You have to
wait a long time for it, but there’s a decently good joke right at the end of
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey film.
It’s in the credits, where you’re told you’ve been watching ‘The
Odyssey, written & directed by Christopher Nolan’, and then, ‘based
on Homer’s Odyssey’, as if Nolan’s is the definitive version, the Greek’s
just a provisional draft (which of course it was until they made the mistake of
writing it all down, thus simultaneously putting a generation of bards out of
work and forcing them to re-train as textual analysts, a wretched profession).
Ownership
matters. There’s an odd, recurring phenomenon of people involved in real-life
events subsequently turned into films (the discovery of Richard
III’s burial is a recent example) complaining that the film tells lies
about them – as if the job of the film-maker is not to tell a story in the most
engaging and entertaining way available in the material (OK, Andy Warhol and
Paul Morrisey excepted) but to reproduce in documentary detail your own character
and personal experience of the events.
And in the case of this Odyssey, if social media’s indicative,
half of classical scholarship see it as grand larceny of their family jewels,
the other half accord it some bemused indulgence. And some of them hit the mark
in a weirdly mis-guided fashion. Emily
Wilson’s comments about the jarring disconnect between lavish spectacle and the
lack of psychologically convincing characters revealed in banal dialogue has
some justice (though as I’ll suggest later, perhaps not as much as you may
think). Personally I found the American suburbanisms of the dialogue jarring
too. But then I come from an Anglophone
sub-culture that expects cinematic pirates and seafarers (with the possible exception
of U-Boat commanders) to speak faultlessly posh King’s English. Wilson’s
comments make some sense – but would you really expect anything else of a
medium whose founding visual grammar of the close-up relying upon minute facial
nuances to speak volumes of emotion is currently being transformed into
something quite different by CGI and digitized spectacle suitable for the
dimensions of the IMAX screen?
So what’s
the view from the stalls of the tertium quid? And I should add that I’ve got skin in this
game too, being a writer of historical novels about the gospels that manage to
irritate Christian believers and biblical scholars alike, avid readers slightly
less so.
I watched The
Odyssey the other night – and did so through a long lens, the latest encounter
with the material that started with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The
Willows as a child and has since moved through James Joyce, Oh Brother
Where Art Thou?, Godard’s Le Mepris – and of course the English snapshot
translations of Homer’s own work-in-progress we all know and (mostly) love.
The first
thing that struck me afterwards was that, at 2 hours & 53 minutes, Nolan’s Odyssey
is really a half-a-dozen films shoe-horned into one. Which is fabulous value. With Polyphemus you get a Gillermo del Toro monster flick. Anne Hathaway
channels Maria Callas in Medea with hysterically repressed frenzy. Calypso
& Odysseus are stranded in a drug-sozzled Club Med beach-movie.
(Probably the least convincing thing about the entire film is Charlize Theron’s
perfect complexion surviving 7 years of sex on the beach in scorching sunshine). Samantha Morton is so obviously deranged in
her serial killer’s lair that a meze, never mind sex, is completely out of the
question – a suburban American Psycho’s vision of enchantment as domestic hell.
Agamemnon’s armour could go on as Darth Vader without rehearsal. And
the Laestrygonian Giants are Star Wars imperial storm-troupers fallen to
earth. (And No, I’m not interested in
comments pointing out where George Lucas took his themes from; arguments to priority
miss the point). There are visual riffs
on Renoir and Kurosawa, and the spirit of Pier Paolo Pasolini towers over the expansive
landscapes and monumental architecture.
Holding
these episodes together is a story arc that’s most probably, at base, about the
slow psychological collapse and social degradation of PTSD and Survivor’s
Guilt. Matt Damon is just superbly good
at following this descent with minutely observed intensity. And seeing the story in those terms may conceivably
explain the option for banality in so much of the dialogue.
There’s a long-standing
truism that good historical fiction tells you about the time in which the story
is set, bad about the time in which it’s written. Given there’s so much we cannot know about the
Mediterranean of 3,000 years ago (I was professionally irritated by the clunky
lines about the Sea Peoples and how ‘our bronze age is collapsing’) does Nolan’s
vision portray anything that resonates within our own times? My guess is that
in 30 – 40 years we’ll look back at his Odyssey and see it as the product
of a time in which America, exhausted by unwinnable foreign wars, haunted by
their unappeasable dead, decided to withdraw westwards into isolation, bequeathing
its survivors the ruins they’ve shaped.
I should
add that I’m not suggesting the film is bad historical fiction – on the
contrary it is a superbly brilliant re-telling of a pre-eminently great story. Much may have been lost to the demands of the
form and the times; much there still remains to illuminate and enthrall.