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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Impale and Cry: Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”

In the latest rendering of the epic, there is plenty to feel guilty about even if you did not mean it.

Matt Damon in The Odyssey.

An American producer, a German director, and a French screenwriter are sitting in a screening room watching dailies for a new production of The Odyssey. “Gods, I like gods, I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel. Exactly,” says the producer. “Each picture should have a definite point of view,” says the director. “I have a theory about The Odyssey,” says the producer. “I think Penelope has been unfaithful.” The screenwriter mostly keeps his mouth shut. It is a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, an adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel. Jack Palance plays Jerry the vulgar producer, and his face lights up with childish glee when he sees on screen the image of a naked woman, a mermaid tossing and turning in the sea. “Fritz, that’s wonderful for you and me but do you think the public is going to understand that?” he asks the director, who is Fritz Lang playing himself. Fritz and Paul the screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) then trade quotations. “All at once what happened as we felt is no more,” Paul says. “Our joy changed to grief as the sea closed above us.” It is unclear whether he is quoting a classic, suggesting a line for the film, or talking to himself about his marriage to Camille (Brigit Bardot). Money is tight and the couple is unhappy. That is why Paul is working for Jerry, who will write him a check on the back of his bent-over assistant and eventually try to seduce Camille. Paul, you see, is also Odysseus. He is not absent, but he is also not himself. He has betrayed his artistic calling. He is a sellout.

I sometimes wonder if Christopher Nolan thinks of himself as a sellout or a god. The former might explain all the guilty feelings afflicting his heroes, from Bruce Wayne to Robert Oppenheimer. Was his Batman trilogy a series of nuclear detonations that wiped out non-indie middlebrow moviemaking? Or was it a Trojan Horse meant to smuggle Nolan’s cinematic genius into Hollywood before an inevitable tech-driven apocalypse would wipe out the remnants of the studio system? Nolan has now staked his claim to The Odyssey, an infinitely fertile text about a man who gets lost making his way home from war, a franchise everybody owns. You can set it anywhere from Dublin to the Deep South to outer space. You can render it as a comic picaresque, a romantic fantasy, a ballad of the aftermath of war, or combine all three and heighten the ironies. Nolan has brought it back to the Bronze Age and pursued an unmistakably personal vision. His joyless Odyssey turns out to be a box-office bonanza. 

Nolan must feel bad about something. Why else all the pensive onscreen melancholy of Matt Damon as Odysseus? And why all the overcompensation in the publicity campaigns devoted to the director’s technical commitments. He uses IMAX cameras that have to be reloaded every three minutes. He does things the old-fashioned way, with minimal reliance on computers. His Polyphemus, the Cyclops, is a giant animatronic puppet. His seafaring scenes are shot in deep-water tanks at a studio in Malta or........

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