The Trojan Horse dragged on its side. Realistic—it would fall over if they pulled it the usual way, the way you always see pictured. But even so, downbeat. This isn’t a proud, pagan-warrior sort of heroic epic, not as written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Odysseus (Matt Damon) turns out to be guilt-ridden over his past. The ocean isn’t wine-dark, it’s gray and grayish-white. The sun’s usually missing and the girls aren’t hot. Helen and Clytemnestra are the exceptions because they’re played by Lupita Nyong’o, who’s beautiful and has skin dark enough to withstand the film’s lighting, an indifferent force that leaves Anne Hathaway and Charlize Theron looking brutally scraped and bleached (the cinematographer’s Hoyte van Hatema).
The Nolan Odyssey is a riveting film, but it’s no fun. I watched every second and so did everyone else in the audience (no coughs, no movement, everybody with eyes bolted to the screen). But I wouldn’t see the movie again. This is a film made with great skill and a unique sense of what the director wants on screen. The cast of A-list actors does well by Nolan’s capable script. But the script’s about suffering and social collapse, and the film’s keynote isn’t danger or wonder, it’s emotional intensity—two hours and 50 minutes of it. The movie’s crowded by relentless close-ups as profiles exchange dialogue. We see expanses of white skin glaring with white highlights; we see Robert Pattinson’s stubble of black, individually squatting face hairs; we see Zendaya’s face looking like an upside-down, lady-size catcher’s mitt; we Anne Hathaway’s face suddenly expanding like a valve when she gives an angry speech (Penelope wants respect for her years as Ithaka’s in-effect ruler). As the faces intone urgently and intensely, there’s the endless knocking, thrumming, and intoning of the soundtrack, which is liberal with electronic sounds. In short you get worked over.
The movie’s striking to look at but not gorgeous; the eye doesn’t feast, it comes to terms with. The panorama of the landscape outside Troy, studded with the armor of the dead, is beautiful but grotesque, and the composition is challenging instead of graceful. Other long shots feature figures who are isolated in the background but prominent because they’re at the top of a screen otherwise filled by darkness, obstructions, or fire. Most films compose shots to offer up what you’re supposed to see; this one plays a modified sort of keep-away that makes you lean in. It’s not comfortable.
Spectacle isn’t the point. The Cyclops is certainly done well, both as monster and cave dweller (like an enlarged Gollum with a suggestion of the white worm about him; eye’s set vertically, on its tip; mouth so small and set at such a twist, it looks like it’s just hanging on), but he’s done briefly. The sirens are barely seen and they’re heard not at all; instead Damon carries the situation, lashed to the mast and emoting in bellows. Circe does turn men into pigs, and again the scene’s well handled (the gimmick here is that she pulls on a man’s chin and brow until his face changes shape, which it does with a cracking sound like the ones in An American Werewolf in London). But again, it’s brief. Add up the movie’s special effects and you get 10 minutes or less. The mythical wonders are expertly done fan service. They’re there because you don’t have The Odyssey without Circe, sirens, and Cyclops. But they don’t matter much to the film.
No gods appear except Athena, and all she does is walk up to Odysseus and lend an ear when he’s troubled. By the end of the film we’ve discovered that really she’s a figment, a device his mind created to help him wrestle with his personal issues. These are emotional and socially consequential. As discussed here, the code of xenia, the obligation of sheltering and feeding strangers who came to your home, held together society in the age of Homer. Nolan’s film highlights the violations of this bond and presents these violations as signaling the collapse of Bronze Age civilization.
At times the script does so bluntly. Woody Allen once played a Medieval jester who said the Renaissance was on its way “and we’re all gonna be painting.” For his part, Matt Damon roars at the film’s climax, “This is the end of our age of bronze.” Before that his Odysseus confided to Athena how he’d betrayed social trust by fooling the Trojans into getting themselves killed. Of course the Greek army wasn’t the Trojans’ host or guest (and the suitors in Ithaka were a biker gang occupying Odysseus’ home). But never mind. Odysseus, a warrior celebrated by Homer for strategy, calculation, guile—for trickiness—is downcast because he fooled the Trojans and they died. One gathers that Nolan has a weakness for conscience-tortured men with the world’s weight on their shoulders. But Oppenheimer felt guilty about inventing the atomic bomb. Odysseus just feels guilty for being Odysseus; then damn, there goes the Bronze Age.
The big themes look better if you skip thinking and simply admire their bulk. Guilt, suffering, social collapse: three big slabs lean together, and of them collapse is the heaviest. Today’s left and right agree on one thing: that our society’s entering a crisis brought about by the other side’s behavior. Whatever keeps people from sawing off the branch we’re all sitting on, we no longer take that restraint for granted. The result is a steady, low-level fear that has settled among us. I think it provides the new Odyssey with a good deal of impact.
Enough Hollywood dramas have succeeded without making the greatest sense. The Odyssey is the latest, but also it’s more than that. This Hollywood blockbuster is a disturbing, astringent, aesthetically challenging work. Nobody knew they wanted a movie like this until Nolan dreamed it up and put it before them. Don’t see The Odyssey if you want fun, but maybe see it anyway. When the final credits rolled at my showing, there was a spatter of applause that quickly turned into a ripple, at which point it rose up long enough to be considered general. Then it dissolved, as if the point had been made and everyone could now check their phones or shuffle for the exits. But it was still a round of applause, and I can’t remember the last time I heard that in a movie theater.