The Odyssey
Starring: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Himesh Patel
Director: Christopher Nolan
I wouldn’t really dare to review Nolan’s new work. It is so beyond anything that words could do justice to. The very act of applying normal yardsticks of evaluation to something so beyond the norm fills me with embarrassment. To use the critics’ jargon like “spectacular,” “breathtaking” , “epic”, etc is like describing the Taj Mahal as “grand”. How bland!
As I struggled with my limited vocabulary to find ways to define this experience—ummm, maybe sui generis, considering Greek is so closely related to Latin—I thought of all the high points in Homer’s epic which Nolan has cinematized so fluently and audaciously.
Watching the film, I felt I was reading Homer on celluloid without the original getting lost in translation.
The magnificent actors—each better than the next, or the previous one—seem to have completely comprehended (I was going to say ‘understood’ but hell, not epic enough) the spirit of Nolan’s epic journey.
It’s as though Time has gone into overspill , the splintered pieces scattering all over Nolan’s universe, reminding us that ‘timelessness’ is not a state of being. It is a notion as vast as the ocean that Odysseus sails with his men, bravehearts whose hearts won’t sink even if their ship does.
I was quite delighted to see Himesh Patel playing Matt Damon’s right-hand man and, later, the agent of insurgency. Patel has a presence that is in sync with Nolan’s Homeric vision (I was going to say epic vision, but blah!). When Patel spoke, I listened. Damon plays Homer’s hero at sea without the manicured nails that screen idols never sacrifice for authenticity. Unless it is Nolan.
Ditto the rest of the exhilarating cast, except Charlize Theron, who seemed a bit too contemporary and chic to play Odysseus’ love-smitten, self-appointed soulmate (somewhat like Saira Banu to Dilip Kumar). Maybe it was her clothes. They seemed far too grandiloquent to be authentic… or do I mean the opposite?
Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’ wife-in-waiting (echoes of Hema Malini in Dulhan, though I doubt its makers were familiar with Homer) is stunning, and so beautiful when screen-aged to look… what?… 40-plus, and of course timeless.
I especially liked when Hathaway sneers at her screen son Tom Holland, who goes by the name of Telemachus (don’t try that at home without supervision), for suggesting the throne needed a king.
As a queen in waiting, she has a whole harem of suitors waiting to marry her as soon as her husband is declared dead officially. But Odysseus is in no hurry to die. Why should he be, when he brings in his presence a sense of constant renewability and guilt, as if to say, the more we try to escape our past the less inescapable it happens to be.
To be honest, The Odyssey cannot be reviewed. It says so much about the quality of human existence and our ingrained habit of betraying loved ones that cannot be explained with words except in Greek. Some experiences go beyond normal explanations. This is one of them.
