I liked Christopher Nolan‘s ‘The Odyssey‘, but am not enthusiastic about it. Every era has its own interpretations of the classics, from Homer to Tolstoy, passing through Shakespeare of course. These re-interpretations often say more about the era in which they were created and about the personalities of those who are the authors of the adaptations, than about the classics whose text is used as a starting point. Even the discussions that follow a staging or bringing to the screen of classic works often reflect the ideological conflicts of the day rather than the works presented to the public. This is the case with ‘The Odyssey‘ that Nolan adapted (crediting himself as the author of the script along with Homer) and brought to the screen. It is, in general, a fairly faithful adaptation, even if there are also dissonant parts (from very … modern swear words to politically correct expressions or even mini-speeches put into the mouths of the characters) and a tendency to insistently push viewers towards associations with contemporaneity. All OK from my point of view, without being delighted or resonating with the speeches. What surprised me a little was how standard the visual approach is. By choosing to use as few digital effects as possible, Nolan has made a film that resembles on the big screen the historical super-productions of the 1950s and 1960s. Mostly for the good, but sometimes for the worse.
Homer’s epics take place in legendary times when humans and gods lived together (humans died, gods did not). In Nolan‘s script, the gods do not appear with one exception – the goddess Athena (played by Zendaya, who does not miss the opportunity to put her name on the credits of yet another blockbuster) who, however, is only visible to the main hero, being more of a confidant than a protector of his destiny. That is the modern vision of faith as a personal relationship with the divinities or perhaps also an affirmation that reinforces one of the main ideas of the film: mankind violated the contract with the gods (the ‘law of Zeus’) and from here begins violence and the free rein given to the instincts of possession, oppression, murder. Ulysses himself (played very Hollywood-style by Matt Damon) is not only a man lost in a world full of traps and dangers, looking for his way home, but also, or especially, an apparently victorious military commander who hides a man haunted by the trauma of the war experience and the horrible deeds he had committed or witnessed. The ending is modified from what we knew from Homer to emphasize the pacifist message. Several of the well-known episodes are rendered in detail and told in a narrative that does not make economy of time, but which is still fluid enough for the almost three hours of projection not to feel torturous. Interestingly, in this version of a macho epic with strong men put to difficult trials, it is the female characters that struck me as more meaningful. Perhaps also because of the actresses who play them. Anne Hathaway, who is formidable in every role she appears in, manages here to give life to a Penelope full of nobility animated by the force of love. Samantha Morton is an evil Circe in the most graphic episode of the film, whose aesthetics seem to descend from the nightmares of the painter Francis Bacon. Finally, Charlize Theron does her best in the role of Calypso, written less inspiredly (I missed here the duality of the nymph who wants to grant immortality to Odysseus in exchange for forgetting his past).
Christopher Nolan is today one of the Hollywood directors who consistently continues the classic line of cinematic tradition combined with liberal messages. This is somewhat paradoxical for the director who at the beginning of his career wrote and made films (‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’) that broke the canons of linear narrative and introduced characters who struggled to adapt to the world around them, to later make films that surprised with their visual inventiveness and original perspectives of the future (‘Inception’, ‘Interstellar’). His ‘The Odyssey‘ is a film that surprised me precisely for the lack of surprises for a Nolan film. The excess of moralizing and modern rhetoric caused me an associative irony that will not escape Romanian viewers who have seen Sergiu Nicolaescu’s historical films, and the scene near the end in which Ulysses fights with dozens of suitors would better fit in a superhero movie. At the end of the day, however, apart from the convinced anti-Hollywoodists, I think that any viewer will find many things to like in this film. Visually, there is always something interesting happening on the screen. The love story and the female characters are moving. The pacifist message is clear, but so is the respect for the war veterans who carry the burdens of their traumatic experiences among us. And the fact that this summer Homer is re-entering the best-seller lists and that teenagers of all ages are discussing Ancient Greece, its people and gods should only make us happy.