Context and a Movie: The Odyssey

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC, Context and a Movie. It's where we convene a conversation about a new film with both a movie critic and an expert in the subject matter. This time, we examine The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's classic epic. The movie is a huge success at the box office. I don't have to tell you, it was the biggest opening weekend of Nolan's career, and it's the biggest opening for a live action movie all of this year. Here's Matt Damon as Odysseus and Charlize Theron as Calypso from the trailer.

**Mary Beard** (0:46)
Tell me what you remember.

**Brian Lehrer** (0:51)
A wife?

**Mary Beard** (0:57)
A son? We won the war.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:12)
Help me go home. We won the war. And listen to the rest of the podcast. And listeners, we'll try not to give away too many spoilers about this film, but it is based on a centuries old epic, and you probably had to read it in high school, so we're not going to be too cautious. But have you seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey yet? How many stars or tomatoes or anything else would you give it? Or say anything you want about Homer's original, or ask a question of our guests, Slate film critic Dana Stevens, or Professor Emerita of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Mary Beard is also co-host of the podcast Instant Classics, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.
Dana is also author of the book Camera Man, Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 20th Century.
Professor Beard is also the author most recently of Talking Classics, The Shock of the Old. Welcome back, Dana Stevens. Always great to talk. And welcome to WNYC, Mary Beard. It's an honor.

**Mary Beard** (2:17)
Hello. Great to be with you.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:20)
Dana, as the film critic here, what did you think about the movie as a movie? Let's start there. I gather you haven't always been a Christopher Nolan fan.

**Dana Stevens** (2:29)
Yes. I think that this is probably my favorite Christopher Nolan film I've seen, but that comes with the proviso that I've never quite had Nolan fever. He's a filmmaker who I admire without usually being able to emotionally engage with his work. I've always found him somewhat cerebral and was very surprised to find myself as engaged with his Odyssey as I was. I'm very, very curious to hear what Mary thought of it because I know some classic scholars have been iffy about it, and it does raise a lot of questions about adaptation and what it means to modernize a nearly 3000-year-old poem. But just as a movie and especially as a big epic summer romp in an action movie, I think it's very successful and audiences have really endorsed that by flocking to Zendaya.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:17)
Mary, you want to jump in by answering Dana's questions?

**Mary Beard** (3:20)
Well, I'm really pleased that Dana says that because I enjoyed it.
I really hope people go and see it, and I hope that when they've seen it, when they've seen the film, they'll go and read the book. That will be absolutely marvellous. And there have been some horribly pedantic, picky classicists around who've been going through this and talking about whether you got the armour right or whatever. And I think that's a bit ignominious, honestly. I think these kind of great books, they're up for adaptation. We should be playing around with them. We should be, in a sense, making them mean something new to us. My question is, and I'm not sure here that Nolan always kind of came out ahead, my question is whether the adaptation loses more than it gains.
So I think adaptation is great. That's what great works of literature are for, really, to be adapted. But there's still a test of whether the adaptation adds more than it subtracts. And sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:32)
Like how? In each case, if you'd like to go there.

**Mary Beard** (4:34)
Well, okay.
There is one huge episode in The Odyssey is missed out. Now, I can see why you've got to miss things out. You've got to get this 24 book epic down to three hours. So something's got to go. But what he misses out is an absolutely crucial central bit of where Odysseus is telling the story of what he's been up to at this magical, magical community at the ends of the world. It's his last stop before he gets home.
What's important about that is that that community has two really key female characters, powerful female characters. It has a queen and it has this curious, but very intriguing princess, Norsecaea, with whom there is a hint in the poem that is, well, there's a question, is Odysseus actually going to stay here with Norsecaea or is he going to go back to Penelope? Now, in obscuring that, in effacing that, I mean, I think first of all, we miss quite a lot of big, we miss a big female role here. We also miss the wonderful bits of eroticism that Nolan has managed to leave out really from the film. We also miss this wonderfully jokey dialogue here between the princess and Odysseus. One thing I thought about Nolan's Odyssey is, maybe I just got a very dumb sense of humor, but there were any jokes. The Odyssey is full of irony, wit and sometimes actual jokes. All that has gone to become very serious. There's a very moral message of a kind which is super 21st century, but not super Homeric.