Oppenhomer: Homage to a hero
On Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey
By Bahar Hassantash
It has officially been over six weeks since The Odyssey commandeered everyone from non-cinephiles to fanatics back to the theaters. This amount of time is the perfect rite of passage for a typical Christopher Nolan release to be thoroughly picked apart, defended, and picked apart again. With that cycle now largely subsided, what's left is the vulturous task of scavanging the scrutinized remains. The answer often exceeds the multiple choice of success or failure, but extends into a longer essay of what the images reveal about his artistic choices.
Picking through the critical flesh, the adaptation debate has provided the most meat, which is precisely why I want to set it aside. I will provide an explanation since the omission is not from a point of oversight, but rather a conscious choice to allow more time for analysis on the auteur choices. Fidelity to the source material has become a banal argument in modern cinema — no adaptation is perfect, and the demand for one is a misunderstanding of the nature of the origins. Greek mythology is intrinsically unfixed; oral-formulaic compositions were bound to the constant assembly and reassembly by rhapsodes using stock phrases and repeated scene-types as memory scaffolding. Homer's Odyssey is a hardened snapshot of a fluid narrative that had been in cultivation for centuries; it is trite for a story such as this to be held to the standard of a single canonical shape. That is, if we also entirely forgo the fact that auteurs have a right to originality — even in adaptations.
Let's do a thought experiment: we could've had Yorgos Lanthimos direct the same story, cast Emma Stone as Penelope, and turn Ithaca into a closed behavioral experiment run by homoerotic Laestrygonians and Willem Dafoe as Poseidon. I would assume many of the fidelity arguments would subside because his auteur style is quirky and outlandish in nature. As for Nolan, one of his signature elements is adherence to incredible realism that actualizes fantasy into tangible worlds, so the realism signals a false intention. The absence of a single Greek cast member should be an apparent-enough gesture to demonstrate that this was never a fidelity project to begin with. The litigation of whether this is a "true" Odyssey is not a concession, but the premise that will carry throughout the remainder of this essay.
Alternatively, what I find valuable to litigate, given its lack of examination by prior critics, is why the film feels more imposing than impactful, and its reference to Nolan's recurring instincts as an auteur, rather than Homer's.
It is perhaps more constructive to think of Christopher Nolan as a scientist than as a director. His filmography is a run of one-man return journeys toward a relatively bathetic resolution: Cobb chasing a way home (Inception), Cooper chasing his daughter across the universe (Interstellar), Oppenheimer chasing the consequences of his own mind. In all given cases, the hero does not create the situation he is in, but is placed inside one that has already mobilized, and the plot occurs as he metabolizes within it. The scientific method trumps his directorial choices because the protagonist's resolution is neither plot-driven nor character-driven, but formulaically production-driven. The best equipment, times the most decorated crew, plus the highest-paid ensemble in Hollywood, over the premise that greatness is achievable by well-resourced execution, equates to a masterpiece. The formula approach is not necessarily a criticism, but a method that defines Nolan's filmography, where the film performs less as an artistic discovery than as an experiment with a predictable, albeit impressive, output.
The cost of this method, however, is that the imperfections on which art tends to thrive are precisely what a scientific process is built to eliminate. Nolan's perfectionism creates extraordinary pieces, but not without a certain emptiness — as though something human, perhaps depth, is missing beneath the polish, so that the emotion that is evoked is not felt through characters, but due to the collective symphony of sensory inputs. Ludwig Göransson’s score, coupled with Hoyte van Hoytema’s visuals, viewed — with obligation — on the most immersive screen and the loudest speakers in existence compels the audience to an emotional response; shouldering a responsibility that normally be placed on the characters and the plot.
Nonetheless, The Odyssey is not a standalone piece, but a sequel to Oppenheimer, where Matt Damon's Odysseus strongly resembles Oppenheimer's study of a man's confrontation with the weight of his own competence. If framed as a continuity, this film makes more sense with Oppenheimer as its backdrop, rather than the Homeric Odyssey.
Homer's Odysseus is defined by mêtis — his hubris and cunning intelligence that underscored his wit over force. The choice of The Odyssey over other Greek myths, such as The Iliad, where heroes are more explicitly burdened by guilt in a manner similar to Nolan's other protagonists, can be explained in a couple of ways. Firstly, because intelligence outweighs bía, or brute strength, for all of Nolan's heroes. Even the Dark Knight was not a jackhammer who powered through the plot, but a burdened hero with incredible intelligence, his brute strength reserved and exposed only sparingly and tactically. This is why Odysseus makes the most sense for a Nolan movie rather than Achilles or Hercules — even given that they might resemble his guilty hero archetype more closely. There is, however, a serious discrepancy: Nolan's intelligence and Homer's are of different kinds. Where one is cunning, Matt Damon's face carries an innocence that undercuts this trait at a casting level. He is smart and relies on deceit, but he is not guileful.
This stands out in Nolan's choice to cut one of the greatest plot points from Homer's Odyssey: the Cyclops's cave, the genesis point of the entire odyssey, where Odysseus tells Polyphemus his name is "Nobody" in order to escape, but cannot resist reclaiming his glory by revealing his real name afterward, which is precisely the act of vanity that provokes Poseidon's decade-long punishment. In Nolan's Odyssey, the cave is a pit stop in a journey of remembrance. The consequence of this stylistic choice is that the source of Odysseus's self-destruction is distracted from his own cunningness, and narrowed onto the Trojan horse and abandonment of Zeus's law. Where this misalignment between Homer and Nolan's protagonist further widens is at the Sirens. Wanting to be the sole man who hears the song and survives is an intrinsically Homeric trait, consistent with an intelligence entangled with an enlarged ego. In Nolan's version, where the humility of the "burdened everyman" has been established as one of the character's core traits, the same desire is inconsistent, but has to be included to remain faithful to the journey's entirety. I argue that Odysseus could've been any of Nolan's other protagonists, Cobb, Cooper, or Leonard Shelby, and I would expect a nearly identical performance until the Siren scene, where the character and the storyline diverge. This is the main tension in the story, and the source of most of the criticism: that the good man carrying guilt toward an unclear reckoning is simply not Homeric.
And yet, this is where I think the film's most interesting accident occurs. What reads as stoic and superficial in the characters is consistent with Greek mythology. Structurally, ancient Greek myths tend to be methodical rather than psychologically layered: picture a man growing angry, then suffering, then acting upon that feeling — each existing as a direct consequence of the one before it; a domino chain rather than a character study. Nolan's clinical, event-followed-by-consequence delivery is the very element that makes long stretches of the film feel like an incredibly real stage play. There are many sequences of two people walking and talking — a common element of Nolan stories, but also of Greek myth storytelling, and an instance where his auteur instincts match the source material. Therefore, while the production is not necessarily faithful to Homer's Odysseus as a person, it retains the oral-formulaic rhythm the myth was built upon.
Having saved it for last, I find it mandatory to address the most critical thread across Nolan's career. I will preface this with some valuable insight from meeting Alison Bechdel in person, where she told me that the Bechdel test's origins were not legitimate and that it is not meant to be used to measure anything. Despite her direct clarification of the test's invalidity, it does reveal much about the presence of women in films where they do contribute to the story, but are not given the screen time to do so. Nolan's women exist in a duality: while incredibly thin in screen time and interiority, they are functionally indispensable. They are almost the highest load-bearing plot points, as it is often their absence or death that supplies the male lead's motivation in their journey. This pattern is consistent in The Odyssey, with Penelope who was allowed more nuance than the other women in the film.
Contrastingly, Circe, played magnificently by Samantha Morton, is outmaneuvered by an Odysseus who does not possess the wit and slyness that is required to do so. This is because, as established before, this version of Odysseus is not equipped with cunning to begin with; therefore, we watch Circe's plot play out on a schedule rather than a meaningful confrontation, which is a disappointment given the strength of the performance underneath it. Additionally, I believe Nolan may have been too absorbed in the self-revelation that he is, in fact, remarkably talented in producing body horror to feed into her character development.
Calypso fares similarly. She becomes a point of online discourse in her own right because she's sadly a victim to a costume commissioned from Free People and an Amazon tortilla blanket, which stands out as particularly cheap rather than otherworldly, on top of her island rendered as a magnificently unremarkable stretch of sand. Expensive, in other words, does not guarantee in-touch; a multi-million-dollar production can still misjudge a costume to the extent that the mismatch itself becomes part of the plot. There is, nonetheless, a structural explanation, even if it's not a full justification: Odysseus spends seven years on Calypso's island, and a linear telling would mean flashing forward through the whole stretch at once; therefore, in true Nolan fashion, her plot is employed as a narrative hinge to move backward and forward through memory. Her presence therefore is less functional as a character than as a tool for storytelling choice, even if it sacrifices some of her characterization.
Underneath all of this, there is a question about guilt, and the crushing burden of the self. In Homer, the Odyssey concludes with a sense of peace, despite the violent means. Nolan, however, is less interested in that peace as resolution than in the confrontation with what has happened. Odysseus's disguised conversations with Penelope reveal a man who seems to withhold his own joy at reunification, burdened by the cost attached to his violation of Zeus's law, where a parallel exists between him and the suitors. This revelation reverses the stoic problem of the movie's delivery; Zeus's law, to treat all with hospitality and to not abuse that given welcome, is a selfish god's request. The human need to express emotions, from disagreement to hostility, is fundamentally undermined by a false display of civility. The incompatibility of the gods' request with human nature is reflected in why they rarely feel divine, and appear instead as witnesses to their own systematic corruption. If there is a moral center to the film, it may be the intrinsic discomfort arising from the tension between god-like heroism and god-like pity — both of which blatantly overlook real tragedy.
At last, I left the 70mm screening with the belief that this was my favorite Nolan movie, because it felt like he'd been challenged, and that is what I find most valuable for someone like him who has a formula. His past work with adaptations had been limited, and this step outside of his comfort zone while retaining his realist fantastical elements made this movie all the more fascinating. Matt Damon's Odysseus is a man who carries guilt not for the men he lost, but for the war he brought upon Troy to begin with, for his deceit of Sinon — which is a humbler, more contemporary notion of heroism than Homer's, but is, not coincidentally, patriarchally consistent with the original text even as it revises the hero's psychology.
It is not an emotional film so much as an imposing one; it is incredibly loud and beautiful, and it is the production that is driving the emotions, as opposed to the characters or the plot, which unfolded on a predetermined schedule. There is still much to be said about this movie, but unlike Nolan’s pieces, mine do not always end in resolution. I conclude with a feeling of anticipation for his next work — perhaps another episode in this series of similar heroic characters draped in different costumes in a different times. Regardless, I look forward to it.