What Nolan’s Film Can’t Capture

Like others who have spent years reading, re-reading, studying, teaching, and being entranced by the Homeric epics, I looked forward to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey with an uneasy mixture of hopeful enthusiasm and nail-biting concern. Some ancient-culture aficionados were, I’m sure, fully invested in the enthusiasm, while others were preoccupied with the concern; but most, I’d wager, were experiencing them in equal measure, bouncing from one emotion to the other. The enthusiasm and concern both derive from the fact that the popular culture has once again determined that such ancient works are worthy of attention, that they can still be made to speak a language accessible to anyone, and that they belong in the pop-culture pantheon.

To some extent, that same kind of ambivalence is associated with an adaptation of any classic work for those who read it and care about it. But somehow there doesn’t seem to be as much at stake in another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice or Little Women or Wuthering Heights, or even a modern novel like Harry Potter for that matter. Maybe that’s because they are in less danger of being neglected by the culture entirely. The great works that resist popular packaging, on the other hand—works like Paradise Lost and (for very different reasons) Moby-Dick—are in danger of disappearing from the literary canon. I don’t mean to suggest a causal relationship necessarily, but it is certainly a striking correlation.

What Homer’s Odyssey resists is not the effort to package it for popular-culture consumption, but the possibility of presenting it in its own terms. (I admit that for true purists, that possibility is always out of reach; in this case, it’s a matter of relative access.) This isn’t because the work is too old or too boring. The Odyssey is, after all, an adventure story replete with exotic journeys, monsters, violence, sex, goddesses, sex with goddesses, fantasy islands, reunions with long-lost family, revenge… As the list goes on, it becomes obvious that a single movie couldn’t begin to cover it. But nor could a trilogy of movies or a lengthy TV series.

That hasn’t prevented successive generations of moviemakers—though the numbers are small compared to adaptations of other major works—from exercising their prerogative, not only to adapt the work, but to present it from their own necessarily limited perspective. In an article for the Atlantic about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, George Packer writes, “The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity.” The Odyssey did the same thing a couple of thousand years earlier. Both the poem and its protagonist are unapologetically ambiguous. For that reason, the Homeric epic of homecoming has become whatever each successive era has needed or wanted it to be.

The Hellenistic Greeks had already put their own spin on the Homeric works by the time those works reached ancient Rome. When the Romans conquered the Greek city-states, they ended Greek dominance in literature, the arts, science, and culture overall. Good citizens that the Romans were, they felt a need to justify their victory—surely, they told themselves, the Greeks must have somehow deserved such a crushing defeat. So in Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus—Ulysses in Latin—became a despised character representing Greek mendacity and cowardice. At the same time, Virgil appropriated many of Odysseus’ adventures and awarded them to his own hero, Aeneas. (Some evidence in the text suggests that Virgil was less convinced of Roman uprightness than the authorities he was hired to please, but that’s a topic for another time.)

By the late medieval period, when the ancient classics were rediscovered and began attracting popular interest, the Catholic Church felt a similar need to vilify the ancient Greeks, but for its own fairly obvious reasons. So in Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses is sent to hell for giving false counsel; his death is attributed to his supposedly insatiable desire for adventure and knowledge, which compelled him to travel beyond the limits God set for humans. By the 19th century, the British belief in progress coupled with a belief in the primacy of imperialism turned that adventurer into the ideal hero. Tennyson ends his poem “Ulysses” with the hero famously proclaiming his intent “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (That imperative was quoted favourably by M, the head of MI6, in the James Bond movie Skyfall.)

James Joyce, on the other hand, associated the adventuring hero with the entirely unheroic character of the Wandering (Irish) Jew in Leopold Bloom. And since the 2000s, Odysseus/Ulysses has become the symbol of toxic masculinity run amok, as feminist authors have retold the story from the point of view of the Odyssey’s female characters, in works like Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 2005 novel The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s recent Odyssey-based Circe. As for the two most recent film versions, Nolan’s film and Pasolini’s 2024 The Return, both have drawn upon our current culture’s fixation on the effects of trauma.

Each of the drastically different versions of Odysseus’ story mentioned above can be supported by the original work, but none manages to capture it in its entirety. It isn’t only the author’s worldview that informs the epic’s complexity and ambiguity; the protagonist also embodies that complex and ambiguous dynamic. Indeed, everything about the work and its hero introduces complications and contradictions. Is Odysseus a hero or an anti-hero? Is he the first modern civilised man or a vicious barbarian? Is he the man who unjustly suffers or the one who causes suffering for himself and others? In today’s progressive political jargon, is he the oppressed or the oppressor? Homer’s epic raises all of these questions and more, but it doesn’t answer them.

If we actually take in the whole work, we come to know a man who fervently longs to return to his provincial home—so much that he gives up the offer of immortality—but who also wants to squeeze every drop of adventure, excitement, and knowledge he can grasp along the way. He repeatedly risks his life to defend his men and his cause—and then repeatedly jeopardises both through his vanity, self-interest, and desire for fame. He is always prepared to break the rules in a society that is strictly rule-bound. He can inspire his followers to be unswervingly loyal on one day, and on the next, disastrously distrustful. He loves his wife and son and father with true tenderness, and yet he chooses to spend years with other women (well, goddesses), and to undertake a risky flirtation with a young marriageable foreign princess. He lies, cheats, and tricks his way through one episode after another and then tells the whole story of his travels and his transgressions when he is at his most vulnerable. He can be unjustly cruel and heartbreakingly sensitive.

Odysseus’ journey is as contradictory as he is. Unlike most heroic journeys, the one undertaken by Odysseus isn’t for the sake of adventure or out of duty to some higher cause. Rather, it’s a desperate and seemingly hopeless attempt to return from the ten-year Trojan War with a powerful god standing against him. But the journey—or rather the story Odysseus tells about it—is full of wild adventure, amazing feats, fascinating characters, and magical realms. And that’s only half the story. When he at last reaches his island of Ithaca, midway through the work, he finds that his home isn’t the place he left, and that he’ll have to risk everything once again to redeem and reclaim it. He does so through a combination of secrecy, deception, and violence. But he also gains the necessary trust and assistance of his son and two loyal servants. And though he succeeds spectacularly—the epic’s climax features one of the greatest revenge scenes in all literature—he knows, as the famously ambiguous ending tells us, that he is doomed to depart once again.

I have yet to mention that this complicated man doesn’t actually even make his appearance in the epic until the beginning of the fifth book (or chapter). The first four books focus on Odysseus’ wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, and their efforts to manage the difficult and threatening situation caused by his absence. In fact, much of what we learn about Odysseus comes to us indirectly, through his family members and other characters. In addition, both Penelope and Telemachus have well developed story arcs of their own. Penelope, in fact, proves to be as crafty and many-layered as her husband. Does she recognise him in spite of his goddess-assisted disguise? Does she set up the contest of the bow intentionally to initiate his revenge? Has she been playing the suitors and enjoying the attendant power and attention all along? Who knows?

The entire narrative is marked by transitions between light and darkness, folktale and tragedy. That oscillating register is difficult to preserve in any work, and it doesn’t transfer well to film at all. So films influenced by the Odyssey are typically forced to choose one or the other. The Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? obviously placed its focus on a cheerfully light side; Pasolini’s The Return opted for an oppressively dark one. I love the Coens’ iteration, which manages to reflect a true understanding of its source material, all the way to the open-ended conclusion. Ethan Coen once claimed in an interview promoting the film that Tim Blake Nelson was the only member of the cast and crew to have read the Odyssey. That’s a funny remark, but it’s almost certainly a lie. On the other hand, I found The Return’s revisionism pretentious, and driven far more by ideology than inspiration. Why else was a Greek island—one of the brightest and sunniest places on earth—as dark and dreary as London in winter? Nolan’s film, as numerous commentators have pointed out, succeeds as a work of art on its own terms while checking the boxes that will ensure its easy appeal to a contemporary audience. Our hero now experiences enough trauma, guilt, and regret over his role in war to make him a sympathetic strong man—and to allow him to enact violent revenge when it is presented as justified.  

A major obstacle to a truly complete popular representation of the Odyssey might be our culture’s lack of tolerance for complexity and ambiguity. Most readers and viewers prefer works that mirror themselves and their ideals and/or clearly condemn anything that doesn’t. The Odyssey doesn’t provide that kind of comfort. It is going to challenge our contemporary worldview, not cater to it. Rather than a mirror, it provides a window on to a strange, paradoxical, fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. And yet, in spite of its strangeness, it brilliantly presents the same contradictions that characterise our present-day life: the longing for the thrill of adventure and the comfort of home, for revenge and forgiveness, for violence and love, for power and submission. Humans are complex, terrible, and wonderful all at once. Beyond a great story, that insight into humanity is what the Odyssey has to offer and what I hope will continue to resonate.

I would be sorry to see a movie adaptation of the Odyssey that managed to fully capture Homer’s poem. That might make the work itself appear irrelevant, unneeded, redundant: one of those cases where “the movie is better than the book.” But I’m not worried about that anymore. Nor was I disappointed by Nolan’s film. You really can’t be disappointed if you don’t expect too much. It was a good adventure story told in a captivating way. Now I must return to reading; there’s a translation by Daniel Mendelsohn I haven’t gotten around to yet.