Will Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie be any good? There is only hope if it embraces being bad. Given Nolan’s increasingly portentous film-making, matters do not look promising. Alongside Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, this Odyssey looks alarmingly like an attempt to make a Significant Movie.
Nolan does have a predecessor. There is a 1954 Italian-American co-production, Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas in the title role. The statuesque Silvana Mangano plays both Penelope and Circe. Anthony Quinn is in it: it was practically a legal requirement that this sort of movie have Anthony Quinn. I saw that Ulysses years ago, in a matinee screening at the British Museum. It is of course utterly goofy—there is no trace of Homeric grandeur. But it is merry, and Kirk Douglas brings to it the unstinting virile energy he brought to everything. It’s not a movie anyone needs to see, but also not a movie that presents itself as one that must be seen: quite the opposite of Nolan grasping for Significance.
What Nolan, one fears, has not understood is that it is not possible to make a big Hollywood movie that is also a serious portrayal of any sort of distant past. The Hollywood movie is a resolutely modern and demotic genre: garish, glamorous, melodramatic, quick. It cannot afford to represent the different rhythms of speech and practice of pre-industrial times: those can certainly be fascinating, but they are not entertaining.
It is not possible to make a big Hollywood movie that is also a serious portrayal of any sort of distant past.
A handful of movies have been relatively successful in giving some image of the medieval and ancient past in all its difference. There is, for instance, Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew, Rossellini’s Francis, God’s Jester (on St Francis of Assisi), Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. All are sober and stripped down. Above all, they adhere entirely or almost entirely to dialogue from a source contemporary to their theme. In Pasolini’s movie, for instance, not a word is spoken that isn’t in the Gospel. These are very striking and memorable movies: they are also, at least by Hollywood standards, rather boring (I have fallen asleep at two of the three). They are certainly no one’s idea of fun.
In the heyday of swords and sandals, Hollywood too contrived to make boring movies. But this was not due to ascetic rigour: quite the reverse. Those movies sunk under the weight of their extravagant costumes, city-size sets, over-egged dialogue, campy acting. Even such natural story-tellers as Mankiewicz, Kubrick or Anthony Mann could not breathe much life into these set-ups. For a more recent, and still more awful, example of this leaden over-reach, see (or, better still, don’t see) Oliver Stone’s 2004 Alexander.
Hollywood does best with the distant past when it sets aside all attempt at essential accuracy, and uses the setting only as a colourful background for what American movies do best: action, romance, violence. That’s the spirit animating Michael Curtiz and William Keighley’s 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood, or, more than sixty years later, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. You will learn nothing serious or reliable about history from these movies. But the answer to Russell Crowe’s bellowed “are you not entertained?” will be a vigorous yes.
What American movies do best is action, romance, violence.
Christopher Nolan too was once an entertainer. His Batman trilogy are certainly among the more gritty and sombre of superhero movies: but these are superhero movies—there is no question of them being high art. A Dreyer, Pasolini or Rossellini making a movie about man in a bat-suit who punches bad guys is unimaginable. If Nolan has decided he has now outgrown such childish things, his Odyssey will be a turgid lecture to swelling chords. If he makes Odysseus a Batman wandering in archaic Greece, he may just contrive to show us a good time. And to be boring and pompous would be a far greater betrayal of Homer than to be silly.
Matthew Arnold identified four essential qualities in Homer: “he is rapid; he is plain and direct in in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it; he is noble”. To be noble is probably beyond the reach of the Hollywood costume epic—but to be plain, direct and rapid has always been at the heart of Hollywood story-telling at it best.
