The trouble with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey starts with the casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus. True, this may not be as egregiously bad as John Wayne as Genghis Kahn in the 1956 movie The Conqueror — a choice so notorious that it inspired the title for a book about ill-advised casting, Damien Bona’s Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders (1996) — but did Nolan really wish us to associate the Homeric hero with the man who was Will Hunting, one of the lesser leads in the Ocean’s 11 franchise, and one of the conjoined twins in Stuck on You (2003)? This is not the typical resume for an Ithacan king associated with the manly attributes of persistence, valor, and brute strength. This is your Odysseus, Mr. Nolan?
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Now I harbor no grudge against Matt Damon — well, I harbor a little grudge against Matt Damon, mainly for his participation in the outrageous legacy media-fueled frenzy against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh via his appearance as Kavanaugh on Saturday Night Live. My assumption is that outside actors who agree to lampoon public figures on SNL, being under no compulsion to do so since they are not on staff, genuinely dislike those public figures, so I hold Damon, not the show’s writers, responsible for his egregiously uncharitable impression, which made a weepy mockery of the real Kavanaugh’s principled (and proper) indignation during his Senate confirmation hearing. I hold Damon responsible, too, for trotting out his parody again earlier this year, when an SNL skit depicted Kavanaugh in a bar with FBI Director Kash Patel (Aziz Ansari) and War Secretary Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost). This time, Damon brought particular vitriol to his portrayal of Kavanaugh, who was said to lament “male loneliness” — as though this real ailment, shared by millions of men though presumably not by the justice, was a joke.
Even Odysseus goes through periods of “male loneliness” — how else to describe his condition on the island Ogygia with Calypso (played, um, by Charlize Theron)? Yet the real problem is not Damon’s political bent but what his casting reveals about Nolan’s overall approach to populating his version of The Odyssey: The movie, much in the manner of a 1990s-era Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare adaptation, is stuffed with stars but with little regard for their appropriateness for their roles. Much ink has been spilled on the selection of Elliot Page (in Prince terms, the performer formerly known as the actress Ellen Page, from 2007’s Juno) as Sinon, although let me pause to comment further: I recently learned that Nolan declines to make use of a smartphone, so perhaps this would explain his tone-deafness to our post-woke moment. How else to account for Nolan apparently assuming that the casting of a transgender actor as a Greek warrior would elicit no comment whatsoever?
Such casting flubs stick out amid Nolan’s peerlessly craftsmanly movies, though — let’s be honest — they are increasingly hulking, clumsy, drawn-out, and ear-splitting movies. We are a long way, with his recent elephantine epics, from the low-key, sinuous appeal of Memento (2000). Even so, given the honest effort he has expended in realizing Odysseus’s journey, why jeopardize it all by casting lightweights such as Damon as Odysseus, Robert Pattinson — the guy from the Twilight movies! — as Antinous, and John Leguizamo (John Leguizamo — Toulouse-Lautrec from Moulin Rouge [2001]?) as Eumaeus? Not only are these personages less than plausible as figures from Homer, but they have each been directed to speak sotto voce — the movie, loud though it is, often consists of dialogue that sounds whispered, as though talking in a hush instantly confers gravity. How about just picking better, more believable, perhaps even classically trained actors?
Alas, despite the undeniable sweep of the production — and it is genuinely thrilling to see the Trojan Horse engulfed in sand, and the cyclops Polyphemus rambling through his cave — Nolan means to make Homer relatable. He felt that we needed not a valiant Odysseus but a self-doubting, self-effacing, puppy-loving Odysseus (just wait for the flashbacks, which are as heartwarming as Benji the Hunted [1987]).
This approach extends to the screenplay, which is not only uninspired but is littered with lingo that would have been once called anachronistic. “Dad is coming back,” says Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland) to his mother, or “mom,” Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Coming back from where — the grocery store? A business trip? This is not the way that a king-in-waiting should speak about his father, the present king, whose lionhearted feats during the Trojan War are undoubted but who is presently absent from the known world. Or should I say he is “MIA”? After all, Nolan also has someone say, at one point, that “Sparta is full of Trojan War veterans.” “Trojan War veterans”? Perhaps Odysseus’s case can be taken up by the, um, Ithacan Department of Veterans Affairs. Meanwhile, Penelope refers to her “years of experience” as queen, as though she is campaigning for president using the same playbook as Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nolan has no knack for depicting the ancient world, other than an abundant appreciation for its slovenly eating habits; never has a movie featured so many disgusting scenes of feasting, especially by Penelope’s suitors.
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Even lines that are less obviously bad remind one of things other than Homer. For example, when Odysseus asks Calypso, “Are you a god?” — a perfectly valid question — the moment bizarrely recalls the scene in the original Ghostbusters (1984) when the god Gozer asked, um, the same exact question. (I’m starting to think Nolan could really use a smartphone to avoid such unintentional parallels.) Sometimes, Odysseus simply sounds sort of dumb: Upon encountering a slumbering Polyphemus, Odysseus says, “I think it’s asleep” — a good guess given that the cyclops is supine and snoring. So nonplussed is Damon’s performance that Odysseus’s journey is mainly measured in the evolution of his character’s beard: from brown and patchy, to gray and Santa Claus-like.
The Odyssey guards itself against the many ways in which it could be mocked through the pedigree of its source and its director, who has fashioned a self-mythology as imposing as Stanley Kubrick’s during the peak of his career. But Nolan is not the equal of Kubrick — even his visuals, though objectively big and bold, are hollow and inexpressive — and The Odyssey is really no Odyssey at all. The finale, in which Penelope’s suitors are scrutinized by their facility in stringing Odysseus’s bow, comes to resemble a Quentin Tarantino epic more than any Greek epic: As I watched Damon vanquish the suitors with bow and arrow, one after the other, all I could think of was the equally improbable manner in which Uma Thurman took on all those ninja-types at the end of the first Kill Bill, from 2003.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Telemachus says to Penelope at one point. At least the movie has the good sense to apologize to us.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
