Expert Comment: Is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey faithful to Homer?
Professor Armand D’Angour, Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Classics, and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, examines what happens to Homer’s most cunning hero when an epic poem becomes a big-studio adventure film. Professor D’Angour is continuing his research into the sounds of Greek music with a bid for a 3-year research project to investigate ethnomusicological parallels that shed light on how Homer’s epics were sung. Please note, this piece contains spoilers.
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns... So begins Homer’s Odyssey, three thousand years old and still great box-office material. Christopher Nolan’s new film doesn’t try to capture everything that makes the poem so memorable – Odysseus’s longing for home, his verbal skill, the notion of deceitfulness as heroism. Instead it picks out the central adventure story and expands it to IMAX scale. On these terms it’s certainly spectacular, and it will provide a lot of fun for viewers who enjoy spectacle, horror, and the fighting scenes that made 300 a success two decades ago.
This is above all a muscular action film with impressive special effects. A monstrous Cyclops, brutal battles, a Wooden Horse that looks like an engineering marvel, and a sack of Troy so ruthless and vivid that it brings home some of the sad truth of war. Fans of Lord of the Rings will feel instantly at home. The audience Nolan is after has been reared on fantasy, horror, and gory battle sequences, not on ancient Greek literature and sophisticated narrative structures.
One key narrative device in the epic is flashback. Odysseus sits at the Phaeacian court and tells his own story over the course of four books. The reader is unsure what to make of his narration: can we trust that he is not making it all up? Nolan relishes the flashback structure: Odysseus, marooned on Calypso’s island, slowly recovers memories of Troy, the Cyclops, and the descent to the underworld. But on screen these memories become simply what happened. A film has less patience than an epic poem for unreliable narrators.
“Nolan’s Odyssey was never going to be Homer’s: there is little Homeric and nothing Hellenic about it. But as a piece of spectacular filmmaking, based on the framework of Homer’s great story of homecoming, it will surely earn a place in the movie pantheon.”
Faithful to Homer, the film opens not with Odysseus but with his son Telemachus setting out to find the father he barely remembers. It’s a good way in for viewers who don’t know the poem, and it pays off at a moving moment when Telemachus looks at his father in disguise and declares ‘You’re Odysseus’. The film also keeps the gods, but they get a pragmatic makeover. Homer can move in and out of Olympus, but Nolan must keep things more grounded and realistic on a human level. Zendaya’s Athena becomes an occasional presence, and the film leaves it open whether she’s really there or a figment of Odysseus’s own mind. It’s a way of handling divine intervention for an audience that doesn’t take Olympus literally. One only wishes that Nolan found similar workarounds for scenes he omitted as evidently unworkable, such as the “Nobody” trick in the Cyclops’ cave. The divine Calypso and Circe in the poem are near-mirror images of each other and in a different interpretation could have been played by the same actress, but here they have very separate identities and actors. Calypso is presented as notably beautiful, while Circe is depicted as a rustic peasant sorceress.
The famous recognition scenes are the emotional heart of Homer’s second half. Here they are compressed, softened, or omitted. The most heart-wrenching passage of the epic happens when the old dog Argos dies the instant he recognises his master after twenty years. In Homer, Odysseus has to brush away a tear to avoid giving himself away to Eumaeus. In the film the moment is gone before the viewer has time to do the same. The marriage-bed scene, in which Penelope finally tests and confirms Odysseus’s identity through a private joke only they would understand, is dropped. The film’s Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is more brawn than brains. There’s no place for the verbal cleverness that makes Homer’s hero no less of a trickster than a warrior.
At a few points, the relentless background score, for the most part heroic and percussive, weaves in the softer sound of the aulos, the ancient double pipes – here played by Callum Armstrong, a brilliant piper and musician with whom I have long collaborated on my research to realise the sounds of ancient Greek music. It is a nod to a world of music that the poem itself is full of, even though the lyre-playing bards Phemius and Demodocus don’t make it into the film. Rather than allowing us to focus on the most emotionally searing parts of Homer’s tale, Nolan has set out to create a big-studio adventure film that borrows Homer’s outline and some of his best set-pieces and to depict them with cinematic imagination.
There will be widely different opinions about what the director has achieved. Classicists are bound to notice the gaps and conflations (such as when Calypso, not the Lotus-eaters, gives Odysseus the lotus to make him forget). Most viewers will want to be entertained, and will be. They will cheerfully accept the predictable script, the flat dialogue, and the cardboard villains that the suitors are made to seem. Nolan’s Odyssey was never going to be Homer’s: there is little Homeric and nothing Hellenic about it. But as a piece of spectacular filmmaking, based on the framework of Homer’s great story of homecoming, it will surely earn a place in the movie pantheon.
For more information about this story or republishing this content, please contact [email protected]
