I saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey this past opening weekend, which probably wouldn't surprise you if you know that I was once a classicist and recently read the new Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of The Odyssey. My alma mater organized a virtual book club with the Classics department to discuss the text this past spring semester, and even though I inevitably fell behind on the my readings by lecture days (ah, it was like being back in school again), I did manage to finish about a month ago before the movie came out. The only other time I read The Odyssey before this spring was in freshman year of high school, so this was my first time reading it in proem form. The Classics department chose Mendelsohn's translation for this book club because his version preserves the form and feel of the original Greek while still modernizing the language over the Lattimore or Fitzgerald renditions. However, it's Emily Wilson's translation from 2017, which simplifies the poetic form into shorter lines in order to make the language more accessible to modern readers, that primarily inspired Nolan's film adaptation.
Wilson's version opens with the line: "tell me about a complicated man." Complicated is unique to Wilson, with the original πολύτροπος more literally describes this to be a man of "many turns." A movie can be a challenging medium to faithfully render the complexity of a story with so many characters and side plots; between the time constraints and production budgets, I think it's possible to have an epic story or a complex character, but it's impossible to have both. Nolan's Odyssey prioritizes the former, featuring nearly all of the monsters and mystical creatures Odysseus and his men encounter in the first two thirds of the film. The scale of the film is undeniably impressive in its commitment to preserving the odyssey of it all. By my count, only Odysseus's final stop to the land of the Phaeacians was cut from this adaptation so that the lengthy exposition of his journey happens during Odysseus and Calypso's conversations on a deserted beach instead. We learn that Calypso has been feeding Odysseus lotuses to forget what happened to him until one day she finally tells him to stop; it's time to start remembering again.
The setting where we meet our protagonist for the first time is an endless expanse of sea and sky. Odysseus is all alone save for Calypso—or is he?
Athena, as played by Zendaya, is the only god presented as a character in Nolan's Odyssey, but even her depiction is made ambiguous. While other gods like Zeus and Poseidon are invoked and it's referenced in one scene that gods may disguise themselves as mortals, at no point are any of the other gods embodied or depicted as actual characters throughout the film. This is a significant departure from all the god-to-god interactions in the original text where Athena appeals to Zeus to help Odysseus or Zeus holds Poseidon back from killing Odysseus at sea, not to mention the god-to-man ones where Athena disguises herself as other characters to convince mortals like Telemachus or Penelope to take action or to grant Odysseus with unworldly abilities or powers. In contrast, Athena in Nolan's Odyssey functions as sort of an angel-on-your-shoulder who is seen by Odysseus only, and perhaps he's only imagining her as a projection of his own guilty conscience. In the final flashback to the sacking of Troy, we see Odysseus watch as his fellow Greeks forcibly take a priestess—portrayed by Zendaya, looking just like Athena as she appears to Odysseus's mind's eye—and behead her.
The omission of the gods fundamentally changes the framing of the story: to remove the gods is to remove the manipulators of fate. In a world where gods can do as they please, a man like Odysseus can be complicated in that morally grey way that comes with hypocrisy, savagery, adultery, and wrongdoing so long as the gods favor you, intervening and allowing you to get away with it. But if there are no gods here scheming in a world apart to shape mortal lives as they see fit, then that means men must face the consequences of their actions on their own.
Nolan's depiction of Odysseus, a man who struggles with guilt over the destruction he helped bring upon Troy, is only possible in a world where Odysseus feels the weight of the war and the death of his men on his shoulders and struggles to bear it. I'm not sure that this is true of the original text. The movie gives purpose to why Odysseus is stuck on Calypso's island spiritually: Odysseus can't just go home as he is; he wants to return to Ithaca as a good man, one who deserves respect as a king and leader of men. (Whose judgment?) Perhaps he also seeks forgiveness as someone who failed to protect the innocent. (Whose forgiveness?) It's this moral conviction, coupled with a godsless framing of agency in the grand scheme of things, that suggests Nolan has imparted an implicitly Christian interpretation onto Odysseus's character.
Making Odysseus out to be a moral man necessitates sanding down his rougher edges in order to tell a more coherent narrative. He is certainly kinder, more merciful, and more trusting than how I read him in the poem. Can this version really be characterized as complicated though? The movie's Odysseus is stripped of his humor, his hubris, his deceptions, and his penchant for telling lies. Gone too was the penultimate recognition scene between Odysseus and Penelope, where she proves she can out-trick a trickster. On a practical level, Penelope needs to test him in case the man before her is actually a god in disguise; on a spiritual level, she proves that she is truly his equal in cunning intelligence and that the two deserve each other. It was one of the scenes I was looking forward to the most.
I'm not a purist: I don't think an adaptation is successful only if it remains faithful to the source material. I'm glad Nolan made the story into something of his own, breathing new life in ancient characters and sparking a curiosity among moviegoers to watch this strange and marvelous tale unfold, even if there are elements I wish I saw in this blockbuster rendition. Everyone inevitably brings their own biases and interpretations into the movie theater, so even if the adaptation didn't capture everything I wanted, his version gives me more material to react to when I discuss the film with others and ultimately revisit the joys I once found in studying classics all those years ago.
xoxo, vivian
