Both admirers and detractors of the writer-director Christopher Nolan have noted his long-standing obsession with dead wives. In movies like Memento, The Prestige and Inception, the male protagonists are driven toward reckless, delusional and even vengeful acts by the memories of their late spouses.
One of the refreshing novelties of Nolan's new film, The Odyssey, is that the wife in question here is alive and well: She's Penelope, queen of Ithaca, played by Anne Hathaway, and her husband, Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, spends two decades trying to return home to her after the Trojan War.
Nolan, working from translations of Homer's epic poem, including Emily Wilson's celebrated 2017 version, lays out the story in an unexpectedly straightforward fashion. Penelope and her son, Telemachus — that's Tom Holland — cling to hope that Odysseus will return. Meanwhile, coarse suitors have taken over the palace, vying for Penelope's hand in remarriage. Robert Pattinson plays the most conniving of the lot, who tells Penelope that Odysseus will never return.
But Odysseus is in fact still alive on a distant island. His memory has been bewitched by the nymph Calypso — that's Charlize Theron — and the story of his long, long journey tumbles out in a cascade of flashbacks.
The jumbled timeline suits Nolan's love of nonlinear plotting. Still, I had a lot of questions going in: How would a filmmaker known for his narrative surprises tackle one of the best-known stories in all literature? And how would a director of heady, high-tech action movies adapt to Homer's ancient world of gods and monsters?
The gods themselves are largely absent, with the exception of Athena, who pops up every so often, in the form of Zendaya, to counsel Odysseus. Nolan is a downbeat realist by nature, which gives The Odyssey a fascinating tension; it's a fantasy made by a skeptic at heart.
The supernatural elements have been tamped down: When the island-dwelling sorceress Circe briefly transforms Odysseus' men into pigs, the magic has a low-key, almost tactile realism, aided in no small part by Samantha Morton's chillingly intense performance as Circe. And when the men outwit a giant Cyclops in his lair, Nolan pares away almost all the dialogue — gone are Odysseus' showboating speeches — and goes full-bore monster movie in a way he never really has before.
Visually, Nolan is clearly pushing himself. The film was shot entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras, and the images of Odysseus' ships at sea are stunningly majestic. There's a ferocious intimacy to the action scenes, some of which play out in near-total darkness, illuminated only by flickering firelight and set to Ludwig Göransson's pulse-pounding score. Nolan brilliantly re-creates the famous Trojan Horse deception, masterminded by Odysseus himself, in two gripping set-pieces, culminating in the total destruction of Troy.
As he recalls these shattering events, Odysseus is flooded with regret, which Damon fully conveys in a terse, plain-spoken performance that ranks among his finest work. Nolan treats the sacking of Troy as an epochal tragedy, comparable to the dawn of atomic warfare in Oppenheimer — an event that forever changed how humans and nations dealt with each other. In a way, Nolan has been telling versions of Homer's epic for decades. His films are about men trying to find their way home, even when home — and the world around them — has become almost unrecognizable.
The Odyssey is thrilling but uneven, though it moves pretty swiftly for being so overstuffed. There are striking performances from Lupita Nyong'o as a fiercely defiant Helen of Troy, Himesh Patel as Odysseus' second-in-command, and a very moving John Leguizamo as an Ithacan swineherd who longs for Odysseus' return.
Throughout the film, you can almost feel Nolan thinking his way through the material, figuring out which parts of the text to leave alone and which parts to cut or embellish. Some sequences, like when Odysseus tussles with the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, feel a little perfunctory.
But then we'll get an inspired subplot featuring Elliot Page as a Greek soldier whose grim fate weighs heavily on Odysseus' conscience, and you remember that Nolan, whose style has often been dismissed as coldly intellectual, is one of our most emotionally driven filmmakers.
There's no puzzle-like trickery to the final act of The Odyssey; it plays out with a classical simplicity and directness, and Damon, Hathaway and Holland are entirely convincing as a broken family being pieced together at long last. You realize why Nolan wanted to make this film, and why it feels like a prism through which his earlier films can be more deeply understood. For him, no less than for Odysseus, The Odyssey feels like a homecoming.
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