years beached with the nymph Calypso, or was he over in Egypt getting filthy rich? It depends who’s listening. What’s more, while we’re told that Odysseus has had enough of Calypso and he’s now eager to go home to his wife and son, it’s never stated objectively in the poem whether he’s always been quite such a reluctant receiver of a divine being’s nightly sexual attention. It’s entirely plausible – maybe probable – that Odysseus has had lots of fun and only now as we join the story has he got bored.
Perhaps hamstrung by modern sensibilities, Nolan doesn’t run with this. Instead he absolves his Odysseus of blame, and has him gradually remember his wanderings to Calypso as she weans him off the amnesia-inducing lotus flowers she’s been feeding him to help him forget his past. (This is a conflation with another episode in the poem.) You could call it a cop-out or a massaging of the hero’s character to make him more palatable for modern eyes. It works either way, as does the speeding-up of Circe’s role from a year’s dalliance to a fleeting visit. That scene, by the way, deserves to go down in history for Samantha Morton’s breathtaking, horrifying performance.
What about Odysseus’ other incredible adventures? There’s no argument about the Cyclops episode, but the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Laestrygonian cannibal giants and more only ever come to us through the hero’s own mouth. Remember, this is the bloke who invented the Trojan Horse, so he knows a good trick or two. And he’s got a reason (like Penelope) to spin us a yarn. In the poem he tells these tall tales at dinner to the court of the Phaeacians, who have a special fast self-driving ship that can take Odysseus home, if they decide they like him. Luckily they do, and it’s thanks to them that our hero finally reaches Ithaca.
This doesn’t mean that Odysseus made the whole thing up. But we’re wise to take it all with a pinch of Mediterranean salt. The point is he has a skill at telling the right story to the right person at the right time. In the era of fake news, he should be the perfect hero. One of the Greek adjectives used to describe him – which classicists love to argue about – is “polutropos.” It’s best translated as “a man of many turns,” which preserves the ambiguity over who or what is doing the turning: is it the ever-turbulent world or our hero’s own devious mind?
Given what he had to play with, Nolan’s film is far less tricksy than we might have expected. He seems more interested in themes of civilizational collapse, and whether we need to consider our own role in that, than in pulling the wool over our eyes. The irony is that his 2006 movie The Prestige, about a pair of quarreling magicians (Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) is in spirit arguably more Odyssean than his Odyssey.
Even so, the new film astutely threads the needle between the real world and the supernatural right from the first frame, which is a caption that reads, somewhat ambiguously, “In a time of apparent magic.” This echoes another trick buried in the original Greek called “double determination,” which means the plot can be simultaneously explained either by divine intervention or without the gods pulling the strings. Does Poseidon whip up a terrible storm, or is it just bad weather? It’s the ancient equivalent of Inception’s spinning top: you can read it either way.
Gladiator may have captured ancient Rome, but nothing on the big screen had ever quite done justice to the timeless and extraordinary stories of Greek mythology until now. Yes he’s taken liberties, and no he’s not Homer. But Nolan is a master storyteller who’s embarked on a colossal journey and pulled it off, which makes him nothing short of a cinematic Odysseus. There’s no higher praise than that. Or is there? It depends who’s talking.
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