A Seriously Epic Journey to ‘The Odyssey’

As director Christopher Nolan debuted his take on Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic, “The Odyssey,” this weekend, Maryland Today couldn’t help but wonder: What would classics scholars have to say about it?

We seized the chance most movie-goers won’t have and saw the movie with University of Maryland Assistant Professor Chiara Graf and Associate Professor Katherine Wasdin. The pair arrived at the theater—accompanied by a former English major who, embarrassingly, has never read “The Odyssey” in full—armed with a list of questions: How would Odysseus’ character be portrayed? Would there be anthropomorphized gods? Could Matt Damon shed his Boston-ness enough to play a convincing Odysseus?

After the film, Graf and Wasdin agreed on one thing: “It’s a good movie to teach with,” said Wasdin. “We’re going to be living with this film for the next 10 years.” And naturally, both encourage anyone who liked the movie to read the original.

Here are five of Graf and Wasdin’s takeaways from the film.

Nolan’s film has a darker tone than Homer’s epic.
Homer had a sense of humor, inserting levity through wordplay or dialogue. (Helen and Menelaus share one scene in the poem in which their dynamic is akin to the back-and-forth bickering of a sitcom couple, said Wasdin.) Adaptations like Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou” kept that levity. Nolan’s film is “dead serious,” said Graf.

Odysseus is flattened—and quieter.
In Homer’s epic, Odysseus is a hero, sure. But he’s also prideful, greedy and cruel. When he and his men encounter the Cyclops Polyphemus, for example, Odysseus conceals his name until he’s seen to the creature’s downfall—then he can’t help but boast to the Cyclops that it was Odysseus who defeated him, which lets the Cyclops ask his father, Poseidon, to take revenge on Odysseus.

In the new film, Odysseus’ rough edges are sanded down, making him “tortured but virtuous,” said Graf. Wasdin added that he’s “laconic” in the movie—a contrast to the epic, in which he’s “always yip-yapping.”

The film bows to some of our contemporary values.
“A monogamous Odysseus?” Wasdin asked incredulously. Separated from his wife for decades, the hero in the original tale can’t resist the temptations of Circe, Calypso and others. Meanwhile, his wife, Penelope, refuses to engage with her many suitors. “Maybe that double standard will play in ancient Greece, but not today,” said Wasdin.

The Odysseus of the film also agonizes over the idea that the attack on Troy through trickery might have led to the collapse of its civilization—a modern view of war that contrasts with the text. “There’s a lot of pain in remembering the war, but there isn’t this sense of, ‘We violated the laws of hospitality for the first time and that caused this downfall of civilization,’” said Graf.

PTSD is a major theme.
In Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” Odysseus is haunted by guilt and trauma from his role in the carnage of the Trojan War. He isn’t the first interpreter of the poem to examine the postwar experiences of soldiers through its lens; the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has famously used “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” to work through the experiences of Vietnam War veterans. “The pain of hearing your story told, and the pain of memory, is a huge part of the epic itself,” said Graf.

The gods take a backseat.
Zeus and Poseidon are mentioned in Nolan’s film, but the roles they and the other gods play are de-emphasized, said Wasdin and Graf. In the epic, the gods intervene and create “concrete effects,” said Graf. Nolan’s version is “a much more secularized view of the world.” Only Athena appears onscreen (played by Zendaya), acting almost as Odysseus’ conscience. “It’s ambiguous whether the gods actually exist,” said Graf.