The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan

I walked into an early morning showing of Christopher Nolan’s new film The Odyssey convinced that it is an impossible task to successfully adapt Homer’s poem into a coherent film. Ulysses, James Joyce’s modernist novel, compresses the travels of Odysseus into one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, and it works wonderfully. When it comes to film, the epic poem morphs beautifully to adaptation. Apocalypse, Now and O Brother Where Art Thou? are successful transfers to another time and space. For me, these transformations feel more akin to the Homeric spirit than an attempt at transferring to the screen the actual poem. Certainly, the Italian film Ulysses starring Kirk Douglas and Silvana Mangano doesn’t do it for me. Try compressing a heroic poem of more than twelve thousand lines into a two-hour movie and see what you get. You get the prototype of a 1950’s “sword and sandal” movie. At least Nolan gives himself more time, almost three hours. Even though this gigantic length is not enough to pack in everything the original has to offer, it is an exciting three hours. Still, I maintain that for The Odyssey to truly work it has to be read. It’s the only way it is going to come to life. And if you want a reading for our times, pick up the Emily Wilson translation, and I can assure you Homer will live once more.

There are many other literary works that resist being adapted, much less being turned into a film. Don Quixote is a perfect example. There have been so many attempts to liberate Miguel de Cervantes’ words from the page. The 1957 film by Grigori Kozintsev faithfully captures a chunk of the narrative, while on Broadway Man of La Mancha makes parallels between Cervantes’ life and thew novel to the tune of a magnificent musical score. There have been film versions made in Spain as well as in Mexico. That country’s legendary comedian Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno played Sancho Panza in a minor comic version. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, perhaps the most interesting of all, is Terry Gilliam’s meta approach to the novel. Back in America, while Orson Welles was desperately trying to fund his version, which remained unfinished at his death, Mr. Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus), triumphed playing the title role in a cute animated short.

Our modern conception of Homer is of a blind itinerant poet who recited the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath, events that happened in the Bronze Age. The Iliad and the Odyssey are catalogued as primitive heroic poetry. Primitive in the sense that they are part of an ancient oral tradition. According to legend, they were first improvised and recited following oral formulas and written down much later in the 7^th or 8^th century BCE. We don’t really know if a wandering bard named Homer really existed.

The original poem exists in two realms: the gods on Mount Olympus and the world of mortal men. Nolan has decided that his adaptation will concentrate largely on the mortals. Unfortunately, this leaves out a lot of the conflict that is essential towards a full understanding of the narrative. The gods are major players here.  After all, let’s face it, it was a divine beauty contest that triggers the Trojan War in the first place, and Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca is largely guided by the whims of the gods. Major deity like Zeus and Poseidon, however, are absent, although they are mentioned. The 1981 film Clash of the Titans, on the other hand, a fantasy based on the myth of Perseus, made it a point to present both worlds. Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom and Ursula Andress, among others, populated a star-studded Mount Olympus.

A major directorial decision when tackling the works of antiquity is how do we know what these people looked like, what they sounded like, what they wore and the nature of the space through which they roamed. Nolan is after the big budget epic vision – shot and edited in IMAX  -- a process that often neglects historical accuracy and is often influenced by the look and feel of previous epics. What about the language? It feels strange to hear one of the suitors drop the F-bomb at one of the banquets. What about Telemachus (Tom Holland) referring to Odysseus (Matt Damon) as dad? Does that break the Homeric spirit of antiquity for you? On the opposite side of the spectrum, Pier Paolo Pasolini, himself a poet, shooting with a poverty-row budget and a cast made up largely of non-professional actors achieves wonders in his Oedipus Rex and Medea. These films are raw and brutal, but their language is elevated and true to their classic nature. They don’t try to dream up distant worlds that we know very little about, instead they create their own. When it comes to presenting ancient Greece, Pasolini’s film achieves a memorable reality rather than a fleeting artifice.

Episodic by its nature, Nolan’s film has some unforgettable set pieces that will stay with you for a long time. Chief among them is Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops. Played by Bill Erwin, Polyphemus is more to be pitied than censured, even when he is munching away at some of Odysseus’ men. We feel sorry for him – a deformed, lonely creature living alone with sheep in a cave. Where did he get his taste for men? Their encounter with the Laestrygonians ends up being less successful, Nolan choses to portray them as gigantic men in shiny armor. That’s way too medieval-looking for my taste. And what happened to the lotus-eaters chapter? Perhaps Nolan decided that a section about beings who consume a flower and go on a drugged-out trip was way too boring (too bad, it worked so successfully in Apocalypse, Now when Major Willard (Martin Sheen) ends up meeting some GI’s, stoned out of their minds, who are obsessed with blowing up a bridge). Instead, Nolan incorporates the lotus eating to Calypso (Charlize Theron) on the island of Ogygia. She keeps feeding our hero the drug so that he can forget all about his wife and returning home to Ithaca. The sections that take place aboard a ship are incredible, especially the sailing of the straits of Messina when, thanks to the wrath of Poseidon (Polyphemus is his son, you see and he’s mad about Odysseus putting out junior’s only eye), the men encounter the whirlpool Charybdis and the serpent-like Scylla.

The three most memorable set pieces in the film are Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, the flashbacks to the sack of the city of Troy (beware Greeks bearing gifts!), and the concluding slaughter of the suitors. I don’t want to discuss these at any length at the risk of spoiling what ends up being amazing examples of brilliant filmmaking. Let’s just say that each is an amalgamation of great acting, amazing editing and evocative IMAX cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema), and ambitious music (Ludwig Göransson) by two Nolan regulars both of whom won Academy Awards for Oppenheimer.

And of course, there is Odysseus and Penelope (Anne Hathaway), as well as the goddess Athena (Zendaya), Lupita Nyong’o (in a dual role of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra), Robert Pattinson as Antinous, John Leguizamo memorable as Eumaeus, and Elliot Page in a standout performance as Sinon (a character borrowed from Virgil's Aeneid). Unfortunately, Benny Safdie in the role of Agamemnon is weighted down by a costume and a helmet / mask (that looks way too similar to Batman’s) and makes him look like some kind of Homeric superhero from the pages of Marvel comics.

It is Matt Damon that carries this film, and his performance is wonderful. Perhaps, this is his best role in his career, and without a doubt the most arduous. It must have been a ball-breaker of a shoot, and Damon rises to the occasion in every scene. Frankly, I didn’t think he had the gravitas to pull it off, but his earnest approach to the role won me over in a big way. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is a study in resignation which she manages to portray in all her scenes.

So, yes, Christopher Nolan’s film is a hit. He has been able to follow a huge film about the creation of the atomic bomb with an even bigger explosion of a film, and he has succeeded. I recommend the film highly, and, quite frankly, despite its length, I’m looking forward to a second viewing soon.  The big question is – how do you top this? Will they all be giants from now on, or does he still possess the ability to come up with a Memento or a The Prestige?

Steven Spielberg's DISCLOSURE DAY

  

Thus far, the Donald Trump administration decision to release previously classified information about UFO (or UAP as we are calling them now) sightings have turned up nothing more than black and white footage of fast moving points of light in the sky. It's true that the movements of these objects shatter our laws of physics, and personal, mystified accounts by pilots who have been eyewitness to these events makes us all ponder what the heck is out there. It's no wonder that the eternal question of "are we the only ones" in this vast universe keeps coming back to the forefront. Since these latest "disclosures" have done a pretty bad job of clarifying long-held secrets, and a great job of raising even more questions, it is up to Steven Spielberg to set the record straight. 

Listen, you unbelievers: Yes, there are beings out there who have visited the Earth! And yes, even some have crashed landed (despite their supposed superior aeronautics); and yes, the United States government has recuperated the bodies of extraterrestrials in Roswell in 1947; and YES, the government has also done a whopper of a job denying it all. In essence, this is the premise of Steven Spielberg's latest film Disclosure Day, a rollicking adventure chase thriller that explores the mythology of UAPs. What makes the movie irresistible is that this time around he never lifts the foot off the gas pedal. Luckily, the latest governmental releases may have incidentally drummed up business for the film. Trust me, it didn't need it. When Spielberg makes a movie about aliens you run to the theater to see it on the big screen. You don't wait for it to stream at home.

At the risk of giving away too much of the plot, the movie opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a kind of whistle blower who has in his possession video drives of many UAP sightings and actual evidence of aliens. He is being chased by Noah Scanlon (a bearded, memorable Colin Firth -- looking a bit like an older Orson Welles) who heads the Wardex Corporation. He and his men are all dressed in black. That's all you need to know. They are, undeniably, the bad guys. 

When it comes to exploring the flying saucer mythology Spielberg, throughout his career, places its visual landscape right along Catholic iconography. You see it in the Sacred Heart of Jesus transformed into the glowing chest of the lovable alien in E.T. The Extraterrestrial, and in the welcoming spread arms of an alien in Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- a kind of redemptive crucifixion. In this film he continues this theological imagery through the character of Daniel's girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) who is, not only a former nun, but during a memorable interrogation scene by Noah, she takes off her crucifix necklace and holds it so tightly that it cuts into the palm of her hand giving herself a stigmata worthy of St. Catherine of Siena or St. Francis of Assisi.

 At the heart of the story we find further religious allusions through the character of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City TV weather announcer who one morning, after a Northern cardinal flies inside her apartment window, she begins talking in tongues (Russian? Ukrainian?).  In Catholic theology this red bird represents the blood of Christ, and is traditionally thought of as a messenger from heaven and a bridge between the earthly and spiritual realms. When she suddenly begins talking in an unknown language on live TV like Christ's apostles did on the Day of Pentecost, she becomes a wanted person by Noah, and thus ignites her run for her life.

But don't get the wrong idea: Disclosure Day is by no means a mere treatise on the mystical aspect of extraterrestrials. It is an exciting pre-summer movie in which Spielberg uses his mastery of pacing and slow disclosure to guide us through a story that visually contains many throwbacks to his past films, and even includes a train crash as a homage to the one in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, one of Spielberg's childhood favorites as we are led to believe in his autobiographical The Fabelmans.  

What about the aliens? Oh, they are there, but you'll have to wait a while to see them. Everything is explained, especially the mysterious Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who throughout the movie is seen surrounded by people building what looks like a theatrical set for a suburban middle-class home.

The film concludes with a one word imperative. Maybe it's not the word I would have chosen, but it is clear that the meaning it tries to convey is that we must demand integrity and transparency from our government. Spielberg has always been a believer, and his films have shown just that, and he knows that his audience share in his search for the truth. 

Believe! At the risk of sounding like a Christmas advertisement for Macy's, maybe this should have been the last line of this exciting film. 

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE at the MET

Tristan und Isolde might be Richard Wagner's greatest work for the stage. A work inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his writings about mankind's insatiable striving. Since its creation, it is his most talked-about, most written about, and most dissected creation. The opera was born out of Wagner's ideas about transcendental love beyond death, and an episode of infidelity (Wagner had an affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of his Swiss benefactor). Its pioneering soundscape, so vastly different from the conventional opera of his time, led to countless volumes written about the dissonant chord found in the third measure of the prelude -- the so, called "Tristan Chord," -- a deviation from the traditional harmonic practice of Wagner's day that many scholars argue eventually led the way to the dissonance of 20th century music.

At a time when the Metropolitan Opera is facing a financial crisis, this new production is the kind of event that is actually filling the seats. The matinee performance I attended yesterday seemed to be sold out, and there was an energy in the house which has not been felt in quite a while.The source of that energy is soprano Lise Davidsen, who is singing the role of Isolde for the first time at the MET after taking it "on the road" singing it for the first time at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, a performance I also attended.

American director Yuval Sharon is responsible for the new production which is filled with perhaps too many complex ideas. It attempts to be a visionary look at the work, and oftentimes it succeeds brilliantly, while at other times you question his directorial decisions. One thing is certain, like the best in theater, less is more, and Mr. Sharon's best moments are when he keeps things simple.

 

At the center of his production is a tunnel, a kind of vortex where the main action is played. Aside from the fact that it is aesthetically beautiful and complex in all its permutations, it also serves as a kind of funnel-like speaker which throws the voices back to the house. Not that Ms. Davidsen needs any amplification which this set might give her, but it really helped tenor Michael Spyres in the Act II love duet, and in the difficult music of Act III. The same can be said about Ekaterina Gubanova, who plays Brangäne. Hers was the smallest voice in the entire cast.

At times, the vortex breaks into two parts, separating the main characters from each other -- perhaps foreshadowing the events to come, or maybe it's just an example of the technical wizardry the MET can pull off and Mr. Sharon is showing off.

Throughout the production there is a long table on the stage. Here, silent doppelgängers of the characters silently mimic the action that is being sung inside the vortex. For the most part, I found this multiplication of characters distracting during the first two acts. But in Act III it suddenly worked. On the stage lies the dying Tristan, being attended by Kurwenal (a rather boisterous and vocally strong Tomasz Koniezny), and inside the vortex Mr. Spyres sings his mournful longing phrases for the return of Isolde. These are the inner thoughts of a dying man, and the audience is made witness to his last moments.

The other trick in Mr. Sharon's magic bag are projections which fill the entire proscenium of the house -- and that's a really tall proscenium! I must say that the resolution of these projections are not the greatest. Perhaps in the future the projections of live events can be improved. Although when pictures are projected, the image is quite sharp. Sometimes the pictures can be outright silly. When Isolde and Brangäne discuss potions a projection of an elegant feminine hand holding an alluring vial appears. The image is right out of Coco Chanel or Cristóbal Balenciaga -- you pick your favorite perfume ad! 

But when the projections work dramatically, they are memorable. During the confrontation between Tristan and Isolde in Act I, the characters appear to be walking the razor's edge, a powerful image that brings back the violent back-story of this tale: the slaying of Morold at the hands of Tristan.

It is a production not to be missed, filled with interpretive ideas that makes for a rich evening at the opera. It is also a harbinger of things to come: Ms. Davidsen is slated to sing the role of Brünnhilde in the MET's new Ring production which will also be directed by Mr. Sharon. Let's just hope that the MET gets its finances in order so that these wonderful future events can happen. 

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - “¡Viva la revolución!”

  Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian literary critic, wrote that the novel as a literary genre is a series of carnivalesque episodes; essentially an empty bag where anything can be stuffed in. Of course, he was thinking of François Rabelais, a French writer whose novels cemented the framework for the genre. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais's great work, brings to life the essence of what a medieval carnival must have been like: loud, dirty and infinitely grotesque.  It is no wonder that Thomas Pynchon's novels are often referred to as carnivalesque and Rabelaisian. If Bakhtin theorized that the novel can subvert social norms and hierarchies through humor and chaos, then Pynchon's novel Vineland, the inspiration for One Battle After Another, is a perfect example of Bakhtin's theory. And Paul Thomas Anderson's film takes the theory a step further and adds politics to the stew in its quest to break down society's standards. Let the revolution begin!

With his incredible flair for telling a story with images that linger in one's mind, Anderson fashions a tale of an underground group of violent radicals vent on a quixotic quest to bring down the government. The story of French 75, the name of the group, (and also the name of everybody's favorite drink at "Rick's Café Américain" in the film Casablanca), has been told in VistaVision, the most celebrated of all the widescreen 35mm formats developed in the 1950's. The Searchers, Vertigo and The Ten Commandments are just three of the many films shot in this process -- a quixotic quest to bring families back to the theaters instead of sitting at home watching Milton Berle on that new invention: television. Mr. Anderson's choice to use VistaVision is also a rallying plea for people to get their ass off their streaming-den couches and come back to the place where movies are meant to be seen.

The focus of the story is the love between Bob Ferguson, in an amazingly satisfying performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and Perfidia Beverly Hills, a powerhouse of a performance by Teyana Taylor. They live in their scrappy revolutionary echo chamber, and they are very much in love. Their nemesis comes in the form of Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (an outlandish and utterly remarkable Sean Penn) who is seduced by Perfidia during a raid on a migrant detention center. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review of the film in the New York Times "Lockjaw will spend the rest of the film trying to reassert his supremacy."

Years pass and Bob is living with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He has let go of the rebellion and is now a burnout watching TV and smoking weed all day. That is until Col. Lockjaw invades his house in a quest to find Willa and discover who her real father is. This puts Bob on the run once again, this time aided by Sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa's martial arts instructor and an underground migrant leader.

Meanwhile Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club (talk about carnivalesque!) a white supremacist organization. During his interview with them he lies about having had sexual relations with a black woman. This lie will result in disastrous consequences for the colonel.

That Bahktin empty bag has been overfilled with so much Pynchon, Vineland and Anderson that a whole lot of intelligent, calculated cinematic explosions will follow!

 A friend reacted to the release of this film by saying "finally a movie worth seeing." I agree, and I'll add that it is worth seeing multiple times. And perhaps in multiple formats, especially if it is playing in VistaVision near you. It is by far the best film of 2025, and it has Oscar potential written all over it. I would not be surprised if we see DiCaprio winning his second Oscar, and Sean Penn his third. Both give fantastic performances.

And for Chrissake, finally give P T Anderson an Oscar!  He so deserves it for this film.

Twenty-two Wagner Years Ago

I can't believe that WagnerOperas.com is twenty-two years old. Not to sound cliché about it, but it only seems like yesterday when I decided to put together a website after I heard the new Parsifal production from the stage of the Bayreuth Festival that was causing a furor. If you've been following my website, or if you are a lover of Wagner you will certainly remember the Christoph Schlingensief staging that transferred the setting of the opera to Africa and replaced the Grail with a decaying rabbit. There was no live video in those days, only audio and some published photographs. Not really being able to see what audiences were violently booing at the Green Hill made the production even more mysterious. In an outrageous kind of way, it was the kind of event that inspired one to go out and put a website together. 

 The production was so creative and outrageous at the same time, and director Schlingensief had taken such a plunge into an unknown world (he had never directed a Wagner opera before) that in my mind I must have said in my own small way I can also go to the edge and produce something that will either delight or upset people. Well, I'm sure my website did neither. The aim of the site was not to entertain, but to instruct, and to serve as a repository of all things Wagner. And, by the way, for those of you who remember, and it may not be many, WagnerOperas looked like this when it appeared on the Internet for the first time on 2004:

 I always had a fondness for that layout, if you want to know the truth. There was something pleasing to the layout. But as things changed in the online world, so did the site. Hopefully, its present look reflects the current visual tastes when it comes to an online presence. My further hope is that it is as pleasing to the eye as the original was.

Perhaps one day there will be a radical change to the look of WagnerOperas. And why not! The site should always reflect the current tastes of the opera world.

A New and Improved Wagnerians Page

 I spent this weekend updating the Wagnerians page of the Wagneroperas site. Click here to go to the page, and take a listen to the new added audio that now accompanies each of the artists featured.

Bayreuth: The New Meistersinger Misses the Mark

 

I imagine that after a notorious Meistersinger production by Katharina Wagner that brought to mind the dark days of National Socialism; and the production that followed it, by Barrie Kosky, that explored the anti-Semitic undercurrents of the work, it was time to free this opera of its sociopolitical trappings and remind us all that it is a comedy. That is the impression that this new staging by Matthias Davids seems to want to put forth. However, if the aim was to remove the corset and let it all hang out, then that was partially achieved arguably by the last scene, which brought to mind a kind of Germanic hoedown, complete with bails of hay, lederhosen and an inflatable cow hovering overhead. Beckmesser unplugs the damn cow in retaliation for being ridiculed in front of the entire Nuremberg, but the cow gets inflated at the end to show that everything is fine in the dear old city.

But it is not! After Walther wins Eva in the song contest, they both storm out of the city hand in hand. Yes, they listened to Hans Sachs's speech about securing holy German art, but they're not buying it. They turn their backs on the old guard, and leave behind Sachs and Beckmesser upstage, both confused, asking each other what went wrong.

You can check out more pictures from the production by going to wagneroperas.com and checking out my 2025 Bayreuth page.

But what about the rest of the production? The first scene of Act I is dominated by a gigantic staircase that leads to a very tiny white church teetering at its zenith. The faithful descend after the service is over. All dressed in costumes that bring to mind the late 1800's. These elegant church goers find Walther wearing modern, contemporary clothing, but wait, is that a chain mail hoodie under his jacket to remind us that he is a knight? Throughout, the costumes seem to be divided in two worlds. David wears a t-shirt and oxblood color Doc Martens, but the Meistersingers dress in ceremonial robes of another time when they gather for a meeting. And what about that visually stunning staircase, the first visual treat we see when the curtain opens? It just goes away never to return. Why have it there in the first place?

The second scene of Act I presents the meeting place of the Meistersingers, and whadda ya know, it looks like a copy of the Festspielhaus auditorium, complete with wooden seats. Many patrons of the Bayreuth Festival complain about the un-cushioned seats, especially those that experience the Festspielhaus for the first time. There must be more complaints about the seats than about the heat in a theater that is not air conditioned. Was this the way to humor the audience? Was the audience at Bayreuth subconsciously supposed to feel good about the fact that the artists were just as uncomfortable, if not more, than they were. There must be a streak of Schadenfreude in Mr. Davids a mile long. 

 The best reaction to this production that I have heard since the premiere on July is that while Davids is busy at work trying to put the yucks back in Wagner's only comic opera, down in the hidden pit Daniele Gatti is trying to find the work's profundity. Perhaps this is the eternal question when it comes to staging  Meistersinger. Despite the humorous situations one might find in the narrative, the story does contain undercurrents of Antisemitism and the glorification of German art, which is called holy. Sachs demands that is be respected and defended, but Walther and Eva give their backs to it. 

Without a doubt, this is the most interesting part of this production, and it should not be. There is more to Meistersinger than just what Mr. Davids has been able to come up with. He's only skimmed the top of the surface, and perhaps has been advised not to seek further inner meaning -- the previous productions had done that already. It was time to allow hilarity to come back to the Green Hill. But in actuality there is very little that is genuinely comical here except for what Wagner has written. Davids just misses the mark.

A note about the cast: Michael Spyres, with his wonderful baritenor voice stole the show. A beautifully crafted performance that was vocally secured at every turn, especially in the difficult third act where he has to perform the "Prize song" three times. It was wonderful each time. Christina Nilsson proved to be a very pretty Eva with. secured top nd a sunny disposition. In Act III she is place inside what looks like a life-sized flower vase reminiscent of Ari Aster's film Midsommar. When I saw this, I asked myself "is this production going to go that way? Thankfully, it did not. George Zeppenfeld was George Zeppenfeld, a little too stern, too philosophical -- not my idea of a warm cobbler. Michael Nagy played Beckmesser, not as a caricature of a Jew, but as a lovesick guy who wants to court and win Eva with a heart-shaped neon musical instrument.

As the seasons come and go at Bayreuth, I am sure that Mr. Davids will change many things in this half-baked attempt to stage Meistersinger. It is not as easy one to pull off. My recommendation is to stay as close to Wagner's original intention, and you will have a successful revival of this dear, beloved work.