Amid a week of wondering whether Elon Musk’s stupid bigotry would stick, and watching the director’s best films re-assessed and re-rated, I happily attended last Monday’s press screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without intention of reviewing. There’s great import and clarity to be gained in the pursuit of not reviewing cinema as crucial as this—the first entirely IMAX-shot drama, Nolan’s victory lap to his billion-dollar Oppenheimer Oscar sweep, a plain-spoken rendition of ancient Homeric verse—as merely a film fanatic. You allow its virtues and its vexations to hit you in real time, with only memory as your guide. And there’s a lot to remember about The Odyssey days after the screening, despite a lack of notes: the jokes of a friend in attendance to hold you (including observations about the oddly vaginal look of Bill Irwin’s Cyclops eye) and a powerful desire to see Nolan’s mythological tale of memory, war, and love’s triumph over everything again, as soon as its crowds thin. Nolan’s elegant, accessible erudition, his fine-art-as-blockbuster aesthetic, is always something best served twice: once hot, then cold.
Nolan’s wide-scale, post-David-Lean take on the world-weary warrior Odysseus’ journey is sumptuous and thrilling as every crevice—even the mist of shadow—comes alive in 70mm IMAX. And yet I can’t help thinking that as gorgeous and grotesque as The Odyssey looks on the widest of screens (and sounds, what with Ludwig Göransson’s score of the organically ancient and the industrial thrumming modern), couldn’t Nolan sword-and-sandal epic have done just as much with a Super 8 camera and a lute? In my mind, it’s The Odyssey—not so much Oppenheimer, despite its Best Actor wins, and certainly not counting Heath Ledger’s still-breathtaking capture of The Dark Knight’s Joker—that is Nolan’s best overall acted film by its most concise ensemble. This odd Odyssey cast manages to craft such luminous, ruminating character essays from what’s often less than ample origin-story detail (Homer was great with broad strokes and moralizing, not so much with detailed character studies), and Hoyte van Hoytema’s vast cinematography is devastating as it captures it all. Reliant on a palette of sepia, brown, bronze, and gold (by land) and gray (by sea), Nolan’s canvas is torturously endless and enveloping.
And still, his cast is bigger than the vista-vision of The Odyssey—especially in the case of Matt Damon as Odysseus. To be frank, I never really understood Damon’s appeal as a leading man. Sure, he always had this wayward-everyman/amiable-chap thing going for him, which therefore made him so effective as the good-not-so-good guy in The Departed and the first Bourne film, along with the naïve boytoy in Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic. But here, in the wasteland that is The Odyssey—hazy with the want of war and lotus flowers, lost in what his purpose could’ve ever been in the first place after decades away from his home, his hunting dog, his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland)—Damon portrays disillusionment with the weight of Brando in On the Waterfront, and vengeance with the cold passion of Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven if he was channeling Sonny Chiba’s saber-play.
Damon, however, is hardly the only surprise performance of The Odyssey. Playing the blind, blonde-haired swineherd Eumaeus, Odysseus’s faithful servant, John Leguizamo eats the screen every time he’s on it—even in the shadows, where he spends his time scheming, longing, and biding the years before his master arrives home. You always knew that Leguizamo was good, but you never grasped that he could be heartbreaking and poignant. The other thrilling performance is that of a surprisingly seductive Samantha Morton as Circe, the coy witch-goddess from the island of Aeaea who turns hungry soldiers into the pigs that they are through the simplest of well-shaded FX. If you’re the type to start thinking of acting awards, start with these three. Unless there’s also an award tailored to the specifications of Robert Pattinson’s squirrelly, scurrilous suitor demanding Penelope’s hand in marriage while she waits for her man to return home from the sea.
The Odyssey is not a perfect film by half. It’s about 20 minutes too long, and some of its FX (say, the Hydra) are incredibly, surprisingly—given the film’s $250 million budget—cheesy and underthought. Zendaya and her role as Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare and Odysseus’ protector, are vague and underutilized, while Elliot Page’s first soldierly scenes against the throes of the Trojan Horse (which really is shockingly tiny) seem silly until he appears later, grimier, in one of Odysseus’ darkest dreams. Holland is too slight to play even a slight son, and Lupita Nyong’o is only on screen for two minutes (so give me a break, MAGA). I had no idea that it was Benny Safdie portraying Agamemnon, the mighty king of Mycenae. And did I mention how squirrelly Pattinson tends to be, no matter what the epoch?
And for those tempted to go by Nolan’s own estimation that his is a 21st century Lawrence of Arabia, I’d like to argue that The Odyssey is so much more, with the grand violence of its sands and seas wrapped up in the enigma of Homer’s mythology, and its language tied up in the everyday conversation of guys standing on the corner.
