Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been in theatres since July, and by now the cast list has done its rounds: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as his son Telemachus, Robert Pattinson is the villainous suitor Antinous. It is the kind of ensemble built for a summer hit.
The names worth noting though, are Anne Hathaway, Samantha Morton and Lupita Nyong’o, playing Penelope, Circe, and both Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. Which sent me straight back to the source material, because the thing about the Odyssey is that Odysseus gets the statue and the epithets, wily, much-suffering, pick your translation, but it is the women around him doing the actual work.
The film covers Odysseus’s ten year voyage home from Troy: the Cyclops, Calypso’s island, the descent to the underworld, and the reckoning waiting for him back in Ithaca, where Penelope has spent a decade fending off suitors. Nolan is reportedly working from Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, the one that made headlines for finally giving the poem’s women a voice that matched the Greek rather than a Victorian gloss on it.
It earns the three hour runtime. The pacing is accessible without flattening the plot, and it leaves room to actually sit with the characters and their struggles rather than rushing you from landscape to hellscape. The effects work is where Nolan’s practical over CGI habit pays off: the Cyclops is properly disgusting, he’s not the monster I’ve always pictured in my mind. The landscapes do a lot of the same work. You can feel the heat and the wind coming off them, and the wide shots keep the characters small against the scale of where they are. It always looks like they are alone out there, because mostly, they are.
Circe (Morton) is the clearest case for why these women matter more than the plot summary suggests. She turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs, yes, but she is also the only figure in the entire poem who actually knows what comes next. She tells him how to survive the Sirens, how to get past Scylla, how to reach the underworld and back. Without her, the second half of the story does not happen. She is dangerous, and she is also the brains of the operation.
Penelope (Hathaway) gets flattened in most retellings into “the faithful wife,” which undersells what she is actually doing for ten years. She runs a household and a kingdom while pretending to weave a burial shroud she unravels every night, buying herself time against more than a hundred suitors who assume her husband is dead. And when Odysseus finally does return, disguised as a beggar, she does not simply fall into his arms.
Helen and Clytemnestra, both played by Nyong’o, are where the film gets genuinely clever with its casting. Helen spends most of the Trojan War being blamed for it and hated for it, yet Homer gives her some of the sharpest, most self aware lines in the whole cycle: at Hector’s funeral she says plainly that no one in Troy is kind to her anymore, that the fault runs through Paris’s folly as much as her own. She is not written as a blank prize. She is written as someone fully conscious of the story being told about her.
What makes these women worth reading about is not virtue. It is that they are the ones actually running things while the men are off being celebrated for running away and back again, and the poem, three thousand years on, still cannot quite decide whether that makes them dangerous or essential. Usually it’s both.
Odysseus gets to go home and be forgiven. Penelope had to build the conditions for that homecoming for a decade first, and nobody wrote an epic with her name on it.
If you liked:
- Circe by Madeline Miller
- The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
- A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes