Nolan Honors the Gods

W hen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was announced last year under a tagline promising to “defy the gods,” I confess the phrase gave me pause. Homer’s poem does not celebrate defiance; it tells the story of a man who breaks a sacred law and spends the rest of his life answering for it, and I wondered whether Hollywood would honor that law or overturn it.

I am pleased to report that the British auteur has done more than resist that temptation; he has delivered an epic that treats the metaphysical with moral seriousness, and honors the ruinous cost of crossing the divine.

The scale is the first thing to strike you. Nolan shot the entire picture on IMAX film cameras, the first feature ever made that way, and the images fill a screen six stories tall. When the waves pound the hull, you feel it in your sternum. Longboats vanish into a slate-dark sea, and the ruined Trojan Horse sits half-drowned in the sand like the wreck of some enormous crime. This is David Lean by way of the Bronze Age.

Nowhere is that scale better spent than on the siege of Troy: a night assault lit only by fire, a burning city rendered without the weightless sheen that makes so much modern spectacle forgettable. Because Nolan builds rather than renders, much of the film inspires the best marvel the movies can raise: “How on earth did they do that?” His monsters are gloriously physical — the Cyclops is a 60-foot puppet worked from within by the great Bill Irwin, a genuine creature throwing a shadow you could measure.

Grand as the set pieces are, Nolan’s greatest achievement lies in conserving Homer’s vision of our relationship to the eternal and the obligations of home and family. His film concerns men answerable to an order they did not author and cannot escape, and the reckoning that follows when they pretend otherwise. Its governing idea is xenia, the law of hospitality set down by Zeus himself: The stranger at your gate may be a god in disguise and must be received as kin. It binds the film’s scattered episodes into one moral argument, and every catastrophe flows from a breach of it. Penelope’s suitors profane it in a domestic key, and Anne Hathaway makes her long vigil look like the hardest labor a woman ever bore.

Perceptive viewers will notice that the Olympians are almost entirely off-screen. The one exception is Zendaya’s Athena, and even she appears less as a deity than as the shape Odysseus’s conscience takes when it visits him. The reticence recalls William Wyler’s decision to withhold the face of Christ in Ben-Hur, where declining to depict the supernatural becomes its own kind of piety: the sacred honored by refusing to reduce it to a costume.

That reverence extends to how the film treats defiance itself. Odysseus spends much of it setting his cunning above the gods’ will, refusing their omens, and Nolan makes each transgression exact its price: a ship, a friend, a decade, a self. Rebellion is never forgotten here, and never free. The god who seemed absent turns out to have been keeping the account.

My friend Spencer Klavan notes that Nolan’s Odysseus arrives home carrying a guilt the poem’s hero does not, a late and gathering remorse for what he did at Troy. The Trojan Horse, the ruse that won him his fame, becomes an original sin: a gift accepted under the protection of welcome, then turned to slaughter in the dark. To burn the walls of Troy, Odysseus comes to understand, is to burn the world entire. It is the film’s boldest stroke, a psychology that feels like a continuation of Oppenheimer, another brilliant man made to sit with the ruin his ingenuity loosed upon the world. Matt Damon carries it in a face gone gray with knowing, and Nolan surrounds him with players equal to the weight of it: a preening, contemptible Robert Pattinson as the lead suitor, and, best of all, John Leguizamo, whose blind swineherd Eumaeus supplies the film its warmest pulse.

The Odyssey is not above reproach, and I say so as an admirer. Nolan keeps his camera in near-constant motion, cutting away before a feeling has the beat it needs to land. Göransson’s drums, too, occasionally swallow a whispered line that wanted hearing. These failings of excess, though, are redeemed by discipline elsewhere. The violence is close and unsparing, yet Nolan never lets it curdle into the horror show a lesser hand would have staged. A kindred instinct governs his tenderest moment, when Odysseus comes home disguised and the only creature to know him at once is his old hunting dog, worn past use and waiting still for a master 3,000 years of readers have never forgotten.

It is a strange fate for so faithful a treatment of one of the West’s foundational stories to be received as vandalism by the very people who claim to guard that inheritance. That Lupita Nyong’o was cast as Helen, and as her sister Clytemnestra, was worked up in the pettier corners of the online right into an act of civilizational arson. A preoccupation with an actress’s melanin is not conservatism. It is mental Lilliputianism, conserving nothing but promo-code commissions.

What makes the manufactured scandal especially absurd is that the roles seized on as desecration amount, together, to roughly ten minutes of a three-hour epic. The surest sign of the digital lobotomizers’ frivolity is that they missed the irony of Elliot Page as Sinon, a slight, frightened boy with no business on a battlefield.

The grifters, unsurprisingly, had it wrong, and Universal’s marketing department had it backwards. Nolan has kept faith with Homer, and delivered an epic in which the household is holy, marriage endures, the stranger is owed his due, and no man escapes the order above him.

The gods were never in danger from Christopher Nolan. He has come to honor them.