Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Matt Damon, Himesh Patel, Robert Pattinson
This week, while scrolling aimlessly, the algorithm proffered me a clip of Christopher Nolan being asked which was his favourite Fast & Furious movie, and the director espousing his love for Tokyo Drift as well as the direction in which Justin Lin steered the series. Nolan is a filmmaker placed on a lofty pedestal by quite a large number of ardent film buffs, and his work often aspires to the grandiose, so to hear him talk about such dumb, fun popcorn fare with evident affection is easy to sell as kooky clickbait. But to do so ignores the broadstroke populism prevalent in his own filmography. The rigorous, convoluted construction of movies like Inception, Interstellar and Tenet doesn’t mask the frenetic, immediate thrills at their core. This is a man who also made three hugely successful Batman movies, afterall.
Still, Nolan’s self-seriousness becomes a bit of a rod for his own back with his ambitious – yet strangely meatheaded – adaptation of Homer’s foundational 12,000-line Odyssey. The very definition of a passion project coming in the wake of his Oscar and box office conquering biopic Oppenheimer, this is the kind of spare-no-expense big ticket filmmaking only a handful of people ever get an opportunity at. The kind of film you can only make if you’re in the position to make absolutely anything. Starring basically everyone, it’s a 3-hour journey through the episodic exploits of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his efforts to return home to his kingdom of Itchaca in the wake of the sacking of Troy. And, this being Nolan, the chronology is all chopped up and the tone unwaveringly earnest.
Part of Odysseus’ ordeal involves the curdling of his memory in the benevolent convalessive presence of Calypso (Charlize Theron), so Nolan’s decision to dizzy us with multiple timelines at the film’s opening seems sound in theory (as well as in-keeping with his consistent MO), but it actively hampers our adjustment to the material in ways that his prior experiments with a-chronology avoided. The opening half-hour is listless and trying as we, like Odysseus, try to get a handle on what’s being rendered out of the movie’s ever-shifting sands. It’s the least sure-footed he’s ever seemed, perhaps faltering in awe of adapting a genuine classic.
This chopping up does bear thematic fruit, however, as it places the various stories of Odysseus’ exploits in the mouths of disparate characters. The story is partially the falteringly recalled memories of Odysseus on the beach with Calypso, but also a number of “I was there” anecdotes and word-of-mouth folk tales received by their protagonist’s wandering son Telemachus (Tom Holland), in search of his father in hopes that his return will unify the kingdom and cast out the hoard of suitors braying to wed his sorrowful mother Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Teasing out the story in this manner by the scattered ensemble, Nolan relishes in the very notion of storytelling. How it embellishes and editorialises. And how we use it to keep those lost to us alive. By lofty extension, it’s a celebration of the power of cinema itself – our most bombastic and censorial modern day method of simply telling stories.
As one might well imagine The Odyssey is about as technically impressive a film as you’ll encounter. Nolan’s fealty for the analogue and the practical yields numerous gasp-worthy results, and particularly stirring is his commitment to this while Odysseus and his soldiers are sailing the high seas. For his part, Ludwig Göransson gifts the film one of his most eclectic, expansive and memorable scores to date, traversing moving woodwind themes and stark modernist electronic beats. These punctuations echo the mild distraction that occurs from Nolan ramming in so many famous faces, like an acknowledgement of the anachronism of stardom in this effort to rend something from the timeless.
Nolan’s stern brow throughout all this is curious. There are undeniably funny elements to Homer’s Odyssey and Nolan’s stubbornness to yield creates unintentional humour (aside from Tom Holland’s acting, that is). Any humour is welcome, quite frankly. With many of the crew’s exploits ending in the sudden discovery of something or someone magical and dangerous, it’s hard not to think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail every time they have to peg it back to the boat. “Run away! Run away!”. And then there’s the third (and best) act, which follows one of the most profoundly affecting and humane stretches of any Nolan film with an exceedingly silly, over-the-top fight sequence redolent of Kill Bill or John Wick. It’s a tremendously entertaining ruck, but slotting it in right after the movie’s emotional crescendo feels like another example of Nolan fumbling the order. Still, the headline is that both sequences are among his most completely immersive filmmaking efforts, if for totally polemic reasons.
But the big fun fight does, in the aftermath, become emblematic of Nolan’s approach to the text, mirrored in many of his films – appear grandiose, even when beneath that you’re being a bit silly. The argument is that it brings this venerated classic text to a massive new audience. That by playing to the masses, you draw them to the source’s riches and break down the barrier of ‘difficulty’ associated with it. The risk is becoming, by virtue of this populist ambition, the ‘dumbed down’ version. On that score I don’t feel fully qualified to judge. I’m no scholar of Homer.
Being episodic there’s a level of inconsistency to contend with here, but also opportunities to dabble and flex with genre. Samantha Morton’s guest appearance as a witch with an unsavoury broth for starving soldiers is a real highlight, partly thanks to her expert performance and partly because of how greedily Nolan revels in the grotesquery. A slightly less successful tilt toward horror is the earlier encounter with the Cyclops. Murky, protracted and mumbly, it has effective elements but somehow underwhelms. While we’re talking about notions of horror in a Nolan movie, it’s reassuring to note also that, seven years after Us, the magnificent Lupita Nyong’o is still quite capable of eliciting a jump scare all on her own.
This is a huge, interesting swerve for it’s director. It feels short at three hours, but it also sees him looser than he’s been in a while. A number of scenes are allowed to become sequences. Whole chapters explored without the constant need to cut to some other story or timeline. For Nolan that’s almost revelatory. As ever, the women in the story are marginalised at best, hysterical at worst. But then, this is a long and winding tale of masculinity. Of the codes of fathers and sons, of tribes and armies. Of men discovering that, when you commit atrocities, there’s a toll on your soul and some part of home is lost forever. Of hubris and arrogance and cocksure recklessness. Of how bestial and unpredictable it is Being a Man. Centering on a faltering figure with a past he can’t remember riddled with futures he can’t escape, The Odyssey circles Nolan right back to his word-of-mouth breakout Memento.
I guess that’s the power of word-of-mouth, of oral traditions, and enduring tales.
The Lost Highway Hotel 