The best and the worst thing you can say about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that it’s very Hollywood. Big stars are distractingly cast, everyone talks in a stunted American vernacular and Homeric subtleties are swept aside in favor of rousing action and sensational set design. On the other hand, “The Odyssey” is Hollywood in the head-spinningly grand sense of midcentury epics like “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” and Nolan’s insistence on practical effects means we often are looking at the proverbial cast of thousands.
The movie starts with a bard, played by rapper Travis Scott, telling the tale we’re about to see on screen. The presence of Scott, famed for blown-out arena-rap epics like “Sicko Mode,” lets us know we’re about to see something big — and something stripped of the typical vague continental Europeanisms that stand in for the non-Anglophone ancient world in most movies of its ilk.
This is hardly the first “Odyssey” retelling to make a point of shying away from heightened style. But even fans of Emily Wilson’s terse 2017 translation of Homer’s poem — “Tell me about a complicated man” — may be forced to admit that some of the action-brute dialogue and aborted attempts at humor in this movie just don’t work. The dialogue in this film gave me a renewed appreciation for Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” which went wild with anachronistic set design but kept the language so archaic it demanded to be spelled out with ligatures. A bit of that might’ve helped us internalize the film’s “time of apparent magic” a little more easily.
Instead, the strength of the screenplay is in its juggling of time. The film is free and imaginative with its flashbacks, often showing events that happened in the past just for the pleasure of showing them — the ill-fated homecoming of Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), for instance, or Odysseus’ last night with his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) before his departure for Troy. Nolan is known for movies that feel like puzzles, but “The Odyssey” plays firmly like an epic, down to the convention of starting in the middle.
You might watch this film down the road and not remember which scene came next, then be surprised — pleasantly or otherwise — by what proceeds: maybe a great scene like the group’s encounter with the Cyclops (a terrifying Bill Irwin) or maybe a hokey one like any number of scenes with Athena (Zendaya).
Zendaya, who shows up from time to time to cast disapproving looks at the guilt-ridden war hero Odysseus (Matt Damon), is one of a few distracting star cameos. As the suitor Antinous, Robert Pattinson does his best to create a sniveling and hateful hero but never quite gets over the barrier of his own star power. Tom Holland as Telemachus is as white bread as a straight arrow can be. Even Damon, for all his authoritative gruffness, essentially comes off as a New Englander in Grecian drag.
John Leguizamo fares better as the blind swineherd Eumaeus, Jon Bernthal scowls nicely as the Spartan king Menelaus and Lupita Nyong’o has a killer double role as Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. Elliot Page is touchingly vulnerable as Sinon, a soldier beloved and then betrayed by Odysseus.
Safdie is only onscreen for a few minutes, but he makes the strongest impression of all as the silent and brutal king Agamemnon. His weird Gigeresque spinal-column helmet is a design coup, and it looks even better as he rises from the grave during Odysseus’ meeting with the shades of Hades. He embodies the movie’s visual approach, which is to assume that anyone dropped in the actual ancient past might speculate they were on another planet.
Special effects are notoriously dodgy in mainstream cinema these days, but “The Odyssey” knocks it out of the park. The sailor-grabbing monster Scylla is faintly seen but palpable in its presence. As the men run from the rampaging Cyclops, the monster really seems to be just behind them, smashing trees and shaking the earth with its footfall. When Circe (Samantha Morton) turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, she literally molds their bodies, forming their noses into snouts and their hands into little trotters.
Even for a director synonymous with earth-shaking sound design, this may be Nolan’s most musical film. Scenes aboard Odysseus’ ship during a storm reach a fever pitch of roaring waves, cracking thunder and desperate screaming. Listen to how the wounded cries of the Cyclops combine with the agitated bleating of his sheep and the cries of Odysseus’ men. Or the symphony of wailing during the sack of Troy. Or the way the ravenous eating of the sailors crescendoes into pig-like squealing as they meet their fate on Circe’s island.
I thoroughly enjoyed “The Odyssey” for most of its nearly three-hour runtime — the last act drags a bit — but if you told me it was emblematic of the way Hollywood grinds literary classics into mulch, I wouldn’t argue otherwise. Much of the thematic weight comes from Odysseus’ guilt over his past plundering and raiding, but such qualms about mass slaughter are absent in the Greek text. The movie lets Odysseus feel bad about violence while also satisfying our bloodlust with scenes like the famous massacre of suitors at the end. It would be more interesting to have the characters take their Bronze Age morality for granted, but then again, it wouldn’t be Hollywood if we didn’t have a hero to root for.
‘The Odyssey’
Stars (out of four): 3.5 stars
Runtime: 2 hours, 53 minutes
Rated: R (violence and some language)
How to watch: In theaters
Credit: Source link