Homer’s The Odyssey

A film by Christopher Nolan

Reviewed by Lloyd Sederer MD

Soon into the 3 hours of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the screen explodes with perilous ocean scenes of a Norse Sea ship on its 10-year return to home, both distant in sea miles and memory. It is returning from Troy and the Trojan War, seeking Ithaca, Greece (ca., 700 BC).

Universal Pictures

That’s when I had a metaphysical experience. I became quite anxious (not like me). I could not discern where I was (as in an IMAX movie theatre in Concord NH) and feared how I would get to my home (as did Odysseus). My brain did not register that my wife was seated beside me, and our car parked outside the theatre.

I was “living”, if you will, in the film.

I want to admire (not quite thank) Mr. Christopher Nolan, the film’s gifted director, for extracting me from my plush movie seat and placing me at a ship’s oar, pelted with sea water and tossed about by waves crashing into the hull of the ship.

This film delivers far more than any conventional movie experience. I was not merely watching an ancient oar and sail ship at sea. I was dreading the next wave looming above me and 50 burly soldiers, they dressed in armor, some about to be pitched, without warning, to their deaths in the sea, with no recourse to lifeboats or vests.

This unforgettable scene is a mere moment in Mr. Nolan’s mighty film, drawn from a foundational work in the Western literary canon, Homer’s The Odyssey.

The film depicts what Joseph Campbell described as The Hero’s Journey (https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-heros-journey). The Journey is a “monomyth” (James Joyce), a pattern universally found in heroic tales of every culture.  It is a river of meaning that shapes our identity and place in the story of man {sic}.

We discover the “hero’s journey” in stories from before the written word and living onto today. Homer’sThe Odyssey (and its companion, the Iliad), from early literary history, has been an abundant supplier to our human need for heroes and their epic stories. May all the depictions of the Hero and Journey be held to Mr. Nolan’s gripping storytelling, his monumental battle depictions, his rendering of otherworldly phantoms, and the compelling drama of his storytelling.

Mr. Nolan, as well, brings luminance to his troupe of remarkable performers, led by Matt Damon as Odysseus, King of Ithaca; Anne Hathaway, in captivating high dramatis personae as Penelope, his wife, the Queen; Lupita Nyong'o as a fearsome Helen of Troy; Charlene Theron as the ethereal Calypso; Robert Pattison as the Queen’s evil suitor, Antinous, looking for a crown; Zendaya (‘to give thanks’) as Athena; John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, Odysseus’s’ friend and swineherd; and Tom Holland as Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, the king in waiting; - to name but a few of the many players bringing this ancient story to its stunning, modern film production. As did, I must say, the casts of 100s pursuing Odysseus and his men on land, storming across soon to be fields of carnage.

Matt Damon/Universal Pictures           Anne Hathaway/Universal Pictures

The Voyage home to Ithaca is as unsettled as was the wrath of the sea God, Poseidon. Some of Nolan’s moments of colossal filmmaking included when...

Upon one island landing, Odysseus, not sufficiently cautious, took shelter and sought provisions from a herd of sheep hiding in a cave. They were not alone. A giant Cyclops, incidentally the son of the god of the sea (Poseidon), was their roommate. Before the giant, perhaps 100 times their size, could rid himself of the intruders, they blinded him with a huge burning poker, then escaped as the cave’s (also giant) rock was closing to block their exit. Adding the vengeance of a father, the Sea God, to face on his “turf”, an ocean far more deadly than a blind giant.

Eleven of Odysseus’ twelve ships (three in the film) are destroyed in the land of (also giant) cannibals, the Laestrygonians. The ship’s passage through a narrow sea channel, whose (also giant) cliffs, left them at the mercy of these hungry meat-eaters, seeing their dinner passing by. Their losses are great, winnowing the fleet to but a fraction of its initial number. Odysseus survives, having kept his ship out of the passage.

More horrors, now earth-bound, happen when a scouting party of (always) starved soldiers lands on an island. They come upon a home with its chimney smoking and the aroma of food passing through the windows. Easily fooled, they readily believe the food and drink offered them by a witch, posing as a woman, are safe. Food is - to a starving man - as intoxicating as lust. Their hostess, if you will, Circe, turns them all into pigs – except for a soldier left outside as a guard, who warns Odysseus, upon his late arrival. The Hero joins Circe at the table but does not take to her dark magic ploy. Instead, he succeeds in having her retore his men to bad manners but not pigs. Though the men are further psychically scarred, wounds they must carry through months of painful rowing and the battles ahead.

Circe, upon her feeding Odysseus, she tells him he must travel to the land of The Dead, leading to the story below.

This last stop (for this review, past my usual word limit), brims with fearsome oddity. It is Odysseus’ entry into The Land of The Dead, rendered in a way that gave me, as it might you, a frisson.

There, Odysseus meets the ancient blind prophet, Teiresias. The story of this prophet is formidable in more ways you can imagine (including a sex change), one worthy of a film (but not 3 hours). His role in this film version of the Odyssey is more circumspect. Teiresias warns Odysseus what he already knows about the seas ahead, namely the supernatural forces of Poseidon’s rage for the death of his son. This foreshadows the endless sea voyage of misery ahead as Odysseus continues his return to Ithaca.

Teiresias also warns Odysseus about a sacred island ahead, Helios, where if his men harm the cattle and sheep grazing there, death to all the men will ensue. So much for a proper warning. Which when unheeded resulted in the death of all the crew and their ship left in pieces. Odysseus is left alone, in pieces like his ship.

The Hero’s Journey, however, is far from done. Appearing catatonic, Odysseus must first make passage through the macabre straights of his inner life, with its losses, grief, self-recrimination for the deaths of all his men, and grave doubts if he can complete his return home, to his country, and what awaits him there, his wife and his son, unseen, he them and they him, for 20 years.

In a beautifully pictured and paced story, Calypso appears. She takes Osysseus in her arms, to care for and restore the broken man. Calypso sees the man he has become, not a King, not a warrior, not a sea captain, but a pitiful man without any station in his world. He has become an impoverished beggar, dressed in rags; ironically, the identity that will carry him through the final stages of this Hero’s journey.

If you imagine this film would then come to a bucolic end, better prepare yourself. Mr. Nolan directs the closing chapters of The Journey with astonishing filmmaking, taking us on as formidable battles as you (and he) could divine.

But the film’s ending is not only its astonishing battle. We have a reenactment of Jesus’ prophesy of the destruction of the King’s temple, as in:

 “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” (Mark 13:1-2)

Odysseus, still hidden in rags, an appearance portraying the mark of a Saint, proceeds to kill the Queen’s plentiful gaggle of worthless suitors, while suffering grave injury himself. Now he is the King of his land, appearance notwithstanding. In fact, his being a beggar makes more just his countless murders of the parasitic suitors, and his delivering Antinous his deserved slow deadly knifing to death, left alive so long that he may see who is killing him. An “arc of justice” has been served, displayed with grace and power by Mr. Nolan.

I understand that many stories exist about the fate of the noble Hero of the Odyssey. Does he live? Does he die? What of Penelope, his wife the Queen, and his son, having become a princely, powerful man?

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Mr. Nolan was faced with the task of fashioning from a foundational and timeless poem of Western literature an indelible and deeply satisfying film, as he did for its 3 hours. I imagine others, like me would have been keen for more.

The Odyssey is his astonishing achievement. It is this film’s Director’s Journey, filmed in six countries with perhaps the length of film strip capable of circling the Earth.

Mr. Nolan’s preternatural re-creation of The Odyssey gives his viewers a Hero to linger in our souls and our civilization and a story where love never dies. Where this Hero’s Journey comes to a fitting, inspired, and passionate conclusion.

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Lloyd I Sederer MD

Dr. Sederer is a psychiatrist, public health doctor, and non-fiction writer.

His website is www.askdrlloyd.com, where many of his writings are posted, with no firewall.