The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, seen in Manchester a day or so after it opened in the UK. And then again, a week later, because a friend wanted to go and see it.

I loved it. Might as well be open about that, since it's been so weirdly divisive among commenters online.  I'm mainly referring to YouTube, now flooded with an exceptional number of highly opinionated posts. Even before most people had actually seen the film.

Apparently it's been very successful. Perhaps it makes a difference that, unlike the earlier critics who might not have seen the film but were familiar with the story and had scanned the cast list etc., most of the audience were at best hazy about the particulars of the story. Though a fair portion would have reckoned themselves to have some knowledge of its background, having seen the recent similarly star-packed film Troy, not that long ago. The Odyssey is indeed a sequel to the story of the Trojan War, told originally by the same semi-mythical classic Greek poet Homer, in The Iliad.

So, in The Odyssey, Odysseus, the Greek who came up with the trick of the Trojan Horse which enabled the Greek army under Agamemnon to break the siege after ten whole years (if you look at the map, Troy really isn't far from Greece; did no one actually go home in all that time, to say hello to the folks etc.?), sets off home. He's the King of Ithaca, a minor king but who dutifully recruited men to contribute to the Greek cause. Initially he has a small fleet with him, taking the men of Ithaca back home. In a moment of complacency or folly as to the best route, he departs from the route taken by the rest of the Greeks, and heads into parts unknown. We realise that he's been cursed, when everywhere he and his men sail and set foot ashore, they face terrifying trials. It isn't long before he has only one vessel, and a diminishing number of men.

Their most famous encounter, early on, is with the giant cyclops Polyphemus. They're trapped in his cave - while he randomly snacks off them - until with another of Odysseus' tricks, they (well, some of them) escape. The really bad news is that Polyphemus turns out to be a child of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. The last entity you want to offend on a long voyage. The painting is one of Turner's greatest works, Ulysses Deriding Polyhemus (Ulysses being the Roman name for the hero). The shadowy outline of the cyclops' head and shoulders is visible just above the ship's rear sail. It's quite a different portrayal of the episode from Nolan's, but it is a great work of art which figures large in my personal awareness of the epic. The deriding part of the episode was a very bad mistake on Odysseus' part.

I think my motivation for seeing the film had less to do with curiosity about the story, and more to do with Christopher Nolan. He's one of the most distinctive directors currently working; I've seen several of his films, but not all by any means. I've admired all of the them, even though each one has niggled me in various ways with certain choices. Like Dunkirk, which I though was great, but which badly failed to show quite how crowded those beaches were, as evidenced by the many photos we have of the event. And in... No, I'm not going to continue like that. I seem to have adjusted to my various complaints in each case.

The Odyssey is spectacular (pity that I missed it in Nolan's preferred IMAX). And although you might have expectations about what you're going to see, if you know the story, plenty of inventiveness has been applied to every scene. There's the novel and clever visualisation of the cyclops; and Circe's transformation of Odysseus' men. Samantha Morton is brilliant there. I admit there are a couple of choices I'm still puzzled about, and will follow up: one is the use of the same actress for both Helen and for Clytemnestra. True, the intention to make a point about the position of women is glaring there, but it's worth mulling over. Secondly, I want to know more about the avoidance of showing Agamemnon's face (the picture, one of the film's posters, shows Agamemnon wearing his striking and unusual helmet. Throughout the film, he's more of a mythical figure, than a human character.

Let's take Nolan's Odyssey on its own terms. Was Matt Damon right as the hero? I'm not sure I'd have cast him to play Odysseus as the great warrior and leader of men; but he does the bearing of conscience well, and in this film's story he's the Odysseus who bears the weight of realising that his actions led to dreadful atrocities in the sack of Troy; the weight of provoking a curse which leaves him the sole survivor of the men of Ithaca; and the weight of delaying his return to his loyal wife who has spent all these years fending off the advances of a rowdy group of suitors, waiting for him. They can't just be told to leave because of the Greeks' obligation to provide hospitality for guests. "Zeus' Law." Most of that delay is spent with the nymph Calypso, forgetting everything among the lotus eaters. Although I agree with many that Nolan has as a main theme the toll taken by war in its aftermath, for me the importance of memory is as strong a theme, how vulnerable and fragmentary it is, and how crucial it is to our identity.

One complaint I don't have about The Odyssey, is that "It's not the proper story" or that Nolan has injected "modern themes/agendas". The point here, is that no matter what you do to it, you can't damage the original. It'll always be there, available to us in a multitude of languages. Including Homer's Greek, which was very different from modern Greek, and probably very different indeed from the tongues of The Age of Heroes depicted in The Iliad and The Odyssey. The situation is much like the one we have with Shakespeare: modern directors frequently muck around with the plays, sometimes setting them in a different time period, sometimes removing whole chunks of the playscript (it's very rare in modern theatre to perform the entire text, there are always scenes which feel immaterial and easy to leave out under time pressure), often to pursue contemporary themes and ideas which would have been meaningless to Shakespeare himself. The plays are tough enough to cope with this, they'll always be around, offering us insights both profound and trivial. Just like Homer's poetry.