Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Have you ever had one of those moments in life that at the time felt like a great victory, but then turned sour later on, leading to regret? I have. It’s no fun to look back on. It can hurt worse to look in the mirror.

Sure you can go into therapy to help you feel better about your choices and the ramifications. But first you have to face them, own them, and accept responsibility.

Or you could try to bury them in the bottle. Or drugs, illicit or otherwise. Or some other way of trying to keep them from resurfacing. Or you could just throw up your hands, blame the gods. Perhaps defy them. But in the end the choices you make define you. How you deal with the definition tells your story.

That’s essentially the story of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Much the same as it was with Oppenheimer. Do a thing. Do it well. Succeed. Then realize what you’ve done has unleashed problems bigger than the one you set out to overcome.

Is The Odyssey a good film? In my opinion, yes. Bordering on being very good one. It’s not a great one. You can see Nolan’s affection for the story he’s telling and his passion for the techniques he’s using to do so in every frame. That passion for filmmaking his way is also what keeps The Odyssey from being a great film.

In general I blow hot and cold on Nolan’s work. While he can create some thrilling cinema, his attention to his process creates an almost Brechtian alienation, while still embracing the story he’s trying to tell. And make no mistake this Odyssey is Nolan’s story more than it is Homer’s. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is a movie after all, and a story to tell the way he wants too. But in most of his movies, his love for his craft and artistry is too distancing to lure me in.

As to the story, the similarities between The Odyssey and Oppenheimer are easy to see. Man uses his ingenuity to do the impossible, man ends up regretting the result. Nolan told that story better in Oppenheimer.

Both films contain big moments of spectacle alternating with more intimate scenes. I walked away from Oppenheimer less impressed with the apparent painstaking to create explosions than I was with the more intimate scenes which I found infinitely more frightening and revealing. I don’t feel the same way about The Odyssey, although the work to create the Cyclops and Circe’s turning Odysseus’ men into swine pays off very well. The intimate scenes in The Odyssey did not capture me the way I think Nolan thought they would. The spectacle largely worked well. Which brings me to Matt Damon.

I don’t think Damon was the best choice for the lead. Given the framing that Nolan chose to wrap his story in, he certainly wasn’t. Following the poem’s lead in alternating timelines, Damon seemed to be the same throughout most of the film, until his return home.

Damon’s known for his straight ahead with purpose presence on screen, plowing through any obstacle in his path, typically with a strong resolve that’s unyielding. Prior to seeing the film I thought the casting made great sense. Yet it did not in practice. I never felt Damon transition from a “something’s really bothering me about all of this” gest into a leader of confidence and cunning until the final act. He just seemed bothered.

Part of that is certainly in the writing, both Nolan’s and Homer’s, given that the story is more about looking back in the aftermath. That makes sense while he’s trying to come to grips with all he’s wrought after the sack of Troy, but not in the early stages of his adventure, which we’re treated to in flashbacks. There’s no self-accomplished, self-aggrandizing height from which he can fall. His compatriots around him acted as if they were seeing something out of the ordinary, yet we never really saw what bonded their allegiance to him in the first place.

The other aspect of The Odyssey that keeps it from being a great film is the Netflix-like don’t trust your audience to pay attention restating of Zeus’ law, which grounds Odysseus’ guilt. The point that Zeus’s golden rule (be kind to strangers and guests-you never know they may be a god in disguise) is repeated so frequently, it often feels like Nolan the screenwriter didn’t trust it as the central motivating point for his character’s actions and struggles.

On the plus side, Nolan has assembled an incredible cast of actors around Damon that we’re used to seeing carry their own films and that largely pays off. Although some seem underused. The visual and aural experience can be stunning. I particularly like the choice of orchestrations in the soundtrack. The special effects have their special moments.

Is it worth seeing? I’d say yes. I’d also say that what it offers will not be substantially different once it becomes a streaming success than it is in the theaters, especially the limited number of venues that show it in the format the director wishes.

I won’t get into the squabbles that have surrounded this film with more free publicity than you can shake a stick at. With one exception. I keep reading and hearing folks saying Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is as much about today as it is about the age the story takes place in. Of course in today’s world that means some love that and some hate that. That has more to do with Homer than it has to do with Nolan.

The reason many of certain generations are at least tangentially familiar with The Odyssey is Homer wrote a story about humankind that is as enduring as the flaws and faults we as a species share and keep repeating. It’s a mirror that exposes those flaws that we really work hard to avoid looking into. It’s a difficult story that needs telling in and of itself, and has found itself as the foundation of many different variants in other forms. Funny thing is, we never seem to learn from it, regardless of its trappings.

Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.