Last summer in Provincetown I read Homer’s Odyssey. At Columbia 67 years ago, as a freshman, I was exposed by force of the mandatory two year Contemporary Civilizations Curriculum to engage the classics; public high school in Brooklyn was light on Greek literature, to put it mildly. I recall being painfully exposed to the Iliad and the Odyssey, albeit in small chunks. Columbia at the time was in the business of training “gentlemen” of a certain class or pretension– a touch of all Western literature, a touch of European and US history and government, blend in a semester of fine arts and a semester of classical music.
First thing to note is that reading the Odyssey in English means a translation, so it is hard to appreciate the fullness of the poetic content. That said, I bet Homer could write like hell. He surely could tell a tale, with detail and texture and pace and poetic phrasing. The translated poem of the Odyssey turned out to be easy to read in 40 or so page chunks, easily digested in two weeks on my deck or on the beach.
I was suspicious of the movie, which was long, photographed in super wide screen and hotly touted by the studio. The critics were positive but then again I often find myself turned off by critical analysis of “film.” It is a “movie,” dammit! Film critics bother me. But one rainy day recently I relented and went to my local superdeluxe theater, munched on my dipping tidbits and popcorn, and watched the almost three hour movie.
It was great. In cinematic format it moved back and forth in time while the poem of course is linear, but the jumps were well-done. The movie captured with reasonable clarity the poetic narrative of events; to my mind, being true to story line in this case was important–we are adapting a classic, not a comic book. A good deal of slaughter but, well, that’s a central theme and the main character’s avocation and redemption.
One thing missing is the weight of the gods in the poem. There were moovie invocations indeed, heavy on Poseidon as in the poem which is important given the role of the sea in the narrative. But the assiduous reference to the gods, clear in the original text, was short-change in celluloid.
I had resisted seeing the film for two reasons: suspicion of hype, and Matt Damon. I still see Damon pasting Mini Driver’s phone number on the coffee shop window (Good Will Hunting) or shooting people (and aggravating about it) in the Jason Boring movies (yeah, yeah, I watched every last one of them). Picturing him as the classic Greek warrior hero was not difficult–it was impossible. Gotta admit it– a credible job in acting, and the guy has gotten some age on him, he carried the lines and beard on his face with panache. I see an Academy nomination coming for him, and for the movie of course.
In fact this showing was so good that I almost want to describe this movie as a “film….”