The Odyssey

The homework required to process The Odyssey is a key part of the experience. Familiarising yourself with the fabled source material (Homer’s ancient Greek epic) goes hand in hand with re-acquainting yourself with the fabled director’s filmography. If you’ve been watching Christopher Nolan’s movies over the years, you’ve essentially seen the making of The Odyssey in real time. It’s not just the recurring themes of adrift men looking for a way home — to children, to comrades, to companions, to family, to themselves. It’s also in the physical images of Nolan-telling scattered across this narrative. There are flashes everywhere. A confused man wrestling with memory on the sea-shore (Inception); the piecing together of a disorienting past (Memento); an injured hero returning to rescue a city under siege (The Dark Knight trilogy); a blind worker, twins, and the obsession to win as a plot device (The Prestige); wars fought on hostile water and lands (Dunkirk); Trojan-Horse-coded deception by a Matt Damon character and a father chasing a belated promise (Interstellar); a thinker haunted by the consequences of his genius (Oppenheimer); a sleepless and guilt-riddled veteran (Insomnia); the blurred lines of time and tide (all of them). The film-maker has been adapting Homer for more than two decades. Like the protagonist, he finally returns home with The Odyssey, but not before defying the genre gods and braving the blockbuster elements.

A Christopher Nolan film is always a reason for that extra excitement for any cinema buff. If Billy Wilder famously wondered, “How would Lubitsch do it?”, film lovers today often find themselves asking, “How would Nolan do it?” Whether it is space travel or a biopic about the scientist who created the most destructive weapon known to mankind, Nolan brings his own unique vision to storytelling. What makes his films special is the way he crafts them, using every cinematic tool at his disposal. In fact, he constantly pushes the boundaries of the medium.

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?

Is there a director working today who has been able to consistently match the crescendo of the last minutes of a Christopher Nolan film? Since Memento (2000) – barring Insomnia (2002), the only remake Nolan has made – the final stretch of most Nolan films could bring corpses to life. In fact, I think one of the most crucial tricks behind his popularity, his ‘prestige’ if you may, might be his ability to finish strong. His weakest film, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), after plodding along for 164 minutes, ends with a spectacular five-minute montage tying all the loose ends of the Batman trilogy. The montage is so good, it almost made me forget what a clunky film I’d seen. In The Odyssey, Nolan delivers his usual rousing climax, but the knockout punch comes a few scenes before. Odysseus (Matt Damon) is talking to his wife, Penelope (Anna Hathaway), for the first time in 20 years. After spurts of flashbacks about the Trojan war peppered through the 173-minute film, this is the first time Odysseus looks back on his storied invasion in the most clear-eyed manner.

“Fantasies and dreams… A nightmare of thought. A face, a fleet, a war…” Add to it a human being who towers above all with fierce courage and a beating heart. Odysseus’ epic story, as told by Greek poet Homer some 3,000 years ago, comes alive in Academy Award-winner Christopher Nolan’s fantastical ‘The Odyssey’. Those clued into Greek mythology know all too well who Odysseus was: King of Ithaca, a true blue war hero, the man behind the treacherous Trojan Horse, instrumental in making the invincible Troy fall. Unlike Achilles, he did not die on the battlefield, but lost his way back home. And it’s his odyssey — full of travails, encounters with monsters, sirens, the dead and gods — which gives wings to Nolan’s extraordinary cinematic vision.

The journey back home means something in every era. Whether it’s a war hero undertaking an obstacle-ridden voyage of over ten years or his wife refusing to concede that her husband will never return, the passage of time means something to everyone. That’s exactly why Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey is such a good fit for Christopher Nolan, because he has a whole filmography around fractured timelines, memory, identity, homecoming, closures, and so on. Rather than bending the poem to suit his filmmaking, he discovers that its DNA has always mirrored his own. The result is perhaps the most naturally auteurist film of his career.

All the ado about Homerian characters saying “Mom”, “Dad” and “F..k” can be laid to rest. Those are but minor updates to the late 8th or early 7th century BC epic The Odyssey (emerging from oral traditions going back even further) by writer-director Christopher Nolan. In the film, the gods are largely inconsequential (barring a scowling, floating in-and-out Athena), real heroes are decided by free will, women are firmly – and sometimes fiercely – feminist, and the shifty, cunning Odysseus of the epic is a man defined almost entirely by guilt that befits a quintessential Nolan lead.