The Odyssey

My take on Christopher Nolan is that he’s far more successful making genre movies with an artful spin (Inception, Dunkirk, his Batman trilogy) than he is trying to make art films with genre elements (Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Tenet). But whichever flavor of Nolan you prefer, the ingredients all come together for The Odyssey, a Homeric adaptation that manages to be sprawling and intimate, episodic and cohesive all at once. The source material provides hubris, catharsis, hamartia, peripeteia, and every other Greek term you learned in drama class, and Nolan brings it all to the screen with both historical heft and contemporary flair.

The story is a cornerstone of drama itself: warrior Odysseus (Matt Damon), following his triumphs in the Trojan War, attempts to return home but encounters many obstacles along the way, from a terrifying Cyclops (Bill Irwin) to the literally bewitching Calypso (Charlize Theron). The longer Odysseus stays away, the more difficult it is for his loving wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to stave off the many suitors who seek to usurp Odysseus’ throne and his place in Penelope’s bed. Young prince Telemachus (Tom Holland) goes out to seek his father, while duplicitous suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson, complete with villain-bangs) plans to manipulate the situation in his favor.

Nolan’s love for non-chronological narrative can be exhausting — Tenet should have come with its own yarn-board — but he manages to jump around the saga of Odysseus in fascinating ways by moving from narrator to narrator, each providing a different flashback to bring us to Odysseus’ current state. They include Menelaus (Jon Bernthal), brother of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), and Odysseus’ devoted swineherd and fight trainer Eumaeus (John Leguizamo).

If it sounds like Nolan is spinning an impossible amount of plates here, he is, but even by his standards the cross-cutting and moments of circling back make for an impressive feat of storytelling. (He’s helped greatly by the wig team behind Damon’s beard — its length and color constantly lets us know where we are on the timeline.) The auteur’s script is matched by the film’s visual and aural pleasures: Nolan regular Hoyte van Hoytema makes great use of the IMAX screen, never providing a wide tracking shot when he can provide a very wide tracking shot, the kind of camera movement you can feel in your chest.

The film wisely acknowledges both the dramatic satisfaction of battlefield glory and the genuine pain and sorrow of war and its capacity to destroy loved ones, communities, civilizations. Ludwig Göransson’s score matches the story’s many tones, from thrilling bombast to mournful horns that call to mind Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels and its use of Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. That blend of majesty and tragedy is best encapsulated in the film’s Trojan horse, an object of beauty that’s also a trick and a trap, designed to backfire upon an unwitting enemy.

Damon is called upon to convey all of these conflicting notions, not only about warfare but also about the gods (he believes in Zeus’ version of the golden rule, yet he’s not above willfully offending Poseidon in the middle of an ocean voyage) and familial responsibility. As he did in Oppenheimer, Damon takes a role that could have been a stone-faced pillar of masculinity and instead finds notes of doubt, vulnerability, and even humor. The ensemble (which also includes Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Elliot Page, and Corey Hawkins) is excellent throughout, taking some of literature’s greatest larger-than-life characters and finding the beating heart within.

Peak Nolan involves a mix of popcorn delights and intellectual contemplation, and he has rarely brought those two notions together as skillfully as he as in The Odyssey. It’s an epic saga of an epic saga, worthy of its source.

Director: Christopher Nolan
Screenwriter: Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s Odyssey.
Cast: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Hamish Patel, Bill Irwin, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, Corey Hawkins, Mia Goth
Executive producer: Thomas Hayslip
Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan
Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Production design: Ruth De Jong
Editing: Jennifer Lame
Music: Ludwig Göransson
Sound design: David V. Butler, supervising dialogue & ADR editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Syncopy
In English
180 minutes