Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Helen in the newly released film "The Odyssey," has praised the director Christopher Nolan for what she calls "his vision.” The casting of the Kenyan-Mexican Nyong’o has come in for criticism in some quarters for her non-Greek appearance. Why this has happened to her and did not to the German Diane Kruger, who is also not Greek in appearance, when she played Helen in the 2004 film "Troy" is obvious and needs no further comment. That being said, I do think there is something wrong with the portrayal of Helen in the new version of the "Odyssey." It is, though, in line with the portrayal all of the other characters including the hero Odysseus himself played by Matt Damon. This is not a problem of the actors or of their casting per se, but of the aforesaid "vision” of Nolan.

Although it is somewhat baffling that a film based on a key text of Greek mythology contains no Greek actors in its main cast, this is not what causes the film to be such a problem. Its problem is its lack of a Greek, or in wider terms Mediterranean, spirit. For this spirit Greek actors may have been an asset but they are not a requirement. For back in 1964 the film "Zorba" the Greek was released based on what may well be the most popular book in modern Greek literature and its two leads, though Greek in the source material, were played by the Mexican Antony Quinn and the English Alan Bates, Quinn being the eponymous Zorba and the mainstay of the film.

The point, however, is that the director Michael Cacoyannis so imbued the film with the Greek spirit of the book that the resulting Zorba of Quinn almost seems like a Greek archetype, and the film is delightfully Greek. I have mentioned Zorba here for his character in his literary and cinematic depiction is remarkably similar to that of Homer’s "Odysseus." These figures reflect an ideal, an ideal that seemingly existed in the Mediterranean before these cultures were even able to put their spirit into writing. For there is a joy in life that is evident in the frescoes of the Palace of Knossos at Crete, whose heyday preceded Homer by about a millennium as well as in the Etruscan tombs near Rome that made such an impact upon D. H. Lawrence.

Homer’s "Odyssey" is life-affirming and joyful. Nolan’s film is anything but. This is because the Mediterranean ideal is foreign to what could be called Nolan’s Northern understanding of heroism. Nolan has produced great films with angsty, guilt-ridden introspective heroes from his Dark Knight trilogy, through Inception to his biopic "Oppenheimer." This heroic ideal works well in its own Northern world and made successes of those films. But transposing this type to the Mediterranean world ruins the tone of the Odyssey completely.

It is the case that in technical terms Nolan’s film is relatively true to Homer’s "Odyssey." But in lacking Homer’s animating spirit, the film is heavy and tedious. This absent life-affirming spirit should not be misunderstood. The Mediterranean world, both in the past and today, is not Edenic. It directly knew all the travails, human or naturally caused, that can befall humanity. Its spirit is its approach to them. For a life-affirming mentality can only exist in such conditions if these conditions are not obsessed about, and that when fortune offers blessings rather than travails they are embraced in full.

This is of course not to argue that obsessive thoughts of the kind present in Nolan’s film have never existed in the Mediterranean world. The point is that they are alien to its ideal, and mythology reflects the ideals of a people. This ability to switch from violence to a joyful embrace of life explains what Albert Camus, himself a Mediterranean man, calls "the curious mixture of ferocity and forbearance which we find in Greek mythology.”

It is also what makes Homer’s "Odyssey" in general a delight to read. For the adversities and horrors are constantly balanced with positives. Although I will look at this issue mainly in relation to the central character of Odysseus, for a moment I would like to return to Helen with whom I started this piece. It seems that for Nolan, the idea that a couple whose marital issues led to the destruction of Troy could afterward enjoy conjugal bliss back at home is simply impossible, but that is how Homer portrays Helen and Menelaus when they are visited by Telemachus. In the film, though, Nolan replaces this Mediterranean picture with an embittered Helen who is the victim of spousal abuse by her masculinely toxic husband.

For Odysseus himself, Nolan has made his psyche the theme of his film. There are two elements to it. One is his love for his wife whom he does not want to leave to go off to war at Troy and who is the object of his return. The second is the guilt that he feels for what happens to Troy and to his companions on the voyage back.

In Homer’s Odyssey, on the other hand, the theme of the return is lighter in that the journey is worthy of being experienced in itself. For instance, a man whose obsessive desire to reach home at the exclusion of all else would simply have wished to pass by the Sirens at maximum speed; yet Odysseus listens to their song, as Homer puts it, with a "heart that was eager.” Nolan, on the other hand, even turns the song of the Sirens into yet another painful episode for his hero.

Odysseus and women

By having themes that befit an angsty guilt-ridden hero, changes from the source material of Homer are necessitated. One involves the interactions Odysseus has with certain women. The main woman in his life is, of course, Penelope. And, one of the reasons perhaps that Homer’s "Odysseus" has remained such a beloved character is that, relatively unusually among the vast dramatis personae of ancient Greek mythology, Odysseus is a man who clearly loves his wife and values family life. His quest to get home is motivated by a desire to see his wife and son.

Nolan, however, in failing to understand the Mediterranean spirit, has to make the tale reflect a perfectly loyal husband. Both Homer and Nolan have Odysseus as a prisoner on the island of Calypso. Yet, Homer’s prisoner is fully conscious of his condition. He pines for his home, but he still engages in a long-term physical relationship with this goddess, and is fully aware of her beauty. Homer relates that this relationship "was against his will; she was loving and he unloving.” However, that seems to be what this relationship turns into rather than how it started out. For Robert Graves in his collation of Greek myths has at its beginning "lovely Calpyso welcomed Odysseus as he stumbled ashore, from his shipwreck, and offered him plentiful food, heady drink and a share of her soft bed,” adding that Odysseus "soon tired of her embraces.” The term "soon” obviously suggests they were not initially unwelcome.

It seems that for Nolan, even though it would not have been for a Mediterranean audience, any kind of conscious relationship by Odysseus with another would imply disloyalty to Penelope, and thus his Odysseus is only with Calypso whilst literally out of his mind in a drug-induced fugue in which he is unable to recall his wife at all.

Nolan’s need for Odysseus to be spousally faithful also causes him to completely cut out one of the most delightful episodes in Homer’s Odyssey, which is Odysseus’ encounter with Nausicaa. For unlike the film in which Odysseus leaves the island of Calypso to simply wash up on Ithaca, Homer’s Odysseus is washed up on Phaeacia before he gets home. On the beach there he encounters a beautiful princess playing on the shore with her serving maids. Whilst Homer does not suggest that Odysseus and Nausicaa engage in any form of relationship, there is a palpable flirtatiousness present. Such a light-hearted scene would betray the Nolan’s portrayal of Odysseus and Penelope and thus it is simply absent from the film.

There is also the regular feasting that takes place in Eumaeus’ hut when a disguised Odysseus has returned to Ithaca but before he has taken on the suitors. This shows that Odysseus does not need to rush to a denouement but can, in the Mediterranean ideal, enjoy life more slowly on the way, with the Mediterranean joys of decent food and good company.

State of Odysseus’ mind

The big difference, however, between the epic and the film is the state of Odysseus’ mind in general. In the film, Odysseus is depicted as being overwhelmed by feelings of guilt related on the macro level to the slaughter at Troy which he enabled and on the micro level to his seeming betrayals of Sinon and members of his crew.

Overwhelming obsessive guilt is alien to the Mediterranean ideal. Instead, within it, there is a compartmentalization. Negative thoughts can be brought out, for example when listening to a woeful tale sung by a bard, but then they are put away again. Otherwise it would be impossible to ever enjoy life at all.

Obsessive guilt is the key theme of Nolan’s filmmaking career though, so he ascribes it to his Odysseus. There is, indeed, much that Odysseus could guilty obsess about. Through Odysseus’ ruse of the wooden horse, he enabled what is effectively a genocide to be brought about in Troy. This weighs on the conscience of the Odysseus of Nolan for the entirety of his return, necessitating that its tone be dark and heavy. Homer’s Odysseus simply does not obsess about this, though.

Arguably the best scene in the film is when Odysseus meets with the ghosts of the dead. This dark theme fits Nolan’s cinematic skills perfectly. This scene is used to further compound Odysseus’ guilt as he meets with the shade of Sinon. In Homer’s poem, however, even the meeting with the dead is not overly dark and there is a key moment that highlights the Mediterranean life-affirming ideal. For amongst the ghosts that Homer’s Odysseus meets is that of Achilles. Achilles stresses to Odysseus the value of life simply in itself when he insists that "I would rather be above ground still and labouring for some poor portionless man, than be lord over all the lifeless dead.”

Northern Odyssey and its issues

My main criticism of Nolan’s film is therefore that it ruins the spirit of Homer’s Odyssey in which brutality and a joie de vivre coexist as they are able in the Mediterranean ideal. This of course, does not mean that Nolan is unable to interpret Homer’s Odyssey in any way that he wishes, here by making Odysseus effectively a "Dark Knight” of the ancient mythic age and the tale of his homecoming a Northern-toned Odyssey.

That is true, but it is equally true that I have the right to dislike it. Even so, there are two major issues with Nolan’s Northern-toned Odyssey in and of itself. One concerns the plot, the other concerns its reception.

The plot issue has to do with the central theme of Odysseus and his guilt. The temporary transformation of Odysseus’ men into pigs is used to indicate their true nature, suggesting that men are naturally violent and covetous. This may well be true. If so, such men, both Odysseus’ own and those of the other allied forces, cooped up and increasingly frustrated on the beaches of Troy by that city’s decadelong resistance would intensify this natural inclination. It would have made them "battle-hardened” not simply to violence and bloodshed but to the very qualms of conscience. Thus, such men, once they finally breach the city’s defences, go on to experience something like orgasmic joy as they butcher, rape and desecrate their way through it.

The issue I have here is not with this depiction, which human history has unfortunately attested to time and again, but with Odysseus. For he is the one who provides entry to the city through the ruse of the Wooden Horse. In doing so, it is seems unlikely that he would not also willingly participate in the general massacre but it is nigh on impossible to imagine that he would not have foreseen one would occur. Thus, his being stunned by this outcome is something of a mystery.

It is, of course, possible, though I think highly unlikely, that Odysseus has over the many years outside Troy remained immune to the violent bitterness of all the others around him. But if he is such a sensitive soul then it is seemingly inexplicable as to why he invents the way to cause the savage fall of the city. If he has no foresight, this renders the vaunted "wise” Odysseus bit of an idiot. But, this cannot be the case for such an Odysseus could invent such a ruse in the first place. This leaves as the only explanation for his stratagem that in his monogamous desperation to get back to Penelope, he comes up with the strategem simply in order to bring the war to an end and allow his return. This would mean the blood of the Trojans effectively pay his passage home. This would make Odysseus more monstrous in his cold heartlessness than the other Greeks like Menelaus who at least revel in bloodshed in the heat of the moment.

Then, there is also the oddity at the end of the film that a man overwhelmed by guilt at the violent fate of Troy does not, with his deep psychological scars, forswear violence himself, but actually commits a one-man massacre once he has returned home. The issues that I have raised here are, of course, not issues in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus with his Mediterranean mindset is able to compartmentalize his violent side, letting it out when needed, and leaving it to untrouble him when not.

As for the reception of the film, the issue with uncritically allowing Nolan his own interpretation is that it is likely to now become what is meant by "The Odyssey." For with the increasing death of reading, classical literature is known, if known at all, through screen adaptations rather than their original books. This is especially the case when the screen adaptations are hugely successful as it appears Nolan’s all-star-cast film will be. This means Nolan is effectively poised to replace Homer as the teller of the story of Odysseus’ homecoming, and he will probably occupy this role for at least a generation, much as have the screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice" from 1995 and 2005. The difference with the latter examples is that they do keep to the spirit, if not always to the word, of their source material and recreate a delightful book with delightful dramas. Nolan’s legacy, however, will be to replace a delightful epic with a ordeal of a film leaving perhaps millions unaware of the life-affirming joy with which the original is so replete.