The Odyssey (The Movie)

It has been a year since Christopher Nolan's new film version of The Odyssey was first advertized. It has been a long - if ultimately worthwhile - wait. 

I first read Homer's The Odyssey in high school. When I first read its companion epic, The Iliad, I had the striking experience of realizing that I knew much of the story already, because I had read the Classic Comics version of it years earlier as a boy sitting in the barbershop waiting for a haircut! (My mother wasn't a big fan of comics, and most of my childhood comic book reading was while waiting for haircuts at the neighborhood barbershop.) The Odyssey, however, when I first encountered it in high school, was completely new to me, and it seemed so completely unlike any of the heroic comics (e.g., Superman, Batman) I had earlier been accustomed to reading on haircut days.

The Odyssey is the putative sequel to The Iliad, that other great Greek epic set in the "Heroic" bronze age, what is sometimes called the "palace" culture of Mycenaean Greece, which came to an apparently abrupt end early in the 12th-century B.C. Together, The Iliad and The Odyssey are the foundational texts of our civilization and of western literature. Both were originally orally recited poems, dating from the much poorer "Archaic Age" (c. 800 B.C.), which looked back nostalgically to that much more glamorous heroic era, the familiar stories from which were well known to the audiences that listened to their recitation. 

In its 12,000+ lines,The Odyssey tells the story of the resourceful and cunning Greek hero Odysseus' prolonged, danger and adventure-filled journey home to Ithaca from the Greek victory in the Trojan War. As such, it is one of the world's oldest adventure stories, richer in many respects than the contemporary superhero adventure stories that typically clutter our modern movie screens. Indeed, as classicist (and Odyssey translator) Daniel Mendelsohn put it, The ‘Odyssey has "bequeathed to the West entire genres” - from science fiction to romantic comedy.

Odysseus is a "hero" in the ancient sense of someone with extraordinary physical and mental prowess who was successful in war.- not in the modern sense of a morally virtuous figure deserving of admiration and emulation. His epic journey highlights the uncertain character of life in an ancient world, which was harsh, unpredictable, and subject to the whims of gods who behave as badly as mortals but who possess so much more power. Odysseus was a relatively minor king among the Greek heroes, but he was not only a great warrior but also a "trickster," a clever, cunning and very shrewd schemer, author of the deceptive strategy remembered forever as the "Trojan Horse." 

Odysseus was favored by Athena (the only Olympian who appears personally in Nolan's film), but made a deadly enemy of Poseidon, the god of the sea and father of the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom he had blinded. The Greek gods are terrifying not only in their power but also in amoral arbitrariness toward mortals. (Unlike in The Iliad, where the gods are constantly active and involving themselves in the story, Odysseus is often on his own a lot of the time, which may make his story more relatably modern. On the other hand, whether Nolan's film may take that too far in diminishing the visible presence of gods other than Athena in the movie may be an argument worth having.) 

The Odyssey, however, is above all an epic story of longing for home (a Bronze-Age Wizard of Oz story). Odysseus - complex polytropos character that he is - does all sorts of things that imperil his eventual return. But, underneath it all, home is where he wants to be, with his long suffering faithful wife, Penelope (who serves as a sort of anti-type to Helen), and the son he hardly knows (who, in his own coming-of-age story, embarks on a journey of his own, which helps fill us in on familiar stories of the Trojan War's aftermath). Along the way, he and his crew encounter some superficially pleasant obstacles like the land of the Lotus Eaters and lots of deadly obstacles like the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis, . Even beautiful and powerful goddesses (like Circe with whom Odysseus willingly spends a year and Calypso with whom he somewhat less willingly spends seven more years) ultimately cannot compare with his wife, who faithfully awaits his return, skillfully manipulating the suitors who greedily compete to replace her husband. Their final reunion is a romantic panegyric to marital love. His homecoming is in every way the opposite of Agamemnon's ill-fated return home, but both share the same overwhelming atmosphere of violent revenge.

Odysseus' complicated and problematic journey also expresses the anxieties that accompany the adventure of sailing on strange seas, something which would certainly have resonated with ancient Greeks sailing the Mediterranean Sea, setting out for far-flung parts of their known world. Odysseus also undertakes the most fearsome journey of all - to the house of Hades, the home of the dead, where the spirit of fallen warriors articulate a very Greek appreciation of the tragedy of human mortality.

Christopher Nolan's unsurprisingly very long movie version of the ancient epic captures the extreme expansiveness of this universal adventure story and homecoming tale in modern form, filled with the high-tech special effects that successively make this ancient adventure story a visually extravagant modern summer blockbuster. Nolan's film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus,  Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope, and Tom Holland as his son, Telemachus. These are familiar actors, and so their casting creates familiar expectations.

Thus, one expects a Matt Damon Odysseus to be a somewhat relatable everyman, and for the most part so he is. To the extent that this is a story saturated with universal themes - loss, longing for home, marital love, growing up, the ravages of war - that may be a legitimate way to go, one which may make the ancient epic more relatable to modern audiences. But it remains an ancient epic about a mythic ancient hero, about people very different from ourselves, about their gods, and about a pre-Christian culture imbued with a very different psychology and moral sensibility from ours. Some of that may inevitably be lost when Odysseus becomes too relatable. Thus, the translator Daniel Mandelson recently remarked that, while more colloquial translations' styles may be legitimate, he personally prefers a slightly more formal style, highlighting the fact that this was in fact a grand formal poem, filled with ancient emotions and rituals that ought not to be made to seem too familiar. (One thinks of the Jacobean translators of the King James Bible who deliberately used understandable but slightly archaic-sounding Elizabethan English to convey a sense of the special sacrality of their text.). In this regard, perhaps, Nolan's effort would have benefited from more appearances by the gods - not just for authenticity's sake of fidelity tot he text but also to remind us that Odysseus and his interlocutors, however universally human we may imagine them, were not exactly people just like us. 

It is perhaps inevitable that a modern audience (or more to the point, perhaps, a modern director) demands a modern sensibility on a modern movie screen. Throughout the film, Nolan's Odysseus is just a tad more modern in his feelings and attitudes and responses to what happens than the ancient Odysseus would have been (or could have been). There is also a strange undercurrent of premonition that the heroic age is ending, that the ancient Mycenaean palace culture is about to be destroyed and give way to a "dark age." Homeric bards who sang this saga obviously knew that, but it is anachronistic in the extreme to attribute such an expectation to the era itself!

Homer looked back nostalgically to that great age of "Heroes." We judge that age by different standards, some of which inevitably creep into Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus. The epic itself ends on a triumphant note of vengeance and restoration. The movie, however, has a more morally ambivalent ending. Odysseus' gets his vengeance, and Telemachus gets his throne, but Odysseus seems anguished and repentant about his warrior life. He and Penelope, happily reunited, leave Ithaca together for some sort of voluntary expiatory exile. It is certainly a satisfactory ending, but undeniably a modern one.

L.P. Hartley's famous observation, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," remains relevant. We learn about ourselves from ancient classics - both from what is universal that we share with ancient people, and also from what was very different from us about those same ancient people.