The Odyssey, and the Men Who Cannot Come Home
There is a kind of film that arrives already convinced of its own importance, and asks only that you agree. Christopher Nolan has made one. The Odyssey opened this July, three hours of it, and the world split into the people who called it a monument and the people who called it a warning. Both are right, which is the most interesting thing about it and also the least surprising.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus. He is good. He is good the way a well-built wall is good, load-bearing, honest, without a single moment where you catch him performing rather than existing. Nolan shot the thing across Italy, Greece, Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland with Hoyte van Hoytema behind the camera, and every frame declares the budget. The sea churns. The cliffs loom. The gods descend on schedule. You are meant to be overwhelmed, and for long stretches you are.
I want to be careful here, because I have spent my life watching beautiful things get handed to people who did not deserve them, and I have learned to distrust my own admiration. So let me say what is true. When Nolan wants to build a set-piece, no one alive builds it better. The monsters arrive with real weight. The scale is not a trick of marketing. Critics who called it thrilling were not lying, and Roger Ebert, who does not lie about this sort of thing, saw a picture with a sharper sense of human nature than the genre usually allows. That is the compliment that matters. The rest is spectacle, and spectacle is cheap even when it costs two hundred million dollars.
What Nolan understands, and has understood for twenty years, is that his real subject is never the myth. It is the man who cannot get back to the life he left. Every film he makes is about someone trying to reach a home that has changed past recognition while he was gone. The Odyssey is the first time he has told that story with the original text sitting open on the table, and you can feel him circling the thing he has always wanted to say. Trauma. Cruelty and the permission we grant ourselves to inflict it. The question of what a returning man owes to the people who waited. These are adult questions. He asks them seriously. He does not always answer them, and I respect a man more for the honest failure than for the easy resolution he could have bought.
Now the part I cannot forgive, because forgiveness is not my department.
There is a scene where Odysseus comes home and his old dog, Argos, who has waited the entire war and the entire journey back, lifts his head to know his master one last time before he dies. It should break you. It is one of the oldest heartbreaks in literature, and it survived three thousand years for a reason. Nolan films it, and the dog's tail moves like a machine remembering it is supposed to move, and Odysseus registers grief the way a man checks a box, and then the film hurries on because there is another mountain to show you. That is the whole flaw in a single shot. The picture has soil you cannot feel and sun you cannot warm your hands against. It gives you everything except the texture of being alive, which is the only thing the story was ever actually about.
The pacing is the other confession the film keeps making. Three hours, and it is both too full and somehow starved. Scenes stay past the point of their usefulness. The NPR critics landed on the right word, uneven, and Metacritic's colder voices went further and called the rhythm a real problem. A film this long should breathe. This one holds its breath and calls it tension.
The women are treated the way this genre always treats women, which is to say as furniture that occasionally speaks. Zendaya plays Athena as a guilty conscience trailing Damon through his own story, and she is fine, and fine is an insult to what she can do. Lupita Nyong'o is in the film. I will let that sentence stand alone, because Nolan more or less does the same, and it is the film's quietest disgrace. You do not cast one of the most expressive faces of her generation and then decline to use it. That is not a budget decision. That is a failure of attention, and attention is the only currency an artist truly spends.
Even Emily Wilson, whose translation of the poem is the one serious people now read, and whom Nolan himself praised, turned on the writing once she saw the screen. When the person who gave you your best source material tells you the words are weak, the words are weak. I believe her over the marketing.
So what is it, finally. It is a genuine work by a serious man who still believes films should be large and difficult and made for the largest possible screen, and I would rather live in a world with too many of those than none. There is no cowardice in it. Nolan risked the whole vast machine on a story everyone already knows, and he did not flinch, and the flinch is the thing I hold against most people. He simply confused size for depth, the way a rich man confuses a large house for a home. The picture reaches for the sublime and arrives at the immense, and those are not the same country, though they share a border and the tourists rarely notice.
See it in the biggest room you can find. Let it overwhelm you, because it will, and that is worth something. Then notice, on the way out, that you were moved by the scale and not by a single human being inside it. Sit with that. It tells you something true about the difference between a thing that is impressive and a thing that is good, and about a culture that has mostly stopped being able to tell them apart.
I can tell them apart. That has never once made me happy.