It's Complicated: Nolan's Odyssey

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Hannah and this is Hannah's Books. Yesterday, after a somewhat unpleasant and complicated morning, I took myself out to lunch and then on a lark to the movie theater. That's a rare thing for me, but on hot summer days, it feels like the perfect treat.

[00:00:20]The local theater that plays everything from the quirky to artouse films was not on my path, but I stopped at a mainstream theater that was, thinking I would go see maybe Supergirl or Nolan's Odyssey and that I would choose only based on the timing of the next show.

[00:00:41]So, The Odyssey won.

[00:00:43]Now, if I had known that I was going to see this movie, I would have poked through Emily Wilson's translation last night in preparation. I wrote her translation, which starts out describing Adysius as a complicated man when it was first published, and I enjoyed it very much. Before that, I had read several other translations over the years. Fagel is my personal favorite, but rumor has it that Wilson's translation inspired Nolan as he began to work on the movie.

[00:01:15]I only read these translations for fun, and I have never studied Homer in the classroom at all, except when I buddy read the Iliad and the Odyssey with my homeschooling son back when he was in seventh or eighth grade.

[00:01:30]At least back then, I believe his favorite translation was done by Stanley Lombardo, if I'm remembering correctly, a translator who doesn't get talked about a lot here on book. But the Lombardo version has some of the same energy and speed that Wilson's translation has.

[00:01:50]In addition to the fact that I am a scholar, neither of film nor of Homer, there's another factor that might complicate my discussion of this film, and that is my hearing. As many of you know, the acoustic nerve on my right side was severed a few decades ago, leaving me completely deaf on one side.

[00:02:10]And that makes it difficult for me to decode words when there's a lot of background noise. If actors are directly facing the screen and I know the basic context, I can often lipre sometimes in those situations, but that was clearly impossible here. I use captions for television, but here the assisted hearing device in the movie theater just makes things louder. And the noise of this film was already absolutely astounding to me. This was the loudest film I have ever been to. I felt like I was in a war zone for three hours with not only enormous sound, but the seats feeling like bombs were going off underneath. All of that is to say that I missed quite a bit of the dialogue. My gut is that any viewer would miss some dialogue during this constant explosion of a movie. So, I said I wasn't planning to see this film yesterday.

[00:03:11]The huge amount of drama about Nolan's Odyssey did not make it at all interesting to me. Assuming this isn't your first time here, you know, I help progressive politics and usually don't mind if modern film adaptations consider new ways to speak to contemporary audiences.

[00:03:31]What I dislike in general is efforts to stir up controversy just for clicks or whatever. I've mostly skipped every YouTube video about the controversy that has appeared on my homepage knowing that it would turn me off.

[00:03:45]But today, I found myself in that theater seat nonetheless.

[00:03:50]Let me start with my take on the casting and the presentation of the characters.

[00:03:56]First, I didn't hate Matt Damon as Adysius. In fact, originally, I had relatively high hopes. Although he isn't always thought of this way, Damon is a smart and nerdy man. When he was a college student at Harvard, he wrote the first draft of what eventually became Goodwill Hunting about a working-class young nerd who, while working as a janitor at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology, slipped in to solve advanced math problems on classroom blackboards. Then later on we see him talking in a bar about how various historians including Gordon Wood thought about the evolution of plantation economy in the antibbellum south.

[00:04:41]Later in the movie we learn about some of the complexities of the characters early life.

[00:04:48]I say all this to establish that Matt Damon understands the idea of a complicated man. And as I quoted earlier, Wilson translates Adysius to be a quote complicated man.

[00:05:04]Nevertheless, what we see over and over and over in Nolan's film is that Adysius is skilled. Skilled with weaponry primarily. He can string a bow too strong for all other men, for example.

[00:05:21]But the translator says Adysius was a complicated man.

[00:05:26]Adysius is so skilled that he can shoot an arrow through the narrowest space through a helmet directly into someone's eye.

[00:05:34]But Wilson says he was a complicated man. And Fagel says Adysius was a man of twists and turns. Fitzgerald says he was skilled in all ways of contending.

[00:05:46]Mendlesson says he had so many roundabout ways.

[00:05:51]All the translators I've ever seen have in the opening of the text somehow found a way to emphasize that there was something a little tricky about Adysius.

[00:06:01]That he was something other than just a great warrior capable of leading other warriors and killing anyone he had a mind to kill. He could think and outmaneuver the other people around him, often in unexpected ways. He was cunning and wily, even a trickster.

[00:06:22]And yet, until quite near the end of the film, no one basically ignores whatever trickster characteristics Adysius might have. Instead, we get super dramatic fight scene after fight scene where obviously Adysius is going to win.

[00:06:40]One more comment on Matt Damon is Adysius. I'm sorry, I don't remember who said this, but some very clever person on YouTube early on pointed out that Adysius should not have a Boston accent since everyone knows that Ithaca is in New York.

[00:06:57]I don't exactly hate Tom Holland as Tyus either. Actually, I was intrigued just for a moment, as I considered that Nolan might surprise us and use the other Tom Holland, the classical historian, in the role. But alas, that would have made the problem I was having with Spider-Man as Tyus, even worse. Holland is 30 years old, and he very much looks it. The other Holland must be nearing 60. If the younger Tom was really Adysius's son, he simply would have himself become the king of Ithaca, there would be no need for suitors and a new king. Nor would a fully mature 30-year-old have the kind of daddy issues that Telmicus has in the Odyssey.

[00:07:48]And Tom Holland, as well as Matt Damon and all the other actors, speak their lines with incredible stiffness. I can only imagine that this was a specific directorial decision, which I do not understand. But let's go on. Despite rumors that Elliot Paige would play Achilles in Nolan's film, that is not the role he plays. Instead, he is the character Sinon. Sinon is not a character in the Odyssey traditionally and not in the Iliad either. The character is not homeriic at all. He's from Virgil's Anid where he's sort of a Greek trickster that convinces the Trojans to bring the horse into the walls of the city. In fact, trickster is a charitable translation of the name Sinaon. It means liar or misleader.

[00:08:38]But Nolan turns that portrayal around completely. Where Son seems unaware of the trickery of the Trojan horse. I guess it's not surprising that Nolan effectively erases that trickster aspect of Simon's character, given that he eliminates the trickster aspect of Adysius, too. But now that I think about it, Paige looks young and innocent enough that he might have made a much more convincing Tyicus than Holland did.

[00:09:08]At first, I was thrilled to see Bill Irwin on the cast list. He's been a favorite of mine since I had the wild and totally random opportunity to have a one-on-one dinner with him in the late 1980s in a college cafeteria.

[00:09:23]The way he could move his body is astonishing.

[00:09:28]But here in Nolan's Odyssey, I hated the way he was directed to portray Polyphimas, the Cyclops, a violent scene that seemed to take more time than the entirety of Adysius's full year with Cersei. For example, the psychop scene was just one of many that seemed overwhelmingly artificial to me. I found that tremendously off-putting throughout the entire movie.

[00:09:54]I've heard there was no use of AI or CGI or even green screens. So perhaps the intensely artificial appearance was the result of using 70mm IMAX for the filming when I saw it on a nonMAX screen.

[00:10:13]I think Lepito Niongo was fine as Helena Troy. It's quite a small role really.

[00:10:20]She is a gorgeous woman obviously, which is more or less all that's essential for the part. A lot of people seem to be upset that she was chosen specifically because of her racial background. I'm not talking about the insistence that anyone playing Helen Troy must be white, although some people did indeed claim exactly that. I'm talking instead about the folks who felt that Nolan chose her not just because she's beautiful enough to play the most beautiful woman in the world, but instead specifically because it would shock some viewers.

[00:10:51]I get that point here. Sort of a casting version of clickbait merely designed to stir up attention. But personally to me, that seems almost like a tempest in a teapot. Merely about that original casting process rather than about the actual actor and how she acted.

[00:11:08]What did really strike me as I was watching is that Nian really stands out in her scenes. Yes, she stands out because she is stunningly beautiful, but Nolan also makes use of her racial difference in scenes to distinguish her as unique.

[00:11:26]And when I started thinking about how Nolan relied on her color rather than just her beauty to make Helen seem more special, it started to feel a little bit more uncomfortable to me. That doesn't mean Yango was a poor choice, just that I question Nolan's motives here a bit, and he doesn't really give her enough screen time to let her develop a meaningful presence in the movie in any other ways.

[00:11:52]Meanwhile, Zenaia plays the role of an Athena substitute. Athena was the Greek god of wisdom and warfare, and in Humber's text, she's only one of the powerful gods in the Greek society. But here in Nolan, she's the only image of divinity to get any screen time at all.

[00:12:11]And she's not particularly noticeable or powerful, and in fact, not even the god herself, if I understood correctly. In Homer, she's a strong and powerful female character. But Nolan translates Athena into basically a meek little ghost or Eko who looks sad whenever Odysius makes poor decisions.

[00:12:34]I suspect she was directed to act this way, to be less like a god, because who believes in powerful female gods these days and more like a pretend friend or maybe a Jiminy Cricut style conscience on the shoulder.

[00:12:51]Athena is one of the most powerful figures in all of Homer, but Nolan only gives us a radically diminished mirror of her. If she were a male god, I might say that no one had castrated her.

[00:13:07]Anne Hathaway plays Penelopey and she gives one of the stronger performances in the film in my opinion, although she is really quite flat herself.

[00:13:17]First, her inability to weave at all after all these years in Ithaca was unforgivable. At some point very late in the game, Penelope expresses her great irritation that women were not allowed to be queens. This scene has been called out as woke. Would a woman of that time say such a thing? Well, I don't know enough Greek history to know that for sure. My understanding is that there were female leaders in the classical world, including in the Odyssey. And obviously, Ithaca has done just fine for 20 years without a male leader.

[00:13:54]Also, to be honest, it doesn't feel at all woke or cutting edge anymore to make that kind of objection to gender inequality.

[00:14:03]When Charlotte Bronte has Jane Air go into a more universal version of that same kind of tirade way back in 1847 was a little more unusual and a little more effective.

[00:14:16]We see that same kind of thing when Cersei talks about why she's changing Adysius's men into pigs, saying something like, "These men should be pigs because they acted like pigs." This is a startling scene visually, intense and grotesque, perhaps the most memorable in the entire film. But very quickly, Adysius convinces Cersei that the men are really not all that bad.

[00:14:44]What we don't see is what is in the home text that Adysius had to agree to a one-year long sexual relationship and he wasn't always itching to leave.

[00:14:56]His men had to convince him that it was finally time to go.

[00:15:02]Some people are complaining that this is so-called woke feminism, but it feels like anything but. Some of the female characters in Homer's original are powerful and fierce, vengeful even.

[00:15:15]They're often working against the men, and they're often in a more controlling position sexually. That's the wrong word. Position implies physicality, and that's not what I mean here at all.

[00:15:25]Maybe a more controlling situation would be more appropriate.

[00:15:29]Their power and their sexuality weren't necessarily good things at all, as seen by listeners of the day.

[00:15:38]But it seems awfully weird to have female characters express less strength in a modern adaptation than they did in ancient texts.

[00:15:48]I'm not going to go through all the characters and cast members, but I will say that I was surprised to see Boderek apparently playing Calypso on the beach and Darth Vader playing the role of Agamimnon.

[00:16:00]I really should talk more about Calypso, though. She gets more screen time across the three-hour film than any woman other than Penelopey, although it is still quite limited, even though Adysius stayed with Calypso for seven years.

[00:16:15]More importantly, in the movie, she's basically a sweet, powerless woman trying to help Adysius recover from trauma and get on home to his family.

[00:16:26]That is not the Calypso I love reading about in Homer, who imprisons Adysius, not with violence, but with escapism, with the promise of a comfortable world that never changes over time. It's not even the complicated Calypso that Suzanne Vega created, nor was Cersei the complicated Cersei that Maline Miller created in her fairly simple book. She is a captor and she is a caretaker as well and Calypso argues viferously with Zeus about the double standard applied to male and female gods. This is true in all the translations I've seen, not some inauthentic picture supposedly stuck in by Emily Wilson. Calypso is complicated, kind and yet deceitful, moral and amoral at once, we might say. A theme of complexity, as we've seen, that threads throughout this entire text here in Nolan, Calypso is merely trying to take care of Adysius, apparently sublimating her own needs and desires completely. She keeps him on the island in the most harmless way possible to care for his mental health for his shell shock. She was apparently just waiting until he was ready to move on.

[00:17:50]Homer does show us at the end of their time together that she loves him. She basically has Adysius forcibly taken away from her by male gods, but she accepts that she is not his choice and helps him return home.

[00:18:10]Perhaps this is what Nolan is trying to show or imitate, but it's clear in Homer that for years Calypso kept him prisoner with very different intentions.

[00:18:22]So, let me summarize the portrayal of Cersei and Calypso. Of the 10 years when Adysius slowly makes his way home, he spends an entire year with Cersei and seven with Calypso. But they are barely addressed in Nolan's film. Part of that's because Nolan's movie focuses merely on Adysius's ability to wield a sword or bow and arrow rather than the issue of his intellectual and emotional complexity. In Homer's text, powerful women can ensnare him, and he often doesn't really seem to mind, despite the fact that he does continue to have the long-term goal of returning home to Penelope.

[00:19:01]Nolan barely mentions any of that. And then there's the major female character in Homer's Odyssey that does not appear at all in Nolan's Odyssey. That is the potential love interest Nasica, a woman who did not capture Adysius as her sex slave, but in whose family home Adysius spends some time. It's a fascinating plot line in the text and yet another complex characterization in the story, but Nolan utterly erases that entire part of the plot. And even the female servants in Ithaca have little role in Nolan's version, who completely ignores their crucial last scene.

[00:19:42]I could go on about this, but instead I'll try to sum it up. Female characters are given enormously short shift in this retelling of the Odyssey compared to what we find in Homer, no matter whose translation we use. The idea that 2500 years ago we had a much fuller presentation of women is honestly shocking.

[00:20:02]In fact, the presence of all these complex women, these complicated and powerful women, is why people sometimes suggest that Homer was a woman. Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that literally.

[00:20:15]I think scholars usually describe Homer as a composite of creators accreted over time. But Homer did clearly have an interest in deep portrayals of both men and women, both humans and gods. And we don't really see either in Nolan's version.

[00:20:32]Nolan is trying really hard to make his movie feel even more relevant for today.

[00:20:38]As several commentators have pointed out, he's thinking about the fear of outsiders, questions of imperialism, including the imperialism of the self and societal decline in ways that are not explicit in the home ethics, but resonate for us.

[00:20:58]I was surprised to see a very different kind of modernization too. Norman one draws what I think of as a Christian version of the very much pre-Christian Adysius in Homer when very explicitly about the feelings of sin and guilt and about the need for repentance and the importance of forgiveness and confession. Is that Penelopey standing behind that ornate confession screen taking in the words of the disguised Adysius?

[00:21:30]I was struck by the ending of the film too, which I won't describe other than to say it's an extension of the theme of repentance and the redemption, leaving us with that as the final message.

[00:21:42]And maybe that's the root of this thing.

[00:21:46]Instead of the complicated trickster portrayal of Adysius we get in Homer, Nolan gives us characters who are complicated primarily in their pattern Christian or perhaps Judeo-Christian view of moral choices.

[00:22:02]This kind of thinking motivates most of Nolan's Adysius with a contemplative style that we start to see especially during the later part of the film. And this fact might explain Nolan's choice of Matt Damon as his star. Yes, Damon has played lots of Dubro action type characters over the years, but he does have a specific kind of interiority that we usually don't see in Homer's Adysius, which does fit with this kind of protochristian style, the concerns about guilt and repentance.

[00:22:36]While I love stories about the difficulties of moral ambiguity and moral grappling, I don't think that approach works well with the power of Homer's Odyssey.

[00:22:49]One last quick thing to end on. I was crushed that many of my very favorite parts of the Odyssey did not appear in this movie. A couple of examples. First, we didn't get the nobody joke with the Cyclops.

[00:23:04]And more importantly, we didn't get the bed made out of the tree for Pete's sake. That's like cutting out the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. What was Nolan thinking?

[00:23:17]Okay, that will do it for today's video.

[00:23:19]Thank you so much for joining me here on Hail's Books. See you soon.