We went to the 10 a.m. showing of The Odyssey, eschewing the DX and IMAX theaters. We had heard that the seats rocked during the boat scenes in the DX version, and the audience was squirted with water.
Special effects are enough, and sometimes too much. This weird film is beautiful, but the special effects are hyperbolic. I covered my eyes during a long, terrifying storm scene with flashing red lights.
The director Christopher Nolan has a spooky imagination. The Trojan Horse is not the wooden horse on wheels of the illustrations in old textbooks. Again, like the storm, it is plus-size – it weighs more than 8,000 pounds – and rears up menacingly on two hooves. Even the interior of the Trojan horse is perilous: Odysseus and the other Greeks struggle to keep their balance, and one drowns in water at the bottom of the horse.
As for the acting, it is superb, though many of the movie stars have disappointingly small roles. Charlize Theron is a sympathetic nymph obsessed with Odysseus, but she seems to be there mainly to look gorgeous and supportive. (That’s the problem with beauty.) On the other hand, Circe the wicked witch (Samantha Morton), is powerful, but very homely. In a memorable metamorphosis scene, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs by making them pig out. Odysseus, rescues his men by trickery – they signal to him by oinking.
Anne Hathaway as Penelope (Odysseus’ wife) has the best female role. She is majestic and beautiful, and at first you think that’s all they’ll let her do. But the pace picks up: she must fob off creepy suitors – who now live in the great hall of the palace, eating her food and imbibing her wine. Penelope weaves all day, and undoes the weaving at night. And then Antinous (Robert Pattison), a sinister suitor, says he is on to her: he has seen her unraveling the shroud. (She claimed she would choose a new husband when it was done.) She speaks quietly to Antinous, reasoning that that Odysseus may be alive, trying to explain why it’s not time to marry, until he backs off, for the moment. Like Odysseus, she has the gift of gab.
Matt Damon’s take on Odysseus is is almost “meta”: he is not only a hero and the wily “man of many twists and turns,” but a complicated post-war Greek general who commands with a quiet authority. His quietness and stillness define his character: although he fights deadly monsters, and has mercilessly tricked and killed during the Trojan War, he is gentle to his men, determined to get them home. (The goddess Athene tells him they will all die anyway, but he has to try.) He addresses the men in a quiet tone of voice, as if they are equals. This works two ways: they can engage him in dialogue, but they also feel they can go their own way, which is always disastrous for them. But never has there been a quieter, more sympathetic Odysseus.
In a way, The Odyssey reminds me of old 1950s Biblical spectacles like The Robe and The Ten Commandments, movies that played over and over on TV at Easter. But this is a different kind of spectacle, majestic but hip and edgy, a portrait of a terrible, terrifying world that is, alas, not unlike our own.