Christopher Nolan’s Homer is a war film about what happens after the war, shot enormous and acted quietly, and for long stretches it is as good as anything he has made. It is also nearly three hours, and in the middle you feel every one of them.
Christopher Nolan, who wrote, directed and produced this with Emma Thomas, has decided that The Odyssey is not a story about monsters. It is about a man who has been at a war and cannot find his way back from it; the monsters are what he meets on the road. It is a Nolan hero: a job, a family, and no way to hold both. The gods are pushed to the edges. What is left is a soldier, a boat, and a house that has stopped expecting him.
Our verdict is that it works, and works best when it is smallest. The scenes on Ithaca, where Anne Hathaway’s Penelope runs a household under siege with a politeness that is a weapon, are the finest in the film. Tom Holland’s Telemachus is a boy who has been told all his life that he looks like someone, and Holland plays the resentment without saying it. Robert Pattinson’s Antinous is not the brute of the poem but a man who has worked out that patience is also a kind of force. John Leguizamo’s Eumaeus gets the least screen time of them all and stayed with us longest.
Matt Damon plays Odysseus tired. Not heroically tired but tired the way people are after a long illness: slow to answer, quick to anger, embarrassed by both. It is a good performance and an unglamorous one. Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus is the crewman who has stopped believing the captain and cannot say so, and Charlize Theron’s Calypso knows exactly what she is offering and what it will cost him to refuse. Travis Scott appears as a bard, there to remind us that all of this has been told before.
Hoyte van Hoytema shoots the sea as an enormous empty room. The boat is small in the frame and the horizon is high, and there are long passages of nothing but weather, and we did not want them to end. Ruth De Jong’s production design keeps Ithaca dusty and low-ceilinged, a farm with pretensions rather than a palace, and Ellen Mirojnick dresses everyone in cloth that looks salted and slept in. Ludwig Göransson’s score, credited with Rosa Fragorapti and Callum Armstrong, is mostly low brass and drums held back for a long time; when it lets go it does so once, and earns it.
We were frightened in the Cyclops’s cave, properly frightened, because Nolan keeps the creature out of the light and lets the sound of it breathing and shifting stone do the work. Jennifer Lame’s editing here is the opposite of frantic: long shots, held, so that you are trapped in there with the crew and cannot look away to find the exit. It is the best set piece in the film and it comes early enough that nothing afterwards matches it.
That is one problem. The other is the shape. Homer’s poem is a string of episodes and Nolan has kept the string, so the middle hour is one island, then another, each well made, each slightly shorter of breath than the last. At 173 minutes the film sags between the cave and the return. Nolan has also sanded down his hero. The Odysseus of the poem is a liar and a boaster; this one is mostly sorry. It makes him easier to like and less interesting, and it lets the film blame a war for everything, which is a modern idea and a smaller one.
Most critics have gone further than us, and we understand why: it is enormous, serious, and not a sequel to anything. We think it is a fine film with a slack middle and a hero who has had his teeth filed. Nolan has done war before in Dunkirk, where the point was getting home. Here the point is what home does to you when you get there, and on that subject it is close to the best of him.
See it in a cinema, on the largest screen within reach, because the sea will not survive a living room. Take someone who knows the poem and someone who does not, and listen to which is more surprised.
