Modern audiences would likely not have warmed to the ancient Greeks’ notions of war, violence, and sex.
The critical consensus developing around Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has several parts. The film has remarkable performances and is made on an overwhelming scale. It finds a way to convey the strange topsy-turvy way the storyline unfolds in the epic poem. And its ending is remarkably satisfying and strangely coherent thematically: the Trojan Horse, a peace offering meant to disguise more war, rape, and rapine, is seen as an offense to the gods. For almost 20 years, the songs about the victory of Troy have been resounding in the halls of the haughty. But the wanderings of Odysseus’s crew, and their need to raid for supplies over their ten-year journey home, have echoed back as dreadful rumors of “sea people” who are destroying civilized life wherever they land. At the end of Nolan’s film we have a guilt-stricken Odysseus. Along the way, we lost some of Homer’s proud trickster.
Though not entirely. The finale features Odysseus disguised as a beggar, then allows him his virtuous and braggart “snap” of his bow before hunting his prey, Penelope’s suitors, who have looted and polluted his home. The audience at my showing started applauding and yipping in response to this.
As many reviewers with a taste for the classics have remarked, Nolan doesn’t tell this story within its own framework of ancient Greek values. This is a point made by the brilliant translator Daniel Mendelsohn and by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
I don’t think Nolan should be blamed too much for this. It would have been much harder for modern audiences to admire and like Odysseus as a husband coming home if they saw him enjoying his romps with Calypso. Modern audiences also would have trouble with a filmic portrayal of war and conquest as unambiguously glorious rather than tragic. And some of the final comeuppance in The Odyssey would have repulsed today’s viewers. In Homer’s epic, after the slaughter of the suitors, Telemachus is commanded to round up the maids who have sided with the suitors. He makes them clean up the gore from the slaughter and then swiftly and brutally has them hanged for their disloyalty. In Nolan’s movie, one treacherous maid is merely exposed to the violent danger of the suitors battling the home’s true master, rather than outright killed by it.
Only Robert Eggers, as a filmmaker, seems willing to let pre-modern values inform his filmmaking and storytelling. Consequently, almost all his films are perceived as horror stories.