"The Odyssey:" It's Not Going to Be Fun
More notes on Christopher Nolan's new movie.
Epic adventure movies can be many things, but it really helps if they are fun:
Christopher Nolan has many strong suits, but a sense of fun does not rank high among them.
Thus, the first time on his journey that Matt Damon as Odysseus smiles may be about two-thirds through The Odyssey when he is having his crew lash him to the mast so he can listen to the singing of the Sirens. Damon isn’t as young as he used to be, but he’s still got a movie star smile when Nolan finally allows him to flash it about two hours into the movie. (Note: he may smile earlier in some family scene or when playing with his long-lived dog, but this is the first time he smiles during his famous adventure.)
Why doesn’t Nolan allow Odysseus to have some fun on his adventure? Because that might encourage young men to go on adventures, and we can’t have that!
Nor does Nolan have a sense of humor. I laughed once during The Odyssey, but I don’t believe anybody else did. I don’t know whether that bit I snorted at was supposed to be funny or not.
Nor does Nolan allow Damon to display any charisma. Throughout he must be, like Nolan, a Gloomy Gus. Even in her wildly over-the-top rave, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is forced to admit that Nolan doesn’t let his top three cast members show their stuff, which is normally pretty dire for a movie:
The performances are uniformly good,
Eh, most of the performances are fair-to-middling, with Robert Pattinson the best and John Leguizamo the worst.
though Damon’s Odysseus is tamped down and notably devoid of charisma, as if he were as hollow as the wood decoy. In action-adventure terms it’s a counterintuitive choice even if it serves Nolan’s tricky, more non-triumphalist ends.
Like a lot of people ever since, the ancients were divided on whether the Good Guys were the Greeks (Achaeans), such as Achilles and Odysseus, or the Trojans, such as Hector, who is more or less the best man in The Iliad. Note that the top college football team in Los Angeles in 2026 are the USC Trojans.
But, still, if you are going to pay money to see a movie about Odysseus, you want to see him doing cool stuff rather than psychologically suffering PTSD over past cool stuff he did like the Trojan Horse.
The usual solution for this is to have the hero look awesome as he smites his foes in the beginning of the movie, then suffer PTSD later on, then, somehow, reach a resolution. But Nolan is so morally austere that he can’t let Odysseus enjoy for awhile coming up with most famous trick in history, the Trojan Horse. (I actually wouldn’t disbelieve that the raised-Catholic Nolan, a colossally successful entrepreneur in an industry where your reputation depends in part upon how you treat others, is morally more upright than Achilles and Odysseus. But still …)
One upshot, though, is that few of the actors, Damon included, manage to hold you with the same emotional force that Nolan’s filmmaking does. Both Holland and especially Hathaway have bracingly strong moments, but his character has too little presence and hers remains shrouded in mystery, which Nolan expresses by filming her behind a latticed screen or the threads on her loom. Mother and son are sympathetic; they’re also routinely upstaged by Pattinson’s wildly enjoyable flop-sweating suitor whose demise you hunger for.
I wouldn’t call Robert Pattinson’s bad guy “wildly enjoyable,” but at least he was unleashed to entertain more than anybody else in the film.
On the other hand, tabulating Nolan’s shortcomings like this is rather like pointing out that Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t shoot free throws or outside jump shots. Those were definite weaknesses, but Wilt was still a giant who put up huge numbers.
Nonetheless …
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