Disclaimer: I haven’t read any other reviews though I have listened to the one by Mark Kermode, as well as the accompanying interview with Nolan conducted by Simon Mayo. I’m also acutely aware that every Classicist and their Argos have since commented on the film. Below are my thoughts as a film goer with an interest in the tale, using my previous post as a leaping off point.
A brief biographical note about that interest: My first experience of the ancient world came in the mid 1980s in the form of the futuristic Franco-Japanese anime Ulysees 31 and the Jackanory Special: Odysseus, the greatest hero of them all, presented by Blackadder‘s Baldrick (the reason why I watched it in the first place), Tony Robinson, coming to you from a beach somewhere in the Mediterranean. I raced home from school to watch both on Children’s BBC. They are the reason why I went to university to study Classical Civilisation. The Odyssey was fundamental to what I ended up doing.
After my anticipatory post from last week, I’ve now since watched Nolan’s Odyssey. Here’s what I think and, perhaps more importantly, feel.
<Warning: contains some spoilers>
1. I had anticipated that it would be epic. It is. There are some truly jaw-dropping set pieces. Film gold, as Nolan put it in his interview mentioned above. Scenes such as the Sirens, Hades, Scylla, Cyclops. CIRCE. I saw it in IMAX. In the shipwreck scene, the sound alone pulled me up by the hairs on the back of my neck. The storm was fully immersive. You could feel the power of the gods, if that’s what the sea and storm represent, as Odysseus’s men believe. If not, the power of nature (is that any different anyway?). A warning for our times? Unlike so many sword and sandal epics, this felt big. Bigger than the ground-breaking Gladiator. Much bigger.
2. I had also thought that Nolan might play with time. (In his interview he mentions that the different narrative timelines attracted him to the Odyssey in the first place.) He does and in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. He makes a good decision to follow the poem’s initial focus on Telemachus and Ithaca, through which he’s also able to do some important scene-setting for an audience who aren’t going to be familiar with a lot of the material. But what impressed me most was his adaptation of Odysseus’s experiences. Out go the Phaiakians. Instead, Nolan concentrates the retelling of all those set-piece events on Odysseus’s stay with Kalypso. And he makes the Lotus eating an integral part of the recounting, as we see him trying to remember and recover his identity. Identity was the third theme that I highlighted in last week’s post as a consistent interest of Nolan’s. The focus on Odysseus’s re-membering was a neat turn, not least because identity and storytelling are so closely bound in the poem and recent critics, including the host of this blog, have written eloquently about Odysseus through the lens of cognitive studies and, especially, trauma. Odysseus comes across as someone traumatized by his experience of war. That’s a fair reading of the Odyssey and a smart adaptation for modern times.
3. What really struck me was Nolan’s daring decision to use an episode that doesn’t even appear in the Odyssey. Just a fleeting mention in book 8, when Odysseus (in disguise) asks a bard to perform one of the Troy story’s greatest hits: the one about the Trojan Horse. And, as Odysseus listened to it — this, his greatest trick celebrated in song — he “melted”, Homer tells us, “and shed warm tears, just like a woman weeps, as she falls to the ground to embrace her dear husband, and watches him die gasping for breath, before the spear is brought down heavily on her back and she’s carted off into slavery” (lines 521-530). Homer shows Odysseus weeping as if he were one of his own victims.
This focus on the aftermath of the Trojan Horse trick, the devastating consequences it has for all concerned, including our “hero”, is precisely what Nolan homes in on and uses as his connecting thread. For me, it’s a genius move. He latches on to something that’s briefly mentioned in the original poem, though critical to it as part of the deep background, and foregrounds it, using it to provide coherence to those episodic moments. I also found it deeply affecting. And here is the one spoiler that you might not want to read if you haven’t yet seen the film. When we finally witness the fall of Troy to its frenzied, grotesque conclusion, the puzzle of Odysseus’s suffering falls into place, just as the head of a defenceless Trojan woman falls — or, rather, as the camera cuts away and the head of Athena’s statue falls in its place. With just this one death, Nolan brings out the horror of the sack, its genocidal impulse. This is how war ends. And it haunts Odysseus. This girl is his Athena. Whether Athena takes on the face of the slaughtered Trojan, or whether Odysseus projects her face on to the god’s to “see” Athena, or whether Athena herself is simply part of Odysseus’s imagination — as though Athena represents his reason or conscience, an allegorical reading which is already present in antiquity — it’s impossible to say. But it’s deeply moving and one I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t expected Odysseus’s relationship with his patron goddess to be so damned sensitive. It’s beautiful, it’s affecting, it’s profoundly human.
Four further random observations:
– Nolan uses the grammar of cinema to tell the story. Much of that is non-verbal in the best traditions of silent cinema. This was most strikingly evident in the Cyclops scene, which in the poem is the wordiest scene with words being essential to Odysseus’s escape (and his fame, with the outis-mētis pun). In the film, the scene is played silently, with the exception of the sound of Cyclops devouring Odysseus’s men and their dying shrieks. This made it all the more alien, all the more horrifying. When words do come in, the effect is very different. When Odysseus and his men blind him, Cyclops’s screams give way to him verbalising his pain (in a foreign tongue). As one of Odysseus’s men says, they had no idea that he could talk. Why would Cyclops talk to ants, as Odysseus puts it — an arresting take on differences in perception. Perhaps, then, they could reason with him? To which we Odysseus quips — with a very different punchline — “we’ve probably gone beyond that”.
– The culminating palace scene pulsated. I don’t think that I breathed for its entirety. At some point I became aware that not all the suitors were being slaughtered, but many had been kneeling (when did that start?). A kind of reverse “captain, my captain”. I was touched by this as well.
– Agamemnon. Not so much the Dark Knight as a masked Ra’s al Ghul. Terrifying and an utter shit.
I’ll leave the last word to my non-academic mum. “That Samantha Morton: she had a bit of menace about her, didn’t she?”
