It isn’t often that a movie review in a literary journal likethe London Review of Books goes viral—let alone a 4,234-word movie review—but that’s what happened this week when the LRB published translator Emily Wilson’s review, titled “An Uncomplicated Man,” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Homer adaptation. The nicest thing she could say about the biggest cultural event of our day: “My teenagers had a good time.”
I have nothing but respect for Wilson’s knowledge of the author and his epic poem, she was the first woman to publish an English translation of the Odyssey, but she willfully ignores the way studio productions work, even on the artier end of the spectrum. She isn’t, in other words, a film scholar, though I appreciate her familiarity with Christopher Nolan’s filmography, since she references Inception, Oppenheimer, and his modest debut, Following.
For the director to depict everything she mentions, though, and in the exact way she mentions them—like Calypso’s “wonderfully outraged, operatic speech about divine double standards” for gods and goddesses—would necessitate a seven-hour film, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part War and Peace, and I don’t think anyone wants that. Nor would a major studio pay for it (Universal already shelled out $250 million). Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, and Mariano Llinás’ La Flor—all non-American productions devoid of elaborate special effects—use extreme length to different purposes and don’t play multiplexes.
Nolan made a 173-minute movie, requiring significant changes to Homer’s text. That’s also where the authorial voice comes in, and Nolan has one as much as Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson, who are also rather fond of the literary adaptation. (There Will Be Blood, Anderson’s adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, not surprisingly, bears little resemblance to the original novel.)
I get that Wilson didn’t like the changes he made, like the absence of the all-powerful Zeus as a visible figure, and she backs up each one of her claims with specific references to The Odyssey and The Iliad, but in the end, it sounds like she would’ve preferred that Nolan didn’t make the movie at all, though she credits him for igniting interest in her work and all things Homer.
I’m hardly a Homeric scholar, but I’ve read The Odyssey, and I accepted Nolan’s adaptation on its box office-friendly terms. The widely-praised sequence featuring Samantha Morton’s sorceress Circe, for instance, excludes the lovemaking with Matt Damon’s antiheroic (and not exactly single) king, Odysseus, that will lead to three sons, but that wouldn’t fit into the harrowing, Island of Doctor Moreau-like scenario Nolan depicts—there’s already enough going on.
There’s one thing she wrote, however, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
“The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.”
Reading Emily Wilson’s review did not make me feel worse about The Odyssey, but finding out about Christopher Nolan’s ethical violation in the course of its filming? Yeah, that did the trick.
In the weeks following the movie’s release, calls for a boycott have been growing among human rights organizations, in addition to activists, actors, and filmmakers, like Greta Thunberg, Javier Bardem, and Pedro Almodóvar. I’m not sure it would make much difference at this point, not when the movie has already made nearly $700 million to date (and will likely be Nolan’s biggest box office hit), but awareness is important, and it’s possibly the most significant takeaway from one of the longest movie reviews ever written.
