‘A man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall’ … Matt Damon and Zendaya in The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures View image in fullscreen ‘A man who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women, and absolution for a civilisation’s fall’ … Matt Damon and Zendaya in The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures The Odyssey A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard Dr Emily Hauser Matt Damon’s sensitive and repentant Odysseus might come as a surprise to Homer, likewise some significant omissions concerning the poem’s female characters
I t would be easy to think that the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem composed over 2,500 years ago, is all about Odysseus. It’s called the Odyssey, after all. It opens with the invocation to the Muse, “Tell me about a complicated man” – pulling no punches about the poem’s theme. This is, on the surface of things, an epic about a man coming home, a return voyage that spans fluorescent fantasy worlds and yawns across 10 years in the wake of the fall of Troy; a one-hero clash with monsters and princesses, giants and whirlpools, the fight to reclaim his place as king of Ithaca, and as the hero of an epic of his own.
But the point about an epic is that it also contains multitudes. There is much that is epic about Christopher Nolan’s latest film. For those familiar with Nolan’s work, that hardly comes as a surprise. It’s a long watch, coming in at just under three hours. It reckons with the breadth of the Odyssean legend, from the sack of Troy all the way to Odysseus’s return, and seamlessly juggles the epic’s multiple timelines and flashbacks. And while the jaw-dropping cinematic effects of a feature film shot with Imax cameras might seem entirely modern, the way Nolan captures the smashing of a ship’s prow into the waves or the crunch of bones in the Cyclops’ jaws have their roots in the dynamic visuality of Homer’s poetry – what ancient commentators called enargeia , the epic’s ability to bring the world to life before your eyes.
View image in fullscreen Unhappy landing … Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures And then there’s the hero. Because, if the Odyssey is clear that it’s all about that complicated man, Odysseus, then Nolan is just as preoccupied with the complex hero – albeit in a different way from the Odyssey. Homer’s Odysseus is cunning with an edge of pride, a liar and a storyteller, with the smarts to wile himself out of any situation and a determination at almost any cost to get his homecoming. Those costs are spelled out many times by the poet before they’re tossed away. When the men who crew his ship back from Troy die (as they all end up doing), the common response in Homer is bitingly pragmatic: “We sailed off sadly, happy to survive, but with our good friends lost.”
Nolan’s Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) makes gestures to complexity too, but here is a modern-day Hollywood hero who learns remorse for the atrocities he commits and spends much of his time trying to excuse having lost all his men, and retrospectively (with a final journey, not in Homer, to pay homage to them) earning their forgiveness. There are glimmers of this, perhaps, in Homer’s epic (Odysseus meets one of his dead comrades in the underworld and goes back to bury him). Yet he…