INTRO: At 56, Christopher Nolan’s own odyssey as a filmmaker goes back to the first Nolan film our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, ever saw, Memento, in 2000, about a man on the run who can’t remember why. Or anything else.
HJ: It was in the millennial year, 2000, that Memento jumped into gear with Guy Pearce ricocheting around a lethal Los Angeles trying to remember who he was, how he got here, why he was here, and who were those guys trying to kill him. While I can no longer remember scene by scene, it’s the Nolan film I still love the most, maybe because now I’m on the run and can’t remember why.
Nolan’s projects and his filmmaking reach have blown up into the monumental, evolving into billion dollar franchise character studies often written with his brother Jonathan – a film noir appliqué applied to mass market genres of sci fi, thrillers and world war: a darker idea of Batman over the Dark Knight films with Christian Bale for Warner Bros, Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio as a second story man in a victim’s subconscious mind, Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut in search of a new planet in Nolan’s Interstellar, the weakest of his films. It was with Dunkirk in 2017 and Oppenheimer in 2023 that Nolan returned to earth and WWII, to layer conflicts of class, history and the responsibility for war on an epic scale. Far from Memento, which he made at 30, Nolan is just this week turning 56 and the filmmaker working on the biggest scale possible in The Odyssey, a foundational text of the West, in 70 MM IMAX rendered in the school of his British cinema-ancestor David Lean, more so than after the style of masters Kurosawa and Welles taking the measure of heroes and villains.
Over his own arc, Nolan has invested his enduring obsessions—who, what, where, why, when inside the psyche of men called into existential battle -- in the telling of the journey of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey. Who is he, how did he get here, and why is he here, and most importantly, the metric that paralyzes him on the road, what has he done? Who are those guys trying to kill him is still true -- sequence by Homeric sequence --but Nolan has flipped the script to have his Odysseus, Matt Damon, asking himself why, after all, did he kill the Trojans, the men, the women the children of Troy with his psychologically brilliant gift horse? In Nolan’s telling, The Odyssey is a soldier’s lament, a PTSD story, before the modern West rejiggered tragedy into techno-language of science that by its nature excuses the tragic offense as an error of judgement, maturity, or sanity. Forgive me, Self, for I knew not what I did.
This Odyssey was set in motion years ago as a revenge project of sorts, after Nolan was kicked off the 2004 Troy, based on The Iliad, by producer Wolfgang Petersen, who chose to himself direct Brad Pitt as Achilles, in what more nearly was what Variety used to dismiss as a sword and sandal or toga pic, for short, to bring Diane Kruger as Helen back to Menelaus in Sparta.
Whatever else Nolan did with Homer in this Odyssey, his cast of heroes, royals, temptresses and Gods speak State University English.
The Nolan project is to resift the concept of masculinity and war in the Greek circle of mythic figures that ain’t who they used to be. Below the armor, they’re Americans and Brits. Matt Damon’s Odysseus initially feels like someone who played varsity soccer in private school and takes some relaxation into the leather Imax chairs, but because I like Matt Damon, I got there. Tom “Spiderman” Holland as Telemachus, Odysseus’ jejune son by Penelope, looked more at home in a Starbucks waiting for an almond milk latté. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous was like the snake in the next cubicle vying for partner in a law firm, Elliot Page as Sinon is so unthreatening as to be the best salesman possible to the Trojans on the Horse as a gift and works once you got the modern rhythm of Nolan’s gender, race and archetypal casting that includes everyone as stakeholder’s in Western mythology.
You’d never know that Bennie Safdie is inside Agamemnon’s Black Knight armor, or that Bill Irwin takes a star turn inside the Cyclops. The makeup department made the monster’s head look like it had been so thoroughly crushed one day in the backstory by the front door boulder of the cave that it rearranged his one eye to be vertical in his forehead rather than horizontal and his nose sideways. I couldn’t stop staring at Irwin’s Cyclops having a good time biting the heads off Greeks scampering horizontally, wondering how that vertical eyeball thing focused 20 feet down exactly.
Those are the men. The women in this Odyssey may have nothing to do with the old school patriarchal translation from the Greek by the Bryn Mawr classicist Richmond Lattimore, (whose last translation and staging of the play Iphigenia in Taurus, I had the distinction of lousing up in my role as a spear carrier. That’s for another time.) Lupita Nyong’o’s Helen, whose capture starts the whole thing, is the face of a wounded, angry, black beauty, which gets lost in an expository speech as the first cause of all this mayhem. Penelope is played as a resolute, middle-aged queen holding off the usurpers to the throne by Anne Hathaway, who worked with Nolan in a Batman and Interstellar. You must take it on faith that this Odysseus would leave Calypso, played by Charlize Theron, when the setup is like Gauguin in Tahiti -- a ruined soul far from being seduced to stay on the beach beneath the swaying palm trees to go home to what? Theron’s Calypso is interpreted as if she’s a Marin County Zen therapist, warm, blonde, fit, beautiful, wise, calm, and helping Odysseus without an hourly fee to process his trauma, his shattered memory, and find his will to return home. To the mess he obliterated from his memory.
Because that’s the Odysseus Nolan has given us: like Oppenheimer, a man who won the war and then hates himself for it, retreating into amnesia to forget who he is, what he’s done and why his house is full of the next generation of young men who are capable of doing nothing, much less anything they’d know to regret.
There’s so much more to say about Nolan’s Odyssey. It’s just shy of three hours, Oppenheimer production designer Ruth Dejong is on the job, Ludwig Goransson’s score leaves nothing to chance. On locations in Greece, Iceland and Morocco, Scotland, Italy and LA, Hoyte van Hoytema filmed it in 35mm blown up on some Imax screens and in 70mm, like Oppenheimer, for the 14 true Imax screens in the world, like the one at Lincoln Square in the City, that can show the full frame. Good luck getting in, it’s headed toward a billion dollars at the boxoffice. Like its hero, it’s imperfect, but it sure beats the togas off the gods and monsters on CNN.
And I’m HJ for WBGO.
