Medievalists must be jealous. Classicists are having a moment on social media, happily discussing whether Odysseus was \u201cpolytropos,\u201d \u201cpolymetis\u201d or \u201cpolymechanos\u201d. And that\u2019s very cool. Thank you, Mr Nolan.<\/p>\n
Christopher Nolan\u2019s<\/a> The Odyssey<\/a> is a throwback to the days when Hollywood<\/a> big shots fearlessly took on literary classics, undaunted by the challenges of bringing vast, thorny tales to the screen.<\/p>\n Conjuring the American civil war in Gone With The Wind? Re-creating the desert battlefields of the first World War in Lawrence of Arabia? Depicting the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago?<\/p>\n Why not?<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s portal to ancient Greece has lured audiences back to cinemas and spiked book sales of Homer\u2019s The Odyssey, over 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century BC. Nolan has turned one of the foundational works of western literature into an entertaining adventure saga.<\/p>\n Nolan told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned identities.<\/p>\n Much of the moral ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon\u2019s<\/a> protagonist more likable. Except for a few mournful appearances by Zendaya\u2019s<\/a> Athena, who seems more like Odysseus\u2019 conscience than his shape-shifting partner in deception, Nolan doesn\u2019t depict any of the major meddling gods from the story. Besides being rich, fascinating characters, the gods are the framework for everything that happened in the ancient world. If you take the gods out of the picture, you just have people struggling within themselves. You lose the depth and force of the epic.<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s nearly three-hour masterwork, classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer\u2019s \u201celusive sexiness\u201d. In keeping with Generation Z\u2019s waning interest in sex, the poem\u2019s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, \u201cIs No One Horny in The Odyssey?\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Fintan O’Toole: Odysseus is all around us, not just in Christopher Nolan\u2019s blockbusterOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Nolan brought the dark spirit of his last hit, Oppenheimer, with him to Greece, imbuing Odysseus with shame about his brilliant engineering invention that won the war: the horse that tricked the Trojans. His Odysseus is filled with remorse and haunted by the idea that his actions may lead to the end of civilisation as they know it.<\/p>\n Homer\u2019s guy, not so much. After Odysseus and his men sacked Troy, they went across the way and sacked another city.<\/p>\n Emily Wilson, whose popular modern translation of The Odyssey inspired Nolan, said the director turned Odysseus into an all-American hero weighed down by anxieties foreign to the ancient Greeks.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s traumatised Jason Bourne,\u201d she said of Damon\u2019s portrayal on Derek Thompson\u2019s podcast. \u201cHe\u2019s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. He\u2019s not that complicated. Unfortunately, he\u2019s not The Talented Mr Ripley in this film. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer\u2019s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text\u2019s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.<\/p>\n In Homer, Odysseus sails to Aeaea, the island home of the enchanting sorceress Circe, \u201cthe nymph with the lovely braids\u201d. (I named my kitten after that Circe.) When Circe drugs Odysseus\u2019 crew and taps the men with her wand, turning them into swine, it\u2019s witchy foreplay.<\/p>\n The messenger god, Hermes, also a trickster, comes down from Olympus to give Odysseus an antidote for when Circe tries to use her magic on him. Hermes also advises Odysseus: \u201cDon\u2019t refuse the goddess\u2019s bed,\u201d because that\u2019s really what Circe wants in return for turning the swine back to men. Under no spell, Odysseus says, \u201cI mounted Circe\u2019s gorgeous bed.\u201d He was so smitten with \u201cthe lustrous goddess\u201d who doted on him with \u201csides of meat and drafts of heady wine\u201d that he didn\u2019t leave for a year \u2013 despite pleas from his homesick men.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Frank McNally: They call it an epic, but The Odyssey was a harder watch than the woeful World Cup finalOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s Circe, played by Samantha Morton, is like a vindictive feminist hippie making ceramic pots in Vermont, except she\u2019s sculpting pigs. Her romance with Odysseus is scrubbed.<\/p>\n In Homer, Odysseus lands on the island of another luminous goddess, Calypso, and stays seven years. He\u2019s imprisoned, but at the beginning at least, he enjoyed himself, even as Penelope was fending off boorish suitors back home.<\/p>\n Nolan whitewashes Odysseus\u2019 infidelity here by turning Calypso \u2013 played by Charlize Theron \u2013 into a fashionable beach therapist who gives him mood-altering lotus flowers to help with his PTSD. In Homer, Odysseus has no need to forget. He cries once over the human cost of the war when he hears a song about Troy\u2019s fall, but mostly he\u2019s proud of his war exploits. And the \u201cscalawag,\u201d as Calypso calls him, doesn\u2019t partake of the lotus; his men become addicted lotus-eaters on a different island.<\/p>\n In the movie, Calypso graciously lets Odysseus go when he comes out of his lotus fog and insists on returning home. In the book, Athena has to ask Zeus to intervene to make Calypso give up her sex slave, and she complains that there\u2019s a double standard, because the male gods have affairs with mortals but interfere when the female gods are similarly romping.<\/p>\n Penelope, a mortal, is expected to be faithful, no matter that Odysseus\u2019 sexual liaisons have added eight years to his 10-year voyage home.<\/p>\n When Homer\u2019s Odysseus finally gets home, there\u2019s a charged scene where he is outraged to see that the marital bed he built, crafted out of an olive tree that grew inside the palace, has been moved. It\u2019s a test by Penelope. Nolan dispensed with that, too.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Emer McLysaght: I feel sorry for anyone who\u2019s skipping The Odyssey because of \u2018wokeness\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The director also sanitised Odysseus\u2019 character by skipping the scene near the end when the hero orders his son to round up the 12 female servants who slept with suitors and hack them to death with a sword. Telemachus convinces his father that the women should be hanged instead.<\/p>\n Nolan\u2019s IMAX Odysseus gives up the crown for his son and goes into exile with Penelope to redeem his actions during the war. Homer\u2019s hero? No way!<\/p>\n Homer did not portray a world turning against violence. He limned a profoundly martial universe interspersed with lots of magic and sex and cavorting, conniving immortals. If you smooth it out and modernise it too much, you lose what made it so important to begin with. And you\u2019re just left with a guy finding his way home. \u2013 This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Medievalists must be jealous. 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