[Warning - numerous plot spoilers ahead]:
Is Homer's Odyssey really filmable? It's inspired innumerable genre paintings over the ages, so it could certainly be claimed to lend itself to fanciful reimaginings ...
The contrast between paintings and movie stills makes it clear just how comparatively restrained and austere Christopher Nolan's new movie is. Is it faithful to the source material? Not particularly, no. You constantly notice, as you go along, little bits of rewriting or reemphasis: whole sections - such as Odysseus's sojourn with Nausicaä and the Phaeacians: the original context for the hero's retelling of his own adventures to date - gone missing.
But does that really matter? Homer's Odyssey is, after all, immensely long - far too full of incident for all of it to be embodied in a single film. What's more, in Christopher Nolan's twenty-first century version of the tale he's hardly likely to indulge us with a gross-out scene of Odysseus hanging all the poor put-upon maids in the palace after the massacre of Penelope's rapey suitors. No, Nolan's intention throughout is to interrogate and question the motives for violence in this society - and, by extension, our own.
I'd been planning to continue my piece on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey by contrasting it with some of the earlier screen versions of the poem - with side-references to my own attempt at a listing of the principal English versions of Homer - but then classical scholar Emily Wilson's rather caustic review of Nolan's movie came out.
I'm afraid that my first reaction took the form of a short satirical epigram (along the lines of John Byrom’s famous piece about the rivalry between eighteenth century musicians George Frideric Handel and Giovanni Bononcini):
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Some say, compar’d to Bononcini
That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny
Others aver, that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle
Strange all this Difference should be
‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!
Christopher Nolan vs. Emily Wilson
Some say that unlike Emily
Nolan stuffed up his Odyssey
others say unlike Christopher
Wilson believes she is Homer
strange all this difference should be
'twixt cine-him and scribble-she
That may not be an adequate response, however. Wilson makes a number of points which are hard to dispute: there isn't nearly as much sex as in the original, and the food doesn't look that appetising ... Whether that's enough to justify panning the film altogether is another question, one which I'll try to discuss in more detail below.
For the moment, though, I think I should declare an interest. I've been a Christopher Nolan fan virtually from the beginning, which is bound to prejudice me in his favour to some extent. Certainly I've been following his work with increasing awe from Memento (2000) onwards.
It's hard to think of a movie of his since then that I haven't admired, or at the very least- Interstellar, Tenet - found intriguing. He is, in my opinion, a genius: one of those very few talents born to transform the art of cinema rather than simply add new items to it.
Having said that, even Homer nods, and I have to say that I wasn't particularly impressed by Dunkirk's stagey theatrics. But his Batman trilogy! And the fascinating wheels within wheels of The Prestige! Not to mention his most recent triumph, where all his skills seem to come together almost miraculously, Oppenheimer!
So where does The Odyssey stand on that scale? It's probably too early to say. So far, however, the indications look pretty good:
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 466 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "Reinvigorating an ancient adventure with majestic sweep and sterling work by its colossal ensemble, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey imbues myth with primal human feeling." It is Nolan's highest-rated film on the website.I wanted to feel like that - wanted to be able to rate it as high on my own list as Inception, which astonished me continuously from beginning to end, and must surely rank as one of the greatest SF films of all time.
There's a melancholy, world-weary tone to The Odyssey. It seems to lack that visceral sense of adventure that inspired so many of his earlier films. Having said that, I'm curious - now - to see it again, perhaps this time on an IMAX screen, and find out how it strikes me the second time round.
However, it did succeed in moving me to tears: just once. Unsurprisingly, it was in the scene where Odysseus is reunited with his aged hunting dog Argus, and his son Telemachus, at that moment, understands who this white-bearded beggar actually is.
I have to say that Tom Holland was excellent in the role of Telemachus - not at all the usual sulky brat. He played it with dignity and grace. Lupita Nyong'o, too, achieved an unexpected triumph in her double cameo as Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra.
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Pappas Post: 'Emily Wilson Helped Inspire Nolan’s ‘Odyssey.’ Her Verdict on the Film Is Brutal (28/7/26)"I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script".
The title chosen for Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's Odyssey, "An Uncomplicated Man", is presumably intended as an allusion to the first line of her own 2017 translation of the poem: "Tell me about a complicated man."
A good deal of ink has been spilled on the deliberately provocative modernity of this choice of words on her part, a distinct contrast to Robert Fagles' "man of twists and turns", Richmond Lattimore's "man of many ways", or even Alexander Pope's "man for wisdom's various arts renowned". She is, in other words, no stranger to controversy. This piece is no exception:
Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.Not to mention the fact that the dog dies, but not before his "adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times." Not even the cuteness of a puppy is exempt from the wrath of this particular reviewer, it would appear ...
I'm afraid that she rather lost me with her next complaint about the movie, however:
The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.This piece of moral one-upmanship sounds quite damning at first - until you begin to break it down. The "most troubling ethical problem" with the film is that it concerns war crimes, and yet was (partially) filmed in a debatable land rife with war crimes? Pardon me, but are there any parts of the globe that aren't past (or present) sites of crimes against humanity?
Emily Wilson is (according to her Wikipedia page) a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, which is a "private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia." Philadelphia, originally named "Shackamaxon", was originally inhabited by the Lenape, also known as the Delaware Indians, who were "pushed out of the region during the 18th century as the original Thirteen Colonies expanded". I like that term "pushed out" - it sounds so much better than "ethnically cleansed" ...
Does she mention this disturbing history at the opening of each of her publications? I doubt it. And yet it's now become the custom in more recently colonised countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land before beginning any public proceedings. Perhaps she and her institution should follow suit.
In any case, is this really the "most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey"? Surely there are a lot of other moral and economic concerns associated with any big Hollywood production which should worry us before this particular detail about one of the locations chosen for the movie?
Isn't the ideological hegemony exerted by the American film industry - and by American capitalism in general - of rather more significance than this absurdly strained piece of right-on-ism about the Western Sahara? The obscene gap between overpaid actors and underpaid contractors in our culture, for instance?
Once you start down these rabbitholes of grievance there's no end to them. It you want to blame Christopher Nolan for 'ignoring' the terrible ongoing human rights abuses taking place in the Western Sahara, why not hold him personally responsible for all the other innumerable injustices in the structure of our society? Or yourself, for that matter.
Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful."In what we are told is the streaming era" ... I'm a decade or so older than Emily Wilson (presently in her mid-50s: a year younger than Christopher Nolan), but I hope that even I don't sound as much of an old fogey as that. I've even managed to stop calling films "flickers" and e-vehicles "horseless carriages". This last paragraph - especially that coy line about how "translations ... including mine, are flying off the shelves" - reads like a deliberate parody of what elderly academics are supposed to sound like. Its closest cousin must surely be Jim Dixon's tortuously insincere "Merrie England" speech in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim - written in the mid-1950s, at the height of the "Angry Young Man" era:
... I say to you that something can be done by each one of us here tonight. Each of us can resolve to do something, every day, to resist the application of manufactured standards, to protest against ugly articles of furniture and table-ware, to speak out against sham architecture, to resist the importation into more and more public places of loudspeakers relaying the Light Programme, to say one word against the Yellow Press, against the best-seller, against the theatre-organ, to say one word for the instinctive culture of the integrated village-type community. In that way we shall be saying a word, however small in its individual effect, for our native tradition, for our common heritage, in short, for what we once had and may, some day, have again – Merrie England.
It's interesting how Emily Wilson's twin versions of the Odyssey and Iliad have been so insistently marketed as the first complete translations by a woman - the implication being that they're therefore bound to provide us with many fresh insights obscured through the ages by patriarchal misogyny.
I have no particular quarrel with that line of reasoning. It's certainly been very effective in selling these two new versions in an already overstocked market. But it's important to note the proviso: the first complete translations into English verse by a woman.
That mightn't seem to make much difference to monoglot English speakers, but it's perhaps worth pausing here to celebrate the earlier achievements of (for example) the inspired and audacious Anne Le Fèvre, more commonly known as Mme Anne Dacier:
In 1711, her prose translation of the Iliad appeared, which earned her the esteem in which she is held in French literature. It was followed in 1716 by a similar translation of the Odyssey. Alexander Pope found these two works very useful for his own translations (Iliad (1715-1720) and Odyssey (1725–1726)). Dacier in turn published, in her second edition of the Iliad, remarks on Pope's translation of the same, which gained her some fame in England as well.
Dacier, like Wilson, was a considerable classical scholar and (again like Wilson) by no means averse to controversy:
In 1714, [Antoine] La Motte, who could not read Greek, published a poetical version of the Iliad, abridged and altered to suit his own taste, together with a Discours sur Homère ("Discourse on Homer"), stating the reasons why Homer failed to satisfy his critical taste. Dacier replied in the same year in her work, Des causes de la corruption du goût ("Of the Causes of the Corruption of Taste"). In defending Homer, Dacier "developed her own philosophical aesthetics. She insists on the centrality of taste as an indicator of the level of civilization, both moral and artistic, within a particular culture."In the eyes of some male pundits, however, this ability to read Homer in the original was a handicap rather than an advantage:
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, critiqued learned women of the time, including Mme. Dacier stating: "A Woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme. Dacier, or who conducts disputations about mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet might as well also wear a beard; for that might perhaps better express the mien of depth for which they strive."
The one thing that Christopher Nolan seems to understand most intimately - since it's at the heart of so many of his films - is the danger of hubris. You'd think Emily Wilson might fear it too. But she does persist, perversely, in crossing powerful goddesses.
Her review of The Odyssey, for instance, appears to have offended those three most terrifying words in the English language, Joyce Carol Oates, who complains that Wilson's "tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note":
rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers. within the world of translators this seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text. one would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.It might be a bit of a stretch to include Wilson in the ranks of "MAGA folks" simply on the strength of this one review, but I can see what Oates means. She goes on to say that she sees:
no reason why Nolan, or anyone else, should not re-imagine/re-envision a classical hero through the prism of his own invention. Homer’s “noble” Odysseus does not really seem so noble to contemporary readers who are likely to think of, for instance, Lt. William Calley in such lines: “From Ilion I was borne by a wind toward the Kikones –/ To Ismaros. There I laid waste the city and killed the men./ After dragging their wives from the city – with a great deal of booty as well –/ We divided it up …” (Book 9, Mendelsohn translation) No remorse here, just swaggering male braggadocio typical of “noble Odysseus” – “Odysseus, that cunning man”; but still, in Nolan’s vision, even such a man is capable of conscience & remorse eventually. in the 1997 adaptation it is pride that Odysseus must overcome; in Nolan’s version, it is conscience ...
Oates concludes by saying:
I do not think that Nolan’s film will be considered a great classic but really, it seems that whatever Nolan did, it would disappoint hordes of people. most moviemakers/creators just try the best they can – it seems odd that this director has drawn such angry criticism.She goes on to note that such criticism
is chilling, dampening for any creative artist. to attack a creative artist as if he were a criminal, had done something to harm, hurt, kill – this is alarming. if you hate a movie, fine – no need to recommend it. no one expects every work of art to be a classic, perfect … rage seems just weirdly inappropriate.
This is not the first time that Emily Wilson has wilfully courted the wrath of the White Goddess. She began her review of poetry diva Anne Carson's recent poetry collection Wrong Norma as follows:
Write about trauma. Write about loneliness. Write about grief. Write about nature. Write about the body. Invoke universals. Make it mythic. Tell it slant. Do not use rhyme. Do not use meter. Use short lines. Leave a lot of space on the page. Juxtapose your words with quivery line drawings in ink or paint or collage.By comparison with this little effort, Wilson's strictures on Nolan's Odyssey begin to sound like a love-letter. She does, after all, admit a certain gratitude to him for increasing the sales of her own version of the poem.
If you want to produce poetry that a large subset of American teenagers and twentysomethings will adore with a passion verging on religious devotion, these simple rules provide your best hope.
It would be impertinent of me to question Wilson's views on Ancient Greek, though she does seem to permit herself a certain telescoping of eras in pointing out just what Nolan has got wrong in his version of Homer - himself many centuries distant from the quasi-historical events he recounted. I would say, though, that the following passage shows an ignorance of contemporary poetry on a far grander scale than any of the solecisms she detects in Nolan's movie:
Of the three prominent writers who have triumphantly followed this track [i.e. the "simple rules" listed in her first paragraph], the most senior, born 1939, is Margaret Atwood, who has published 18 books of melancholic, reflective poetry, at least one including her own, quirky art, that often juxtapose contemporary experiences with allusions to ancient and medieval fables and myths. The youngest, born 1992, is Rupi Kaur, whose work has an enormous following, especially among young people on social media. Many readers with no interest in any other poetry — including one of my own daughters — have found a kind of spiritual salvation in Kaur’s visceral, poetic evocations of the struggles of young womanhood.
Margaret Atwood is a famous novelist. Her poetry, while certainly highly regarded, is hardly in the mainstream of contemporary verse. As for bestselling "insta-poet" Rupi Kaur, comparing her clichéd banalities to the work of the multi-award-winning Carson can only be seen as a deliberate insult. Juxtaposing the two poets is about as intelligent as equating Keith Haring with Johannes Vermeer.
But that, of course, is Wilson's rather less than subtle point.
Be Canadian. Be zany. Be moody. Be relatable. Write about your mother. Write about desire. Write about trauma. Write about loneliness. Write about grief. Write about nature. Write about the body. Invoke universals. Make it mythic.Atwood, Kaur, and Carson are all indubitably Canadian. Does that make them all alike as poets? Not entirely, Wilson concedes. "What distinguishes Carson from her more pop-inclined compatriots is her clear interest in disguise, performance, and experimentation with genre."
Like many of us, Carson uses writing to find out what she thinks; but the means of production do not always need to be preserved in the finished product. You can throw the ladder away after you make the climb."Like many of us" ... a horrible truth begins to dawn at this point. The author of a competent translation of Homer in rather jog-trot pentameters actually considers herself a poet on the same level as the tirelessly innovative Carson. She goes on:
I have been told that Carson, preparing to give a talk onstage, has been spotted in the green room, speaking to herself and saying over and over, ‘I am Anne Carson. I am Anne Carson' ... The performance of her own personal identity, on the page as well as onstage, is a site of struggle and artistry.
This is just silly - and offensive as well. It puts me a mind a little of Camille Paglia's painfully embarrassing acccount of her attempts as a young grad student to impress Susan Sontag, whom she'd managed to entrap into taking a car journey with her. Sontag, understandably, found it difficult to understand why her interlocutor seemed to want to be her, to upstage her, and to kill her, all at the same time.
The penny drops at last. These frantic cries for attention are Emily Wilson's version of the anxiety of influence. Anne Carson's sin lies in being a classicist and a widely acclaimed poet, whereas Wilson is regarded as (at best) a competent versifier. The worst thing of all is the fact that Carson doesn't appear to have noticed this foolish attack on her.
When asked later about Paglia's vitriolic denunciations of her, Sontag, too, is reported to have said: "Who's Camille Paglia?"
But Christopher Nolan's sin is even more grievous. Remember that quote near the top of my page? "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script." Despite offering, early on, some tepid praise of her version, which he claimed had influenced his script, he didn't ask her to help. She might have been ashamed to have written it in its present form, but you can be sure that she had a kick-ass version in her head, all ready to go at the press of a button (so does Elon Musk, we're told: his is gonna be untold better than Nolan's, it'll be made it with AI, and he'll be getting Mel Gibson to direct it ...)
Her Odyssey was highly praised, but it came out nearly ten years ago now and the bloom has started to fade. So, instead of writing a Hollywood blockbuster, why not translate it again, only this time much better? There's a new article out about that now, too: "Why Emily Wilson Is Translating The Odyssey — Again":
I wouldn’t have done this and then be doing it all over again if I didn’t think the whole thing is awesome.Awesome indeed. Once was enough for Alexander Pope, and William Cowper - even for T. E. Lawrence ... but "with her second version, Wilson intends to honor the poetic traditions of the English language". This Harper's Bazaar article, too (alas) begins with that familiar exaggeration:
Wilson first completed her version of Homer’s epic poem in 2017, becoming the first woman ever to publish a translation of the story.Except for Anne Dacier's and Rosa Calzecchi Onesti's complete translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, that is - not to mention Caroline Alexander's earlier Iliad.
But then, Christopher Nolan has his predecessors, too - not that he's ever sought to conceal the fact. Among the various recent cinematic versions of the Odyssey, I'd like to single out Uberto Pasolini's The Return: a detailed version of the final twelve books of the epic. It's important to remember that no less than half of Homer's poem is devoted to Odysseus' return to Ithaca, so treating the subject in such depth was his idea, not Pasolini's.
My first thought on seeing this film was that it was meant as a deliberate echo of such classic Pier Paolo Pasolini movies as Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (1974), part of his trilogy of life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and the Arabian Nights).
Like them, it seems to move in a world of pre-existing landscapes rather than carefully modelled sets. The characters, too, underact as much as possible: preferring to let the gradually unfolding story speak for itself.
It came as a bit of surprise to me to discover that Uberto Pasolini is no relation of Pier Paolo. Instead, he's the nephew of Luchino Visconti, director of The Leopard (1963) and Death in Venice (1971). But that doesn't really seem to offer us much of a clue to his intentions - and neither does the fact that his past credits include producing quintessential British movie The Full Monty (1997) and directing the little gem Still Life:
There's a certain intimacy about many of the scenes in The Return which might recall Still Life, in fact. But perhaps it's the writing team we should really be concerning ourselves with.
They include veteran screenwriter John Collee, a sure hand at a big screen epic - his credits include Master and Commander (2003) (directed by Peter Weir); the Charles Darwin bio-pic Creation (2009); Hotel Mumbai (2018); and Kate Winslet's Lee (2023).
But of course the crucial figure there is legendary British playwright Edward Bond. His 50-odd plays include such masterpieces as Lear (1971), a rewritten, more class-conscious version of Shakespeare's King Lear; and Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), set in the haiku poet Bashō's Japan, and notorious at the time as "The One With Five Dead Babies and a Disembowelling".
Pasolini (and Bond)'s is a brutal vision of the rottenness of the state of Ithaka in the absence of its king, and his version of the death of the suitors seems to go on forever. Otherwise, the two directors, Nolan and Pasolini, present suprisingly similar visions of Odysseus's Mycenaean hill-fort - and the impossible dilemma of their respective resplendent Penelopes, Juliette Binoche and Anne Hathaway.
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Derek Walcott: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993)"The future happens. No matter how much we scream”
― Derek Walcott, The Odyssey
Which leaves me, for my final dramatised Odyssey, with Nobel-Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott's epic play, originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but recently revived for a new production in Houston, Texas:
As local theatre critic Chris Vogner describes it:
Alley Theatre artistic director Rob Melrose was mesmerized when he saw Derek Walcott’s Odyssey in London back in 1993. Walcott had taken Homer’s epic poem about love and longing for home and given it a jolt and a lilt from his native Saint Lucia, spicing the work with Caribbean flavor. It was a follow-up of sorts to Walcott’s Omeros, a postcolonial meditation that borrowed characters and themes from Homer’s Iliad. But where Omeros was a sort of homage to Homer, this Odyssey was the real deal.Rob Melrose goes on to say:
“It's one of my favorite stories of all time,” he said. “I have a Greek scholar friend who said, ‘There are two kinds of people in the world. There are Iliad people and there are Odyssey people. The Iliad is about war and fighting and strife, and The Odyssey is about adventure and romance and love. I'm definitely an Odyssey person. It's so wondrous, the way it's about a father and a son and a husband and a wife, and all the creatures and goddesses he comes across in his journeys.”
That seems to me a very pertinent remark. Having recently read Walcott's play for the first time, and fresh from my viewings of both Uberto Pasolini's and Christopher Nolan's films, I'd have to admit that I, too, am an Odyssey person.
I understand the arguments in favour of the Iliad. Structurally, it makes more sense as a story, and its range of emotions and depth of understanding of human nature are probably even greater than those supplied by the Odyssey. But the Odyssey offers hope where the Iliad has little or none. Against all odds, Odysseus does return, does defeat his enemies. He even succeeds in placating the gods he's offended for long enough to earn one more night in his tree-bound bed with his faithful wife.
It offers, in the end, a more ecumenical, more inclusive view of the world than the relentless tragic truths of the Iliad. And it's always been open to endless new interpretations and readings. Nolan, Pasolini, Walcott, and Wilson are all part of that story. Of course they all prefer their own recreations to those of their rivals: that's their privilege - but surely, for the rest of us, the more versions we have of it the better?
There may or may not have been a single poetic genius called Homer, and he/she/they may or may not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The arguments on that subject have been going on now for more than two thousand years. What we do have is the poems themselves. So let's just be grateful for that, and cut it out with all this pointless infighting.
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