Director Christopher Nolan’s new film, an adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” has much of the MAGA world’s knickers in a twist.
These deep thinkers claim the movie is “woke” — their all-purpose word dismissing everything they don’t understand, don’t like or that frightens them. That a Black actress — Lupita Nyong’o — plays Helen of Troy — and a transgender actor, Elliot Page, plays Sinon enrages them.
Terrified of the complexity in our modern world, they abhor any acknowledgment that the past might have been something other than simple, too.
This is a pity. Nolan’s film advances a subtle thesis and embraces values that not long ago would have been considered conservative.
And it does so in a manner that makes an ancient tale seem as contemporary as this morning’s news alerts.
Part of the reason “The Odyssey” became a classic — why it has endured for nearly three millennia — is that it asks timeless questions.
How can a man who is lost find his way home?
How long can a wife endure a great distance in her marriage and harbor love through tremendous uncertainty?
How can a son find and gain what he needs to be a man from his father?
How can any of us come to terms with the difficult choices we must make in a hard world, particularly if those choices produce harsh consequences?
Stripped of the spectacle and the stirring action sequences, Homer’s ageless tale is a simple one. It is the story of a man, Odysseus, who struggles to come to terms with the desperate acts he committed during a brutal war. He struggles to recover his best self while he fears that that best self may have been lost along the way and that those he loves most — those to whom he is devoted and for whom he fought — won’t recognize or care for the man he has become.
His wife and his son labor to love and remain true to a husband and a father who is not there—whose sense of duty has denied them his presence—while the world around them reels toward chaos and disintegration in his absence.
The threats and diversions that plague Odysseus on his journey home — Cyclops, the Sirens, Calypso — have their counterparts in everyday life.
How many of us have found our way blocked by adversaries of limited vision, their near-blind opposition to our efforts threatening to us and destructive to others?
Who hasn’t heard the siren call of temptation and felt the alluring impulse to surrender?
And who doesn’t wish from time to time that he or she could set aside duties, burdens and griefs and exist outside the world and its cares?
There was a reason the Irish genius James Joyce adapted “The Odyssey” for his 20th-century modernist masterpiece, “Ulysses,” into a tale in which everyday events stood in for epic ones. Joyce recognized that Homer already had established that epic battles could represent everyday challenges.
Joyce simply reversed the equation.
This is why “The Odyssey” still speaks to us 27 centuries after it was written—why its title has become a synonym for a journey, particularly a life’s journey that affects and alters us with its twists and turns.
It is because it asks questions — how should we live, how should we love, how should we stay faithful — that humans have pondered forever that Homer’s classic has remained relevant through so many ages of history.
This is what, distracted by their bigotry and their fear, the film’s critics miss in their condemnation of the movie.
Its answer to these timeless questions is hardly revolutionary.
Summed up by Odysseus near the end of the tale, it comes down to this: There is a cost and there are consequences when we break faith with the divine and violate the norms and conventions of decent society.
Once upon a time, Americans who called themselves conservatives would have embraced such a message as a self-evident truth.
Now, they damn it as “woke” and close their eyes to its ageless wisdom.
Part of Homer’s point was that creatures of limited vision — Cyclops — existed to block the path to the home and the life we want most.
True then.
True now.