When I was a child, my parents were judicious about what they would allow me to watch. Cartoons were tightly limited, but Turner Classic Movies was largely free game. It was there I fell in love with the Hollywood epic. Lawrence of Arabia—the scale, the music, the journey, the near Biblical proportion of the story—had me hooked. My appreciation for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey began at his commitment to producing an epic in an age of thirty-second entertainment. It is an excellent film to experience. The wind and the waves, the tragedy and loyalty, the music and cinematography and suspense made three hours at the IMAX almost feel too short. And Odysseus fits Nolan’s preoccupation with tortured heroes—from Batman to Oppenheimer—men whose genius enables them to combat existential threats yet also threatens to wreak great harm.
There are many lenses through which to watch a film like this. Voices focusing on gender, sexuality, history, and politics are legion and loud. But what of the agrarian? The agrarian voice reveals Nolan’s most significant and disappointing departure from Homer’s epic. Wendell Berry has written on the Odyssey at length in The Unsettling of America — more pages than most readers expect to find in a manifesto on agriculture in America—and returning to them in the context of Nolan’s film sheds light on what the movie misses.
Berry focuses on Odysseus’s homecoming to his marriage and island, writing that “one of the best examples that we have is in Homer’s Odyssey. Nowhere else that I know are the connections between marriage and household and the earth so fully and so carefully understood.” For Berry, the virtue of the Odyssey is not the journey, but the homecoming. Odysseus’s homecoming is an unfolding process. What the reader and the watcher know is that after the witches and giants and the wrath of Poseidon, there is yet another battle waiting for him at home. The suitors in his house require a reckoning. Berry reads the poem as moving from war to domesticity, from the world of the Iliad—“war-obsessed, preoccupied with ‘manly’ deeds of exploitation, anger, aggression, pillage”—toward the values of home and field. The Odyssey is, in this sense, counterpoised to the Iliad. The destruction of Menelaus’s marriage leads to the destructive violence of other households at Troy. For Odysseus, violence is the necessary means to bring about a “cleansed and reunited household,” but he does not rule with violence. It is that sequence, reckoning before restoration, that Nolan captures only in part, and this failure is what makes his ending, for all its beauty, finally unsatisfying.
The most compelling thread in the film is simple: a man desperately fighting to get home, and a people who just as desperately await him. Penelope remains faithful against every pressure to move on. Argos, the old dog, waits in the dunghill. Robert Pattinson plays Antinous with a repellent charisma—the ringleader of the suitors who have made themselves at home in another man’s house. Against him, Tom Holland’s Telemachus is “pining for a daddy he’s never met,” yet learning to fight faithfully for the possibility of his return. Set against this fidelity is the crew whose disobedience costs them their lives. In the Odyssey, fidelity marks the difference between life and death.
No one embodies fidelity more than Eumaeus. John Leguizamo plays him — beaten and bloodied, still loyal when his king finds him enduring the suitor’s violence. Odysseus, still in disguise, assures him the king is coming back. Leguizamo asks, compellingly: is he bringing vengeance? And Matt Damon answers with a line that is a little corny yet lands powerfully in the moment: “bringing it all.”
For once, perhaps, Hollywood has downplayed the violence and sexuality of its source material, for which I am grateful. Nolan captures the wrath of Odysseus without extravagant bloodshed and stays true to his adventures with Circe and Calypso without explicit details. But Nolan’s portrayal of the bloody cleansing includes more mercy than in Homer’s account.
Berry acknowledges the violence hesitantly, quoting Richmond Lattimore’s discomfort that the punishment “seems excessive” before offering his own brief defense: Odysseus is the agent of divine judgment against men whose contempt for domestic order the poem affirms. Berry moves past it quickly, back toward fidelity and marriage—but this reckoning is what makes the restoration possible. And as Berry observes, Homer’s vision of restoration “is centered on the marriage bed of the king and queen, and that bed is rooted in the earth.” Their marriage is not portable. Their love is not the feelings that two autonomous people have for each other. It grows from and is rooted in the place where they live and among the people whom it blesses.
Nolan redirects the meaning of this reunion in the film when Odysseus collapses into the arms of his wife after twenty years apart and tells her they are leaving Ithaca together. To Nolan and to our modern ears, this might sound romantic. Nolan has, after all, told this story before. The Dark Knight Rises ends with Bruce Wayne walking away from Gotham with Catwoman, also played by Anne Hathaway. Gotham is a city worth sacrificing for but not worth inhabiting. Berry, by contrast, recognizes that Homer’s story places romantic love and marriage at the center of something larger: household, community, earth.
Homer gives Odysseus a prophecy through the blind seer: carry an oar inland until you find people who have never seen the sea. You will know you’ve gone far enough when men mistake the oar for a winnowing fan. There plant it in the earth and make your sacrifice. The instrument of a warrior and adventurer becomes a farmer’s tool. Like those who will beat their swords into plowshares, Odysseus will not know rest until he carries the symbol of his wandering life inland, plants it in the ground, and gives up his restless search for glory. After that, a gentle death will come to him in blessed peace, his countrymen around him. Nolan, by contrast, seems to take a page from Dante’s version of Odysseus. Yet in Dante, Odysseus is in hell because, it seems, he lured his men off on further wanderings.
Furthermore, Nolan misses a scene that could have rivaled the Penelope reunion. In Book XXIV, Odysseus finds his aged father Laertes alone in the orchard, spading earth around a young fruit tree, dressed like a peasant. Berry sees it as a parable: in a time of disorder, the faithful man returns to the care of the earth. Surely, we had five more minutes for Matt Damon to find his father in that orchard—played of course by Sir Michael Caine. Instead, we watch Odysseus sail west into open water with his wife. For those of us who know the story and who have read Berry, it is a letdown: the man who fought twenty years to get home, leaving it again so easily. C.S. Lewis gives these words to the Unicorn arriving at last in the real Narnia: “I have come home at last. This is my real country. I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. Come further up, come further in.” There is always more to discover here, at home, but Nolan fails to imagine the endless adventure of homemaking.
Instead, he gives us an endless odyssey—a film that tries to convince us the journey is the point and who we go with is enough. It is a beautiful story. It is well told. But it is a modern story and an unsatisfying one. The Odyssey has lasted three thousand years because, while Odysseus wrestles with his longing for adventure and glory, he comes to realize the inestimable value of a rooted household. Nolan fails to give viewers the satisfaction of this arrival: the man who has finally come home, who discards the tools of adventure which took him from his place, and who stays with his people.
There is one more homecoming the poem anticipates without knowing it. Odysseus returned to his own house unrecognized, dressed as a beggar, mistreated by the very men who have abused the land, tormented his bride, and rejected his son. The king came back in disguise before he came back in power to restore his kingdom. The promise of such a homecoming is older than Homer. We see it in the prophecies of the Old Testament, in the longing of a people for a king who would come to set things right. That king came first in disguise, unrecognized, and rejected. He will return on a white horse, with wrath and vengeance, to cleanse the house and restore the kingdom. And when that work is finished, the swords will be beaten into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. The warrior’s instruments will be put to work tending the new creation. Our king is coming and he’s bringing all of it: reckoning and restoration.
Image Credit: Critical Popcorn
