Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey has more than its share of admirers. Classicist and translator Emily Wilson, it turns out, is not one of them.
Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the epic poem became a bestseller and garnered critical praise, panned Nolan’s movie in a review for the London Review of Books.
The headline for the piece is “An Uncomplicated Man,” a reference to the first line in Wilson’s translation of the poem: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Wilson starts by damning the film with faint praise, calling it “an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours” and noting that her “teenagers had a good time.”
It gets worse from there. Wilson notes that Nolan is familiar with her translation, having told Empire, “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me.”
“But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script,” Wilson writes. “Sadly, [Matt] Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.”
She continues, “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great.…Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
Neverthetheless, the movie is “still an event to celebrate,” she writes. “In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas.…Nolan, who studied English at University College London—where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’—is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.”
One can only imagine what ungrateful would look like.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
