Epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis: enough to call it a masterpiece?
I strangely agree with Peter Bradshaw‘s review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis – The Guardian – but, in my opinion, 5 stars are an exaggeration; I could settle for a generous four. Maybe because I always approach Nolan’s movies with a certain awe: after films like Memento, Inception, and Tenet, I feel the director has gone too far with his egocentric, and disturbing , narcissism, taking his brilliant post-postmodern film style too far (see my review of Tenet in Italian). When you need explanatory articles to understand what’s going on (Memento), when you get easily lost in the characters’ subconscious (Inception) or when you get completely misplaced in a narrative in which time goes forward but also backwards (Tenet), you don’t expect an easy narration in The Odyssey, being Homer’s epic itself made of flashbacks, plot and subplot, visions and dreams. Unexpectedly, Nolan narrates the story almost chronologically, like a Victorian writer; his post-postmodernism lies more in the images and the style (the stunning visuals are an asset in creating a super blockbuster).
Having said this, it is quite impossible to make a more convincing film version of this quintessential Western epic, with its hero, notwithstanding his toughness, so full of doubts and spleen, to the point of evaluating suicide: I woke, and debated in the depths of my heart whether to hurl myself from the ship and drown, or suffer in silence among the living. I stayed and suffered: wrapping my head in my cloak, I lay down on the deck (The Odyssey, 10.55-61). What makes Ulysses so modern, in the film and in the epic, is the fact that he is the victim of no single enmity, except arguably that of Antinous, but enmity all around, an ecosystem of enmity, the hostile terrain through which he must pass to reach the even more hostile terrain of home; an ecosystem made also of many women – mortals or goddesses – beautiful and tempting (dark ladies prototypes) and Penelope, too faithful to be true (an Ancient Greece Pamela, prototype of the fake bourgeois myth of woman as absolute purity). Comes to one’s mind Springsteen’s famous line if you’re rough and ready for love, honey, I’m tougher than the rest.
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