The Odyssey – 1.5 stars

Cards on the table. My knowledge of The Odyssey is limited. So limited, when Christopher Nolan‘s film depicts the fall of Troy, I kept looking for Brad Pitt as Achilles.

So, I come to this picture with no interest in fealty to the source material. I’m open.

What’s good? Filmed with IMAX cameras, the movie is beautiful and grand in scope, and it did not feel overlong even though it is really quite long. Robert Pattinson also near steals the picture, such is his committed performance as the villain.

To the bad.

Didactic and pedestrian dialogue. Nolan explains everything. He cannot rely on a look, or a gesture, he must tell us all. And often when he does, what we are being told is so painfully banal or high falutin’, it is cringeworthy. The “what you hear when the Sirens sing their song” explanation was so hilariously bad, I longed for the same ear wax utilized by Odysseus’ men to drown out their bewitching appeals. There is not one clever exchange, not one illuminating piece of dialogue. Rather, we get turgid exposition, conversation that basically exists to get you to the next thing.

Bad performances. Wikipedia tells me that Odysseus is renowned for his intellectual brilliance, guile, and versatility. Matt Damon, however, plays him as dimly solid and a bit of a lummox.

As his son, Tom Holland gives as bad a performance as I’ve seen in a major film. He’s a less chirpy Spiderman sporting Disney Channel-esque mien. Nolan’s script does him no favors, having Holland utter, on numerous occasions, the word “Dad.”

Not “my father.”

“Dad.”

Holland sounds like Richie Cunningham asking for his Pop’s advice before going to the see The Fonz.

As the wife of Odysseus, Anne Hathaway gives one of her patented over the top, histrionic performances, particularly noxious when it rams into Damon’s dullness or Holland’s puerility. She’s at a constant 13, which will elicit an Oscar nod and my groans.

Discordant modernity. There has been spirited discussion about the propriety of casting Elliot Page, who is transgender, as one of Odysseus‘s warriors. I did not find the cast as incongruent as the transgender actor playing the Philip Seymour Hoffman role in Netflix’s Ripley. But to then have that character speak gravely from Hades and say to Odysseus, “Hey, when you go back, and tell my story, feel free to add some ‘stuff’”

“Stuff.”

Modernity skews the story as well as the dialogue, at least, such as I understand it (note my prior reliance on Wikipedia). As I said, I am not going to kick the film for diverging from source material of which I am ignorant. Odysseus haunted by the sack of Troy? Okay, I’m listening. Even Athena (played by a wasted Zendaya here) was not on board with the excesses of the Greeks as they pillaged the city. Odysseus suffering from PTSD due to the war crimes he witnessed? Errr. Okay?

Odysseus then killing 25 men in dizzying acrobatics that smacks of John Wick? True to the story perhaps, but tonally moronic. Nolan wants it both ways. A classical Odysseus, who rips guts and gives no quarter and less shits, and a modern combatant, haunted by the depravity of his deeds.

Nolan also injects sophomoric Women’s Studies feminism for good measure. Hathaway spits at Holland about the unfairness of it all, kvetching that she’s been holding Ithaca together for years with nary a whisker on her chin. But near as the audience can tell, it appears she has been merely overseeing a very long, rambunctious dinner party. She does not demonstrate any ruling decisions other than withholding her hand in marriage to a replacement for Odysseus and hectoring Holland. And working on a very, very, very big blanket.

Nolan also gives us a nasty witch (Samantha Morton) who turns Odysseus’s hungry but unfailingly polite men into pigs when they ask, mind you, if they could eat from her kitchen. When Odysseus inquires as to the point of her cruelty, well, you know… it’s the patriarchy. But Morton also turned her sister into a bird, and when Odysseus pedantically inquires as to the crimes that resulted in that particular fate, Morton implies that her sister was just a bitch.

Repetition. There’s too much disembarking where Odysseus and his men clamber up a hill and then, in a Keystone Cops manner, scurry back to their ships. Which reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and “Run away, run away!”

Humorlessness. An odyssey is a long time. And when you are being chased by a Cyclops, or turned into a pig, or just floating around endlessly on a boat, there has to be some levity. Not here. The only person who smiles is Pattinson, and even that is mostly a malevolent leer.

Ultimately, I’m heartened this film was made, and that it is racking up kabillions. I fear the extinction of the historical epic, and Nolan has now given us three, along with Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

Two out of three ain’t bad, even if the third is.