Why wait for The Odyssey? Homer is everywhere in films

{"text":[[{"start":6,"text":"The Odyssey may be the greatest story ever told in epic verse. Yet how many screen versions of Homer’s homecoming tale have there been? Answer: not many. If well clad in years, you might remember Kirk Douglas and the Cyclops going eyeball (glittering) to eyeball (incinerated) in 1954’s Italo-Hollywood peplum Ulysses. And we could include that celebrated 1968 space odyssey, 2001."}],[{"start":32.1,"text":"But now that Christopher Nolan is poised to unveil his Homer extravaganza — literal, literate (we hope) and starrily cast — let’s ask a different question for a richer answer: how often has Homer’s Odyssey appeared in movies in disguise? Not unlike the hero’s own beggarly masquerade when he returns to Ithaca, his kingdom, after 10 years in Troy and 10 bedevilled years at sea to reclaim his wife Penelope and slay the suitors crowding up his palace."}],[{"start":59.95,"text":"See how I got the whole story in there? But not really. Because there isn’t really a “story”. As Nolan himself has said, Homer’s Odyssey is “the original non-linear narrative”. Unlike The Iliad — where a whole war begins and ends, albeit across a decade and 24 “books” — TheOdyssey doesn’t go from A to Z. A humongous homecoming yarn, it circles from A to A, beginning with a flashback-style evocation of life in Ithaca, then surviving an alphabet of challenges, ordeals and adventures on the return route (the one-eyed ogre Polyphemus, the Sirens, the enchantress Circe — a name that actually means circle). Ergo: The Odyssey, departing from its base and then picaresquely and incident-richly coming back, is really the first road movie. Except at sea. And in near-3,000-year-old Greek dactylic hexameters. "}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":112.25,"text":"What is Homer telling us as he takes his expansive time to bring his hero home? It’s a universal life story, surely. From birth to, not exactly death, but a chastened and magical kind of rebirth. A circle of its own kind, fired in the kiln of exploits survived, wisdoms learnt and follies shed or overcome."}],[{"start":133.95,"text":"As with any decent cyclical epic, from Wagner to Tolkien, the word “ring” is never far away. Indeed, the last part of Homer’s story — the part that some films amplify to the near-exclusion of everything before (see 2024’s The Return) — is about Penelope preparing to surrender her wedding ring to the winner of the “Which suitor can string and flex Odysseus’s bow?” contest."}],[{"start":158.5,"text":"The Return is gritty and well acted by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, but often lumberingly solemn. The supporting cast give it a euro-pudding acoustic in the lower depths — that dimming knell of post-dubbing — much like its 70-year-old antecedent Ulysses."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":177.35,"text":"That too, though, hefts up the Penelope story, with the interesting twist that the same strong-cheekboned Italian actress, Silvana Mangano, plays both Ulysses’s wife and the seducing Circe. A double vision of the “eternal female” to challenge and test our hero, not to mention his coming-of-age, wannabe warrior son Telemachus. Resulting score: stern-willed womanhood 2, male heroism 2. Extra time, maybe going to penalties."}],[{"start":205,"text":"(Fun fact: Ulysses employed, as script doctor, the novelist Alberto Moravia. His memories of the shoot later became raw material for Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt), a 1963 film about filmmaking in which strong-willed, ensorcelling womanhood was in the hands, and other beguiling parts, of Brigitte Bardot.)"}],[{"start":225.25,"text":"Some movie tributes to Homer have no time for women at all. Stanley Kubrick’s great space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey puts men front and centre. Made in the mid-late 1960s, it is an allegory of evolution and the future-in-embryo. It was all about Man, with Man played by, yes, men. The only women with a voice are astronautical trolley dollies."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":247.65,"text":"But at the same time, the only men around, including our protagonist Bowman, are inchling strivers outwitted at every turn by the gods (the Monolith), the one-eyed Cyclops (HAL) and the siren call of that Circe bedroom, where enchantment is disguised as death turning to rebirth. Cue the Star Child."}],[{"start":265.55,"text":"The only other Odyssey adaptation that dared such a heroic removal of the original to a distant place was, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses. That lit the way to a freewheeling universe where you could transpose, magic and re-hew the original. Alas, the only major screen version of Joyce’s novel is a 1967 arthouse dud."}],[{"start":288.75,"text":"In the bipolar landscape of Odyssey adaptations, the climate swings between extremes. One: attempts at an ur-textish fidelity, faithful to heroic Hellenic torsos, Mediterranean seas and tick-box gods and monsters. Two: those crazy-creative bids, Joycean or Kubrickian, to remake Homer root and branch while making sure some true Homeric fruit still hangs, just about recognisable, on the branches."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":315.3,"text":"For fidelity my top choice would be the 1997 TV series The Odyssey, written and directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, with Francis Ford Coppola executive-producing. Yes, the dialogue is spoken in Anglo-Hollywood, with a few European variants (Isabella Rossellini as Athena). But it’s both more fun than the Kirk Douglas Ulysses and more inclusive. You get a greater number of greatest Odyssey hits: monsters, deities, island nymphs and princesses. You even get the god Aeolus in his cave, played with mischief casting by Michael J Pollard, the pixie-faced dimwit of Bonnie and Clyde. He’s the one who gifts our hero a bag of winds, rashly opened by his crew to run the ship amok in mid-voyage. Armand Assante is a passable, pumped-muscled hero. Greta Scacchi is a grieving but defiant Penelope. Geraldine Chaplin and Christopher Lee pop up for extra star lustre."}],[{"start":372.55,"text":"At the other extreme there are rich pickings. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) has the greatest homecoming scene in all Westerns, with John Wayne framed in an unforgettably poetic doorway after long questings on the desert’s ocean. Cold Mountain (2003) is its wintry cousin. French historical epic The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) has a home-returning soldier mystifying a disbelieving wife (Hollywood-remade in 1993 as Sommersby). And let’s not forget a real oddity. Pinter’s The Homecoming — wonderfully filmed in 1973 as a runic, claustrophobic comedy — is about a long-absent-in-America academic who brings home his new wife, only to find his own family are a bunch of preying suitors who want to earn a quid by forcing her into sex work.      "}],[{"start":422.95,"text":"But the most intriguing Homer-away-from-Homer may be the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) which, say the credits, is based on Homer’s The Odyssey. We sometimes struggle to crack the codes in this Deep South tale of escaping convicts starring George Clooney, though that’s half the fun. John Goodman’s blind conman turned murderous Klansman must be the Cyclops, yes. The skimpy-clad girls singing in the river the Sirens. The South itself is good for Ancient Greek name-dropping (Athens, Sparta). And Menelaus and Homer seem no more misplaced here, as character names, than in old Magna Graecia.   "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":461.15,"text":"Who’s quibbling about fidelity anyway? Isn’t transplantation the greatest form of homage?"}],[{"start":467.25,"text":"Nolan himself made a crypto-Odyssey, on an epic scale, in 2014. Interstellar tells of an astronaut voyaging far from home. Nasa pilot Matthew McConaughey pinballs around the universe, hoping to find sustaining lifeforms for a famine-depleted Earth. The homesickness motif involves him and his left-behind daughter, growing up in virtual orphanhood, a Telemachus re-gendered.    "}],[{"start":493.25,"text":"Interstellar might in fact be a more intriguing trailer for Nolan’s Odyssey than the new film’s own, which has already been criticised for its Stateside accents and slang. But would stage English be any more authentically Ancient Greek than American twangs? If anything, the fear raised by the trailer is not infidelity but excessive literalness. Will Nolan, Matt Damon and Co achieve for one Homer epic what Troy achieved for the other one? The 2004 Brad Pitt starrer was a pedestrian, slam-bang, beefcake Iliad, faithful-by-numbers to the Homeric battles, characters, plot twists and action peaks. Everything we could get, similarly potted or potboiled, from a Classics Illustrated comic."}],[{"start":537.25,"text":"Please, Mr Nolan, give us something a little more. The Earth being round, a brave stride away from an original source can sometimes bring you paradoxically closer to it — by a different, more revealing, more world-encompassing route.         "}],[{"start":551.3,"text":"‘The Odyssey’ is in cinemas from July 17"}],[{"start":555.3499999999999,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first —follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":572.7499999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783249749_6460.mp3"}