So I saw The Odyssey tonight. I found it a thoroughly inoffensive sword and sandals epic in the tradition of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur. The type of movie Cecil B. DeMille made. And It has about as much to do with The Odyssey as de Mille's movie The Ten Commandments has to do with the exodus. Anybody who has a problem with this movie has a problem with Hollywood from its, ahem, inception.
I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with the idea that we're supposed to take it seriously. I watch The Ten Commandments every year at Passover and mouth along to lines like 'Oh Moses, Moses!' and 'So let it be written, so let it be done.' Just like in The Ten Commandments, the motives of the characters are utterly modern anachronisms. De Mille was an arch-Republican, but he had an eye to the box office, and Hebrew slavery was clearly done with an eye to reminding people of civil rights struggles. In the same way, the focus on the law of hospitality,is done with an eye toward reminding us of immigration and hyperpolarization.
But they weren't wrong to depict what they amusingly termed 'Zeus's Law.' It was every bit as important to Greek civilization as they allege. And it's just one of a number of very strong ideas. Certain controversial choices make enormous sense in ways our ignorant age doesn't realize. The audience has to made to feel the presence of certain characters properly and understand their situations, and atraditional casting makes more artistic sense than I initially thought it would.
Sinon is not a character in The Odyssey, but he's hugely consequential in The Aeneid. Hiring our most famous trans actor as Sinon is in fact a very salient decision, because what I'm sure 9999 out of 10000 viewers don't realize is that Tiresias was said to have lived part of his life as a woman. In some traditions, he had breasts for the rest of his life. Putting Elliot Page in that role gives that scene the proper strangeness in the minds of unedumacated America. In pagan eras, a kind of trans person certainly existed, and often were thought of as prophets and priests who were sexually complete in manners that men and women were not. Think of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium--trans-like people were often thought to be their own soulmate, and therefore were nearer to the Gods; traits like that continues in certain undisturbed tribes today.
As for Helen, well... if you've ever seen Greek Drama done as it was said to have been done, it was done with masks. We have little idea what the masks looked like, but the chances of these masks being flesh toned is infinitesimally low. Furthermore, we don't know if Helen ran off with Paris or was kidnapped by Paris, but whether she was slave to Paris or Menelaus, Helen clearly spent part of her life in sexual slavery. What better way to implant that in the minds of the audience than the actress whose Oscar winning breakout role was as Patsey, the violated slave of Brad Pitt in 12 Years a Slave?
Ultimately, even if I didn't enjoy a lot of it, it's a thoroughly adequate movie. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes at the woodenness of the script and the complete inability of the actors to sell it. Over and over I felt like I was watching that alleged Tony Curtis line in some Medieval epic where he says 'Yonda lies da castle of my fadda." Nobody in this movie except Robert Pattinson demonstrated they have much acting ability. Tom Holland was particularly wooden; and occasionally I thought Christopher Nolan demonstrated a writing ability on the same level as George Lucas... Nevertheless, it's Nolan. A lot of the filmmaking itself is magnificent. The continual shots of the sea are extraordinary enough to make Spielberg jealous. You know exactly when you are in the chronology, and exactly where you are in every battle scene. There's no words for how hard that is to do: I just think of the battle scenes in Gladiator where to this day I'm utterly confused who is where in the geography of the forest or the stadium. The Cyclops was, I thought, wonderful. Scylla a little less so, but I completely understand why Nolan wanted to stay animatronic analogue. It worked for Ray Harryhausen, why not here? As a technician, Christopher Nolan is impeccable in movie after movie and achieves things most people would think impossible. I didn't even think the idea to tell it in flashback was so bad: it gives the film leeway and license to include things from The Aeneid rather than just The Odyssey.
What was, however, truly bad was the usual thing with Nolan. He cannot resist the twist ending, or, as he'd doubtless call it, The Prestige. He doesn't know how to make a movie without it, and it's very very difficult to take an entertainer seriously when you feel like he's always saying 'TA-DA!!' near the end of every movie.
Read no further if you don't want to know the end but....
The whole idea that Odysseus punished himself because of his shame in causing so much destruction is the biggest load of shit I've seen in a movie in a long time. I'm sure there are people who speculate that Odysseus felt remorse, and I'm sure even in ancient Greece there were people who pointed out that in formulating the Trojan Horse, Odysseus was an even more flagrant violator of "Zeus's Law" than any suitor in his house. Nevertheless ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME?!?!
This is ancient Greece. Odysseus was not a PTSD survivor, he was Walter White 3000 years before TV. The whole idea that the world should be peaceful hadn't even been invented yet and wouldn't be for at least another 600 years or so from the time the Odyssey was said to be written.
This was just a piece of relevance fused into the movie's ending like a thumbtack pasting a paper onto cork; like when Matt Damon talks about how hospitality violations are indicative of an imminent dark age. He even says the gem "Our bronze age is ending", which is a bit like a hero in today's movies saying "This is the end of our Age of Plastic." It's a very Hollywood thing to do: spend three hours watching people kick each other's asses and then mouth five minutes of platitudes at the end which are supposed to give the movie depth which is utterly unearned.
Nolan can never resist the twist. It is one of the most annoying directorial tics I've ever seen. If that's what he wanted to do, he should have had the courage to say it upfront and make a movie that interprets Odysseus as a remorseful character. But he doesn't have that kind of fortitude, because he's not an artist, he's a puzzlemaker. He's proven by now he can do an impression of depth, but if he can't make remorse into some kind of plot twist that's supposed to be mind-blowing, he is, even now, not a moviemaker to take seriously.
The Odyssey as it exists is sort of unfilmable. Most everything we like about The Odyssey is packed into about 25 pages. The Iliad, with some trimming, could make a truly great film where we see the sublime wrath of Achilles and Hector's sacrifice given their proper epic weight. But if this movie becomes a classic then no movie should.
The best adaptation of The Odyssey is still O Brother Where Art Thou.
No comments:
Post a Comment