By CYNTHIA BIDDLECOMB
Los Alamos
Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster “The Odyssey” was released Friday. Only a director/writer of Nolan’s renown would have the hubris to bring this epic song-poem, which originated in Greece in the 8th century BCE, to a modern audience via a nearly three hour feature film. Mostly, Nolan’s efforts work, though not all film reviewers are enamored.
Cast in the title role of Odysseus is a mature Matt Damon, made to age appropriately over the twenty years of the epic. This is a colossal role for Damon, allowing him to demonstrate deeper acting chops than he may ever have. Left at home on Ithaca is his long-suffering wife Penelope, the character played with near perfection by a mature Anne Hathaway. Their son Telemachus, a toddler when Odysseus left (to fight alongside King Agamemnon in the Trojan War), grows into manhood under the acting efforts of a boyish Tom Holland.
After Odysseus has been gone some years, potential suitors arrive on the island, hoping to marry the presumed widow Penelope and take over as king. Their numbers have reached untenable proportions as The Law of Zeus requires that a household provide hospitality. In fact, the abuse of this Law of Zeus is an underlying theme and a source of Odysseus’ deepest regrets after all he endures through this tale.
Odysseus is held captive by the seductive nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) who, after seven years enjoying his company, encourages him to remember his misadventures. He pieces it together for her. On the way home from Troy, Odysseus’ fleet of three longboats got lost, was forced to look for food on islands where magical personages live, and where many of the warrior-sailors died catastrophically in increasingly disturbing incidents.
Nolan images the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus (using motion capture technology) on one island, and the giant Laestrygonians on another. Odysseus’ men are turned into pigs by the witch Circe (played with bone-chilling calm by Samantha Morton). Hades is imagined as an island too, where hundreds of Odysseus’ long dead soldiers emerge from the dirt and blame him for disobeying the gods, risking their lives and leading to their deaths.
Other excellent portrayals in the film include: Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, Odysseus’ second in command; Zendaya as the goddess Athena; John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, loyal swineherd on Ithaca; Robert Pattinson as Antinous, the increasingly annoying suitor back on Ithaca, and Elliot Page as Sinon, the shepherd boy Antinous pays to go to war in his stead; Jon Bernthal as Menelaus and Lupita Nyong’o as both his wife Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife. This really is a star-studded movie!
The movie plot of The Odyssey is choppy, as it tries to incorporate all the ways Odysseus got waylaid, trying to get home. But this is a vastly entertaining film, with a great musical score by Ludwig Göransson. Go see it at SALA through next weekend or find it in an IMAX theater!
