Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is the only movie we can recall in eons to stir a wild debate among top scholars — including Joyce Carol Oates.
The film has classicists clashing over Ivy League scholar Emily Wilson’s harsh reviews of Nolan’s version of the Greek epic. (Those words may sting all the more since Nolan has frequently cited Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s work as one of his sources of inspiration.)
In two separate reviews, Wilson was brutally unkind to the director. First, she wrote she’d be “ashamed to have written any part of this script,” essentially reducing it to a fun, but hollow, popcorn movie. She followed in The Atlantic this week, specifically calling out Nolan’s interpretation of “Zeus’ Law,” a fulcrum point throughout the movie, and again labeled the movie as “emotionally empty.”
Wilson’s reviews have seemingly touched a nerve.
Fellow classicist Theo Nash (who holds a Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Michigan) called Wilson’s arguments “baffling” in a piece for Slate.
“The close attention to the text that informs Wilson’s translation is lacking in her reading of the movie, and the idea that Nolan might have something new to say about the Odyssey is denied,” Nash writes. “Her critical eye is so insensitive that she appears to willfully be misunderstanding basic elements of the film’s plot, characters, and themes.”
National Book Award winner Oates called out Wilson for sounding like the same MAGA people that have attacked her celebrated translation of Homer (the first woman to do so). “One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”
Princeton and Bard icon Daniel Mendelsohn, in his own upcoming review for The New York Review of Books, appeared to share many of Wilson’s criticisms. (He previously called the movie a “mixed bag” to P6H, but said he hopes people still see it.) The scholar specifically lamented that Nolan cut out too many important moments from the text — such as a reunion with deceased warrior Achilles — while keeping unimportant scenes for the sake of action.
“Nolan has merely remade Homer’s hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus’s adventures values utterly foreign to Homer,” he wrote. “Is his new vehicle for Odysseus’s tale impressive in its visual impact and distinctive in its structural ingenuity? Yes. But is its ‘essential’ in any way Homeric? On that I’ll let Penelope have the last word: ‘The structure is nothing without the people’s respect for its meaning.’”
For her part, Wilson posted: “I cannot rest from discourse. I will see that film again tomorrow. I will drink life to the lees. Again I will enjoy greatly, will suffer greatly.”
Since “The Odyssey” was released on July 17, her translation has shot up the best-seller lists, reaching as high as No. 3 on Amazon.
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