Reflections on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

Over many years I have taught and immersed myself in Homer’s Odyssey, from leading studies for 10-year-olds to accompanying adults from all over the world through the poem both virtually and in person on the Greek island of Agistri. Each person creates their own poem from Homer’s words and images – I honour that – and those who take the epic from the page to stage or screen in turn influence the way many others understand the work. This is why the Salon community worked to present carefully selected passages in our recent Odyssey Live! event staged in collaboration with Theatro Technis in London.

I watched Christopher Nolan’s film at the London IMAX on the day it opened. The cinema was packed and tickets had been sold out for weeks. Everyone is talking about this film and I am LOVING the buzz around it!

Many people have asked me what I thought about the movie. As a film, I found it startling, to the point of being overwhelming. It saddens me a little that what film makers think we need is always something bigger, louder, brighter. It was certainly big, it was definitely loud and it was visually stunning! The experience and vision of the film really stayed with me, it was powerful. But, a few days on, some of the aspects that Nolan has chosen to shift, or mute, or totally disregard began to discomfit me.

In our present moment – with a sense of impending apocalypse from so many directions – we have such a strong need to be able to clearly figure the enemy. Perhaps this is what prompts Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic to bleach so many of the characters of both their subtlety and their complexity. For me this is not just a male/female issue as some commentators have suggested, although Nolan’s treatment of the female characters gives us a useful example of this reduction.

Circe is my particular issue. I really celebrate the focus on craft and artistry in Samantha Morton’s portrayal of Circe, and I was hypnotised by her remodelling the faces of the warriors as though they were clay. This absolutely captures what later poets (Louise Gluck, for example) have suggested: Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men shows them for the swine they are – greedy, gluttonous and lacking in manners.

But what we lose in Nolan’s portrayal is the strenuous back and forth exchange of power between Odysseus and Circe. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus is able to resist Circe’s enchantments through Hermes’ gift of the Moly – she is aghast when she cannot turn him into a pig, he threatens her at sword point, she welcomes him as equal and then seduces him, he requests that his men are turned back into their human form, she aquiesces, and then they spend a delicious year of food, libation and love, with Odysseus’s men also fed and satiated.  Crucially, Circe is the source of the information Odysseus needs to continue his journey to Ithaca, and she gives this willingly as a good friend would.

In Nolan’s version, Circe loses all her fine surroundings and becomes a rough artisan whose skills are infused with a magical element. But at a cloying word from Odysseus, she collapses into a servile position and, after changing the men back, there is no further exchange between them. Her power is thwarted, her intelligence undervalued, and her role is reduced to no more than a brief moment in the adventures.

Nolan focuses on battles and violent encounters; these go on and on as though the camera is in thrall to the barbarism of what we do to each other.  Perhaps we find these epic film battles particularly satisfying at a time when it is harder and harder to figure out who the enemy is and the nature of the threat they represent. The enemies in my life today are greedy tech bros and appallingly stupid and avaricious politicians, not noble adversaries I can confront in combat.

While the challenge of the warrior-hero returning from war – not to mention adapting to being a king and a husband and a father – is certainly a theme of Homer’s  original; this is balanced with the meaning of HOME and the difficulty of returning to the place that is at the core of our being. Anyone who has left home – willingly or not – holds an idea of what they have lost that becomes calcified and coloured with imagination and the ache of nostalgia. For reasons both concrete and subtle, that idea of home becomes hard to match with reality given the passage of time and change. I had a startling experience recently in Estonia as I shared a table and started talking with a man and his son, to whom he was suggesting places to visit in Tallinn. He had left his homeland of Russia twenty years before, and his eyes grew teary: “I have lost my motherland.” I felt a clang of recognition: me too, my friend, although we come from such different worlds. Homer has Odysseus give voice to his recognition, in the kingdom of the Phaeacians, of a love of the true pleasures of home: a partner with whom you can celebrate the joys of shared friends and good food. The complexity of Homer’s vision is broad enough to show what connects different peoples as well as what divides. 

Narrative form is much better able to hold complexity than film, and Nolan’s enactment of The Odyssey demonstrates this. As others such as Emily Hauser and Catherine Shroad have already noted, the film’s portrayal flattens some of the complexity of character that makes the poem so absorbing, reminding us that any re-imagining of this foundational epic will inevitably reflect the values and preoccupations of the producer/writer/translator. 

In the original epic, Athena is Odysseus’s champion. She is willing to stand up to her father and remind him of the agony Odysseus has suffered, even though Zeus has just railed against mortals as being responsible for their own suffering – an observation amply demonstrated by Odysseus in his taunting and boasting to Polyphemus. However, in Nolan’s telling Athena drifts around Odysseus as a thin and insubstantial presence, tearing up and occasionally offering advice.

Penelope too is simplified: she expresses a hunger for power, for the throne, that is totally antithetical to Homer’s portrayal and to what a loyal wife of the time would do.

Even Odysseus is no longer a complicated man, rather he is a regretful warrior with a singular note of nobility. Personally, I find this less interesting than Homer’s wily and steadfast hero.

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how we wandered and was lost . . .
Tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.”

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2018)

Nolan’s film has helped me to clarify to myself what I enjoy about Homer’s rich and multi-faceted text, and am thrilled that it has excited people around the world to want to learn more about the epic. I hope that this curiosity translates into exploring  Homer’s broader vision and a realisation that we are ALL complicated people. Above all, I am grateful to Christopher Nolan for making a film that has ignited new enthusiasm for a story that remains as relevant to the world today as it was nearly three thousand years ago.