Sorry, haters, Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus is no wimp — but a hero for our times
Was Odysseus, the legendary Greek warrior, actually a wimp?
The most trenchant criticisms of Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster movie “The Odyssey” involve how he portrays the hero of the tale.
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In the original, Odysseus is a clever, multifaceted hero who comes up with the idea for the Trojan horse and then, after the Greeks win the decade-long war with Troy, embarks on his arduous journey home to Ithaca and his waiting wife Penelope.
Now, it’s true that Nolan modernizes Odysseus for a contemporary audience, but what was he supposed to do?
If he’d given us the 100% Homeric Odysseus — abducting women, slaughtering unarmed people, sleeping around with nymphs, ordering the execution of housemaids — there’d be little chance that movie-goers would be interested in shelling out to see a 3-hour movie about his adventures and travails.
The values of Bronze Age Greece, when Odysseus was supposedly fighting and maneuvering his way home, were emphatically not our own.
So, Nolan had to soften him.
But he went too far in this direction, giving us an Odysseus who is wracked by war guilt and suffering from PTSD.
In the Homeric version, his long stay with the beautiful nymph Calypso underlines how desperate he is to get home — she offers him a life of endless pleasure, and still he pines for Ithaca.
In the Nolan version, Calypso serves as the hero’s therapist, and it emerges that he truly doesn’t want to go home until he works through all his dark memories.
If this is a bit much, there’s no doubt that Nolan is drawing on elements of the original.
Homer has Odysseus weeping when he hears songs of the Trojan war, a wrenching depiction of his sense of grief and loss.
This isn’t all: Nolan leaves it out of the movie, but in Homer’s telling Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior, meets Odysseus in Hades and tells him he regrets having chosen a short life full of glory.
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There have been many different literary depictions of Odysseus over the years.
Since he wasn’t a real person, none of them should be binding.
The likes of Sophocles and Euripides gave us negative portrayals, and Dante put him in the Eighth Circle of Hell for his deceptive tactic with the Trojan Horse — a major source of his guilt in the Nolan version, as well.
Ultimately, the director renders a Christianized version of the pagan epic.
Having sinned, Odysseus needs to repent and seek forgiveness.
The movie is more evidence for the proposition that, even in our secular age, our notions of what constitute morality — and admirable conduct — rest on a Christian edifice.
I found the Nolan movie gripping, despite some of its flaws, and at the very end, even inspiring.
For the finale, Nolan seems to draw on the depiction of Odysseus in the Alfred Tennyson poem “Ulysses” (another name for Odysseus).
The British poet renders an Odysseus who feels compelled always to learn and experience more, as he sets out on another journey after his return to Ithaca.
Odysseus and Penelope in the movie almost directly quote Tennyson when Ulysses speaks of following “knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
In this, Odysseus is the very embodiment of the questing, endlessly curious spirit of Western culture that has forged so many new discoveries and transformed the human condition.
Tennyson’s Ulysses believes, “’tis not too late to seek a newer world,” and “to sail beyond the sunset.”
He ends with a ringing commitment “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The most fevered critics of the movie on the right suggest that Christopher Nolan seeks to subvert the Western tradition.
If so, the director — who has renewed interest in a Western classic and ends with a paean to the Western zest for exploration — has a funny way of going about it.
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X: @RichLowry
