Emily Wilson’s 2017 English translation of Homer was, in the words of Christopher Nolan, a key wellspring of inspiration for his summer tentpole The Odyssey. In the early going of the promotional push for the film, the director made much of this classical scholar’s work, even lifting her famous “Tell me about a complicated man” to set the tone for his own cinematic take on the epic.
That cordiality has now been put to rest. Wilson has issued a withering condemnation of Nolan’s box office hit in a wide-ranging piece for the London Review of Books and in interviews since. She has no time for the film’s “grandiose and superficiality,” and was blunt in saying she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
For the University of Pennsylvania professor, the problem is one of scale versus nuance. To be sure, she concedes the movie has generated a cultural wave of its own that has driven readers to buy up her translation. But as she sees it, the adaptation has stripped away the ethical, temporal and psychological richness of the source material.
In her essay, Wilson is uncharitable in her appraisal: “The writing is abysmal,” she declares. “Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great… It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history or war.” She finds the narrative structure to be little more than a gimmick and says the character of Odysseus comes across as hollow where he should be complex. Penelope is given short shrift, and what might have been a classical tragedy is instead drenched in modern sentimentality.
Her remarks have set off something of a row. Some are quick to defend Nolan, contending that you cannot expect a three-hour IMAX spectacle to adhere to the same rules as a scholarly verse; some compression and commercial give-and-take is inevitable when one is making a Hollywood blockbuster. Others in the critical community have found themselves in agreement with Wilson, voicing the old frustration of seeing high-concept source material whittled down to bombastic action and a run-of-the-mill hero’s journey.
It is the sort of friction one expects when the academy and a major studio production cross paths. Nolan may have turned myth into a sensory event for the stadium, but Wilson’s takedown serves as a reminder of the moral ambiguity and interiority that have kept the original text alive for three thousand years, and which no amount of visual effects can replicate.
Source: The Guardian