I'd like to believe John Leguizamo is Eumaeus in The Odyssey because he was Tybalt in Romeo + Juliet (1996). To watch Baz Luhrmann’s film as a 12-year-old and hear Shakespeare’s language from the mouths of Leguizamo and Harold Perrineau and Dash Mihok rewired my brain. In Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Leguizamo plays a blind swineherd on the island of Ithaca living in the hope that his king Odysseus (Matt Damon) will return. It’s an oddly tender performance, but the electricity of his Tybalt is missing. In its place, extending across the entire cast, is a more limited provocation—imagine if ancient Greeks spoke like present-day Americans instead of posh Brits?
Nolan takes Homer’s epic from its pedestal, only to dust it off, buff it up, and place it back respectfully. This is a film as serious and forbidding as an ancient leatherbound tome. Familiar legends are rendered without a wink—the one-eyed Polyphemus in his cave; Charybdis a confusing minute of whooshing projectiles. Nolan has always been a sobersided filmmaker, but this is a new impulse—a safe epic, missing the big swings he’s taken all his career.
It’s been years since the Trojan wars ended, but Odysseus is still missing. He’s a legend now in Ithaca, immortalised in song and generally assumed to be dead, especially since others who fought with him have returned to their kingdoms. But his queen, Penelope (Anne Hathway), still holds out hope, surviving on scraps of news and rumours from travellers. But her faith comes with its own tests. She must hold at bay a legion of suitors—including Robert Pattinson’s shifty Antinous —who’ve parked themselves in her palace, and keep her son and the heir apparent, Telemachus (Tom Holland), from doing anything stupid.
Odysseus and his men sail from Troy with Agamemnon’s fleet, but opt for a shorter route. From here on, it’s one Homeric battle after another. First there’s a run in with Polyphemus—and because the Cyclops is son of ocean god Poseidon, their subsequent journey by sea is cursed (at any rate the soldiers believe this). Though Odysseus is a revered general, his grip over the men frays as the obstacles become more surreal. At several points, he’s forced to sacrifice men for the survival of the group—which leads to a reckoning with the dead that’s one of the film’s more spectacular scenes. The world around them is thick with superstition and fake news; with the exception of Athena, the gods are easily offended and vengeful. It's striking that Hades doesn't look all that different from the other blasted landscapes he moves through.
At the end of Nolan’s last film, Oppenheimer and Einstein reached the conclusion that they’d set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. Odysseus seems to think he did the same to his world by breaking Zeus’ law of courtesy between guests and hosts (his ruse of hiding inside a giant wooden horse defiling the idea of a parting gift). The film strips the siege of Troy of all honour and grandeur—a political war, won dirty. But Odysseus, despite his protestations and self-doubts, is always a hero, a classical variation on the modern war-criminal-with-PTSD Hollywood protagonist (he even gets hooked on drugs in his recovery with Calypso, losing track of time and reality).
Nolan reteams with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, composer Ludwig Göransson and production designer Ruth De Jong, but the results aren’t as captivating as Oppenheimer (2023), a film which kept finding aural and visual burrows into its central character’s mind. Perhaps the challenges of shooting the whole thing with IMAX cameras—a first for a full feature—left everyone less time to dream up truly fresh imagery. The film’s look is what I’d call functional-spectacular: images of scale and beauty but not transcendence. The commitment to location shooting, though, pays off in spades. There’s a palpable feeling of travelling with the characters through real environments and geographies that’s altogether rare in this sort of film today.
In a film about men, a handful of women offer the most vivid moments. Of all the dangers Odysseus and his men encounter, the most quietly devastating is Circe, played with relish by Samantha Morton. Her scene is something different from Nolan, with marvellous stretchy makeup and a sharp indictment of men and their wars. After all the noise about her casting as Helen of Troy, Lupita Nyong'o is barely onscreen for a few minutes, but it’s an upsetting, surprising cameo. And Anne Hathaway is fraying and fierce as Penelope; a tentative Tom Holland is left hanging on for dear life in their big confrontation scene.
I’m fully on board with the film’s colourblind, race-blind, accent-blind casting. I was more mixed about the film's updated language. “Ten years on this fucking beach” lands beautifully. Less so: “Feel free to add things.” And I draw the line at Telemachus calling his parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad’. I can appreciate why it’s there, to undercut the ornate English of sword-and-sandal epics. But it just sounds wrong.
Like the other Nolan film about a man fighting to get home to his family, The Odyssey is an expansive, melancholy piece about a doomed civilisation, with characters in wide open spaces wrestling with existential questions. I’ve always felt Interstellar (2014) lacks a bit of rude life, and I feel the same way about his latest film. Two actors inject a bit of welcome bad taste. Jon Bernthal plays Menelaus, Helen’s husband, as a hilariously uncouth Spartabro. And Robert Pattinson is a hoot as the conniving Antinous. As Odysseus fights all of Penelope’s suitors at once, he parks himself out of harm’s way. His contribution is to announce the weapons that are periodically dropped from a hole in the ceiling. “Swords!” “Shields!” “Spears!” After all the tastefulness and gloom of The Odyssey, it’s nice to know the fate of an empire can hinge on a Looney Tunes moment like this.
‘The Odyssey’ is in theatres.
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