In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is proof that political life is a miserable way to go.The two groups you’d expect to be happiest and most excited for this movie, the hardcore Right and the left-wing author whose “feminist” translation served as a blueprint for the film, are seething angry.
There’s just no pleasing people who’ve chosen to be unhappy.Nolan’s three-hour, R-rated, sword-and-sandal epic is well on its way to $1 billion worldwide. It holds a 94% critics’ score and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.Why?Because it’s good.It is gripping, exciting, and new. From score to imagery, The Odyssey does something well worth the price of admission: It marries the ancient with the modern. Just as composer Ludwig Goransson pairs eighth-century B.C. instruments with the synthesizer, Nolan pairs the Greek texts with the language of modern cinema.For example, the imposing Agamemnon is presented in non-period armor. He looks like a Greek Darth Vader. He is meant to. Nolan meets the audience where it is, telling a 3,000-year-old story in a language it understands. Modern viewers know what to feel when they see a Vaderian figure — they know Agamemnon before he speaks.As for the continued silliness of the right-wing holdouts, the film’s themes should have them cheering.The Odyssey argues that, though society is imperfect, the virtues and social etiquette that bind us into a peaceful whole are necessary and worth protecting, because the alternative is worse. Odysseus explicitly bemoans the loss of a high-trust society.Themes of duty, honor, chastity, kingship, surrender to divine authority, family, home, and lineage run throughout. The script is basically an Arthurian reading of the Greeks.Then there is the Christian imagery that undergirds everything.“Zeus’s law” is the Golden Rule. When Odysseus leaves Calypso and takes to the sea, it’s only after he gives up the illusion of control and surrenders his life to the divine. It’s only after this, after his head and face are submerged in water, that he wakes on the shores of Ithaca, home at last. One of the more haunting lines in the film is when Odysseus’s second-in-command screams at him to “pray for forgiveness.” Lastly, before he can end his 10-year estrangement and free his soul from the guilt of sin, Odysseus must go to confession. He does. There is even a screen between him and his confessor.Yet even these conservative elements have not cooled the pure hatred of the weird online Right, whose animus predates the film’s release and whose complaints encompass everything from costume design to color palette to the modern dialogue.Matt Damon in “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda via IMDB)
