Some people are going to tell you that the problem with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that it’s about modern people, not ancient people. Not me. It is about modern people, but so is everything else made by modern people. If you want to encounter the ancient world, you have to open a book. (Homer is available in several translations; I like Richmond Lattimore’s.)
Other people are going to tell you that the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that he’s using an ancient text to revisit his own preoccupations: heroism, guilt, memory and the nature of time. Not me. I like an artist who’s not afraid to keep gnawing at the same bone.
No, for me the problem with Mr. Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is something else. It’s Odysseus.
To refresh briefly for those who don’t remember the story and haven’t seen the movie: Homer’s two epic poems, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” follow the story of the Trojan War, when the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggers a huge conflict. The Greeks lay siege to Troy for 10 years, with great losses on both sides, and finally achieve victory when Odysseus tricks the Trojans into bringing a horse full of soldiers into the city. Odysseus, sailing home in victory, then angers Poseidon, the god of the sea, delaying his homecoming by another decade. When he finally makes it back, he discovers his home is full of suitors courting his wife, Penelope, and plotting the demise of their son, Telemachus. Penelope has cleverly kept the suitors at bay through trickery, but she’s been betrayed by some of her servants and cannot hold out much longer.
One thing that may strike contemporary readers of Homer is that Odysseus is one of a handful of epic heroes whose motivations actually make sense to us. He doesn’t want to be in Troy; he wants to be home. He is devious and clever without being an out-and-out scoundrel, and he’s generally motivated by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.
In Mr. Nolan’s hands, however, wily Odysseus becomes a different, if still recognizable, type: the halfway hero. He’s a man who in some way fails to be a father, a man who dirties himself in the name of a higher cause but then discovers that the cause wasn’t worth it, a man with the power to change the world but who, in the end, either fails to do so or makes the world worse.
Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Mr. Nolan’s previous film, this halfway hero seems protected from self-knowledge, either through culpable naïveté or blinding arrogance. Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, for instance, is shocked that once he gets the Greeks into Troy, his comrades loot it and kill the inhabitants. He plucks his bow while hunting out of a sense of sportsmanship and, when his ships set sail to go home, he decides not to take provisions from Troy because, he says, they’ve taken enough from the city already.
This is, as mentioned, an Odysseus for modern people, and modern people struggle with the idea of true heroes. A figure who identifies what needs to be done and then does it without tremendous inner conflict? What’s the point of that? Such a person will make most modern audiences only feel like failures. Perhaps contemporary viewers don’t trust the idea of a sharp, decisive leader, or perhaps the notion of doing something without feeling bad about it seems inherently villainous to them. In contemporary politics, Americans tend to alternate between people who tell us nothing can be done and people who swear everything can be done, both of which disappoint in their own ways. So Mr. Nolan’s Odysseus, who struggles after doing something that turns out to be the wrong thing, feels like a particularly compelling figure.
In stories, we seem to be drawn to these halfway heroes: people who sort of know what to do but have a lot of trouble doing it and whose eventual moment of personal resolution somehow fixes everything in the end. In its least artful forms, this turns art into an ersatz therapy session in which you forgive yourself for your failures — and then you save the world.
Mr. Nolan is more artful than that. His heroes are often exceptional men who cause problems, then agonize over how to make amends. The fact that they are men is no accident. Their failures at both masculinity and intimacy are essential to understanding them. They aren’t good men, in the sense of upstanding members of the community who work toward building something better. And they aren’t bad men, which is to say violent parasites. Instead, they’re halfway heroes, charismatic but hollow people who deem love as something best shown by their absence because their presence proves to be too dangerous.
The problem that shapes “The Odyssey” is what has happened in the neglected homes while the men have been away. The suitors who pester Penelope to marry one of them are lesser men than Odysseus, and in the absence of men like Odysseus, no one has taught them how to behave. The generation they represent has gone astray, and there’s no fixing it.
It isn’t giving too much away about the movie to say that, much like Mr. Nolan’s interpretation of Batman, and even his Oppenheimer, his Odysseus decides to become a sin eater, someone who atones for the misdeeds of others — seeking to rectify not only the disorder that has overcome his home but make amends for the entire Trojan War. His solution to the disastrous generation that lies between his own and his son’s is the same as in the poem: Odysseus kills the suitors. They are dangerously weak men, not strong enough to rule or to exhibit self-control but strong enough to terrorize the elderly, the blind, women and children. In the film, Odysseus tries to keep his son’s hands clean of blood, but he fails, so the project of creating a genuinely innocent new generation is over before it’s started. But having taken all this violence onto himself, Odysseus can attempt to purify his home simply by retreating and leaving it again.
In real life, outside the movies, we are certainly presented with many examples of dangerously weak men, much like the suitors: men whose conception of being a man begins and ends with a sense of being able to humiliate others, men who live off the work of others while contributing nothing, men who are manipulative cowards who love to tell tales of their own virtue. When we try to imagine alternatives to these men, we come up with the halfway hero — someone who can’t prevent a crisis but will try mightily to fix the mess he made. As one of Mr. Nolan’s characters in a different film said, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” — an epigram that applies equally to Batman, Oppenheimer and Odysseus.
It’s not Mr. Nolan’s job as an artist to give us a solution to these dilemmas, and in some ways, I’m glad that in “The Odyssey” he doesn’t really try. Still, I watched the ending of his “Odyssey” with a kind of resignation. Maybe, to riff on another well-known line from one of Mr. Nolan’s movies — “not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed” — halfway heroes seem to be the heroes we want, because certainly they’re the ones we think we need right now. But we could deserve another kind of hero entirely.
B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.
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