A Teacher's Odyssey

 

I was pleasantly surprised when some of my former Latin students posted online that they were awaiting my review of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.  My family and I had already planned to see it with one of my own former teachers, and so as the film unfolded, I began to consider what I would say for the sake of my students and friends.

A Child Running Around for Ice Cream

When we met my former teacher and one of her friends, I displayed a bit of enthusiasm as we walked to the auditorium where the film would be playing.  In her words, I was like a child running around for ice cream.

I'm not sure why she said that.  It wasn't as if I was such a fan boy that I wore the Indiana University Classical Studies t-shirt of my alma mater just for the occasion or had one of my adult children take a picture of me with the movie posters.  She was right, of course.  For a guy who has spent more than forty years in the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, this was a movie I could not miss.

Teacher and student at the movies

It's Not PBS

This film is not a documentary on ancient warfare, Classical poetry, or ancient mythology.  It is retelling of a classic work of fiction that has some historical roots.  It serves no purpose to point out that the film does not use armor or props accurate to what we know of Bronze Age-Greece.  It is a retelling.  It is a translation, just as was Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus in 1960 and Zach Snyder's 2006 film 300, and every translation of anything, whether from one language into or another or from medium into another, will add things, omit things, and change things.  An exact, word-for-word version of Homer's Odyssey would simply be the 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter Greek that constitute the original poem.

For this reason, the stylized armor did not bother me.  I enjoyed it as much as I did that in 300, to which the Trojan helmets bore more than a striking resemblance.

The sets and costumes gave us powerful and exciting visuals and worked well with the many action scenes of warfare and bloodshed.  In fact, they helped give it an otherworldly feel that was important to this retelling.

Is Frank Herbert the Descendant of Homer?

There is an unmistakable feeling of the Denis Villeneuve Dune movies at many points throughout Nolan's The Odyssey, and this makes sense.  The world of Dune is set in the year 10191 on the far off planet of Arrakis, and the world of The Odyssey is just as distant.  Bronze Age-Greece is five thousand years, give or take, removed from our time.  Its culture, values, traditions, rites, and methods of war are utterly alien to ours, and Nolan captures this, not only through the otherworldly feel of the sets and costumes, but also through the music.  In many places we hear metallic sounds in the background that lend an almost sci-fi effect and that sweep us into something entirely beyond ourselves.  And this is why certain language choices are discordant.

While "otherworldly" may be the term to describe much of the feel of this film, it is clearly set in the ancient Mediterranean region.  As a result, words like "mom," "dad," "party" used as a verb, and three instances of the f-word (once as a participle and twice in quick succession as an imperative) seem to stick out like a sore thumb.  Had this version of Homer's epic been set in a different time and place, much as it was in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, such contemporary colloquialisms may have worked, but here they are simply jarring.  Fortunately, such intrusions of our world into this one are few.

And the Oscar Goes To...

There are plenty of A-list names garnering attention in this cast, and most do a fine job with their characters.  This is not Matt Damon's crowning achievement, but he serves well as Odysseus.  Anne Hathaway is a strong Penelope, but top honors go to the supporting roles of Samantha Morton as Circe, Tom Holland as Telemachus, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus.  Holland's son of Odysseus is appropriately whiny, not in the grating way of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, but as we have come to know him through Homer.  The true standouts, however, are Leguizamo, whose strength, loyalty, and brokenness make him a truly sympathetic character and one you want to watch, and Morton, whose portrayal of Circe as psychotic is genuinely disturbing.

Beyond Homer

There is an entire body of ancient literature beyond Homer's two epic poems Iliad and Odyssey that touches on the Trojan War, and Nolan's film draws on them to good effect.  The story of the Trojan Horse is famously told in Book II of Vergil's Latin epic Aeneid.  Vergil gives us the all-important key to making the whole trick work through the character of Sinon, who lies to the Trojans about the horse's true purpose, thus prompting them to take it into the city.  Sinon has a more significant role in the film than in Vergil's poem, but I will say more on this below.  In Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 film Troy, the Trojans arrive at the conclusion on their own that the horse is a gift to the gods, so the inclusion of Sinon here is helpful in making it more reasonable that they would have taken it into the city.

In the fifth century B.C., Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays dealing with the homecoming of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy.  He had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia before leaving in order to obtain fair winds for sailing, and that was a bridge too far for his wife Clytemnestra.  She took a lover after his departure and spent the years plotting her revenge.  Upon his return, he is stabbed in the bath, and this leads to Orestes, his son, planning and executing revenge for his father by killing his mother.

Menelaus and Helen

Nolan brings all this into his story, again to good effect.  It is first mentioned by Helen when Telemachus visits Menelaus.  She does not go into detail, but Agamemnon does when he returns from the underworld to talk with Odysseus.  Nolan uses this bit in a powerful away, but once again, I will touch on that below, and in a flashback to Telemachus's visit to the Spartan king, Menelaus tells him that Orestes killed his own mother.

Han Shot First

In Homer's poem only Odysseus can string and shoot his bow, and Penelope uses this as a test for the suitors seeking to marry her, challenging them to string and to shoot it through twelve axes as her husband used to do.  No one can do it, and Nolan was faced with a similarly impossible task.  This is a story that has been known and loved around the world for three thousand years.  Countless high school freshman read selections from it every year in English class.  There was no way this film would satisfy everyone.  As I said at the beginning, this film is a translation.  It leaves things out, it puts things in, and it changes elements.  For some, none of this will matter.  For others, it matters a great deal.  In the retelling of a tale as famous as Homer's Odyssey, there are certain bits we expect.  When George Lucas re-released the original Star Wars, he changed the scene in the cantina to show Greedo shooting first at Han Solo, but everyone who saw the film in 1977 knew it was the other way around.  Just Google that one for a fun diversion.  Here are a few of the omissions and changes and that were the most striking.

When Odysseus and his men enter the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, the creature asks Odysseus his name, and he famously answers "Nobody."  After the men have run the stake into his eye, Polyphemus runs from his cave shouting, "Nobody has blinded me," and the other cyclopes tell him to shut up.  This is missing, and it is a mistake.  Nolan says he was not able to work it in.  But anyone familiar with the story only through that freshman English class would have looked for it, and it is strange not to have it.

The cyclops Polyphemus

Other omissions include Hermes giving moly to Odysseus to protect him from Circe's spell, which likely would go unnoticed by any but those most familiar with the poem.  Many, however, will likely recall that Aeolus gives Odysseus all the winds that would harm him bound in a bag, with only one left on the waters to blow his ships home.  His men untie the bag, and the other winds blow them off course, yet this makes no appearance in the film.  Odysseus does not land in Phaeacia, meet the daughter of King Alcinous, or receive the ship from the king that finally takes him to Ithaca.  Gone is the care he shows for his wife when, after the slaughter of the suitors, he tells Telemachus that the room must be cleansed before Penelope can lay eyes upon it, and missing, too, is the famous part about the bed he had made out of a tree.

We did get the episode with the Laestrygonians, although they went unnamed, Scylla and Charybdis, the theft of the sun god's cattle, the Sirens, the suitors attempting to string Odysseus's bow and shoot through the axes, Odysseus's old nurse recognizing his scar, and, in one of the most touching scenes in all of literature, the death of Argus, the dog who waited twenty years for his master to come home.  The episode with the lotus-eaters was transferred to the scenes with Calypso, and that worked well, and there is a nod to the desecration of the Palladium from the Iliad.

Odysseus vs. Laestrygonians

As for significant changes, there is ongoing discussion in the film of how Odysseus lied to Sinon so he would be more credible in telling the Trojans that the horse was a gift to the gods.  Only those familiar with Vergil's Aeneid will know that Sinon was fully aware of the plot and concocted an elaborate lie to deceive the Trojans.   Some will remember the trip Odysseus makes to Hades, but in the film the dead come to him, and it is here that one of the changes works quite well.  As Agamemnon tells Odysseus of his murder at the hands of his wife, he advises the Ithacan king to disguise himself when he gets home.  In Homer's tale, the disguise of a beggar for Odysseus is wrought by Athena, but this works nicely in the context Nolan has constructed.  The general narration of the poem is split across Odysseus's recounting of his adventures to Calypso and Telemachus's discussions with Menelaus, and this is quite effective.

Odyssey Plus

When it comes to additions to the film not found in the poem, three are worth noting.  There is a running focus on the fact that Odysseus did not allow Antinous, who would grow up to become one of the suitors of Penelope, to go with him to Troy.  In this version, Sinon took his place, eventually asking Odysseus to obtain vengeance for him after he has died.  This works dramatically, and although it is not strictly necessary to advance the plot, it does add an interesting element.  What is utterly unnecessary, however, is the sequence in which some of the suitors seek to murder Telemachus as he stops at Pylos on his return home from visiting Menelaus.  In the poem this is his first stop on the way to Menelaus, but it is not the change of order that is bothersome.  There is simply no need for the revised portrayal of the attempt on his life, which in the poem happens upon his return to Ithaca.  It works in the film, but no better than what Homer wrote, which leaves us wondering why the addition.

The other addition is the mindset of Odysseus.  He is known for his hubris, and this is well depicted in his line, "The gods help those who help themselves."  Yet when he is asked what he hears in the Sirens' song, he says it was the realization that he does not really want to go home.  This is a significant addition and change to the motivation of Homer's character, as is his level of self-reflection upon reuniting with his wife Penelope, a scene that necessitates another extended flashback to the Trojan War.  If I may invoke Star Wars once again, a remake of that saga in which Luke Skywalker is driven by thoughts of profit and Han Solo by desire to help the oppressed would cause audiences to howl.

The Final Grade

I am not a great fan of letter grades and will not assign one to this film.  Overall, it is good, and I enjoyed it.  Will I purchase it when it becomes available?  I will, and not only because as a Latin teacher I own most Greco-Roman based films.  Will I show clips to my students to illustrate aspects of the story?  I certainly will and would encourage English teachers to do the same.

The perceptive reader may note a certain underlying condemnation brought about by faint praise, and such a reader may be right.  It is impossible for me to see this film other than through the lens of the poem.  I am sure one unfamiliar with Homer will have an entirely different experience of it.  Still, for all the stunning visuals and sound we have come to expect from a Christopher Nolan work and indeed from most modern films, the script itself pales with those of yesteryear.  This is no Spartacus.  It is not even Gladiator.  In the end, I enjoyed it, but was most pleased with the desire it ignited within me to read the original once again.