Anne Hathaway

THE ODYSSEY: epic filmmaking at its best

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Photo caption: Matt Damon in THE ODYSSEY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

It’s not surprising that The Odyssey is a superb film. After all, this is the work of a great filmmaker, Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Inception, The Dark Knight, Memento), making full use of his considerable skill and imagination. The source material has been unsurpassed as a melding of adventure, romance and trials of human character for 2700 years.

Odysseus (Matt Damon) is the smartest and most devious of Greece’s warrior kings, the strategist who devised the famous ruse of the Trojan Horse, and facilitated the Greek victory at Troy after ten years of stalemate. Now Odysseus, with his fleet of ships, can sail back to his home island of Ithaca. Unfortunately, gods and monsters await.

For all of his courage and resourcefulness, Odysseus has the ability to annoy, and even enrage, enough of the gods to turn his return voyage into a ten-year ordeal. He will need to get by a 60-foot tall Cyclops, an island of man-eating giants, supernatural songstresses who lure mariners into shipwrecks, a giant whirlpool, a six-headed monster who snacks on sailors, and a witch who casts horrible spells. And then there’s the seven years as the sex slave to another witch. Fortunately, has the goddess Athena (Zendaya) on his side; she admires his intelligence, and helps him out of the worst jams.

Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland in THE ODYSSEY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Back home in Ithaca, there’s another story thread. Odysseus’ queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has been running Ithaca in his absence, but he’s been gone for twenty years, and a hundred opportunists are sponging off Odysseus’ wealth while they pressure Penelope to marry one of them. Odysseus also left a baby son, but Telemachus (Tom Holland) is now only twenty, and he’s too callow to take on so many ruthless, grown-ass men. Will Odysseus return in time? Will anyone, especially Penelope, recognize him after 20 years? Can Odysseus battle the suitors to reclaim what is his and Penelope’s? Will Penelope take him back?

In The Odyssey, Nolan shows what a great Hollywood epic can look and feel like – in the best sense. Filmed in IMAX, The Odyssey looks and sounds great. Amazingly, Nolan did not use CGI or green screens – instead, he employed old-fashioned practical effects, forced perspective, animatronic puppetry and plenty of hoists, rigging, and stunt performers. The set pieces are wondrous, even for the monsters – Polyphemus, Scylla and the Laestrygonians. The sack of Troy was exactly like what I imagine the razing of a Bronze Age city would look and feel like. And it all looks better and more convincing than it would have with CGI.

Because of the genius of Nolan and his editor Jennifer Lame, who won an Oscar for editing Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the audience does not have the sensation of sitting through a three hour movie.

Matt Damon and Zendaya in THE ODYSSEY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Nolan is pretty faithful to the source material, and, although he compresses some the parts of the tale , he captures Homer’s key elements. Nolan’s re-imagining of the ending is actually less of a slaughter than Homer’s, and Nolan plays down the sexual aspect of Odysseus’ sojourn with Calypso (Charlize Theron). Nolan does add some New Agey hokum about the “Code of Zeus”, but it’s harmless.

Nolan’s version is more nuanced than the 1954 Ulysses with Kirk Douglas, which emphasized the adventure aspect. Last year’s The Return, which covered the return to Ithaca, is a fine movie, but doesn’t have the epic scale of The Odyssey (not to mention the monsters). Similarly, the scale of Nolan’s The Odyssey overwhelms the star-studded, Emmy-winning 1998 mini-series.

Nolan, Damon and Zendaya show us the relationship between Odysseus and Athena particularly well.

John Leguizamo in THE ODYSSEY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Hathaway is excellent as the resolute yet vulnerable Penelope, a woman whose wits could match up with even those of Odysseus. I like Tom Holland’s performance as a well-meaning kid who just isn’t ready for prime time. Everyone in the cast is good, including Robert Pattinson and Corey Hawkins as two of the scariest and most odious suitors. An unrecognizable John Leguizamo is outstanding as Odysseus’ one remaining ally, a blind swineherd.

Samantha Morton in THE ODYSSEY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.

If there’s a best performance in this movie, it may be Samantha Morton as the witch Circe, filled with grievance, creepiness and craftiness.

The Odyssey is both a great barn-burner,and a great love story, and Nolan has made it into this summer’s Must See .

Les Miserables: Now I’m miserable, too

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Let’s get this out of the way first – having neither seen nor desired to see the Broadway musical Les Miserables, I am not the target audience for this movie.  I don’t care for melodramas – and Les Mis is two melodramas in one – the story of the saintly Jean Valjean being chased for decades by the monomaniacal Javert and a romance between two kids.  So I was mostly bored.  If, however, you love Les Mis, you’ll probably enjoy this long, long, lavish all-star effort from director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, The Damned United, John Adams).

The cast is mostly excellent.  Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn), Amanda Seyfried, Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit are all excellent singers and give outstanding performances.  Redmayne is exceptional.  Sasha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are very funny in the comic roles (the highlight of the movie for lowbrow me). The other lead is Russell Crowe, who really can’t match the singing ability of the other actors, which is a distraction.

Hooper has made the costumes and make-up very realistic for the filthy and scabby period.  This, for me, was jarring when juxtaposed against the artificiality of the characters breaking into song and some very cheesy CGI sets.

Now here’s one of my pet peeves – movies that should be over but linger like an unwanted guest.  Here, both of the plot threads (the chase and the romance) are resolved, yet the movie goes on for three more songs, including a death scene and the stirring finale.  Aaaack.

The Dark Knight Rises: Unfortunately, over 2 hours when Catwoman is not on the screen

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Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back. First, the good news about The Dark Knight Rises.  Anne Hathaway excels as the best Catwoman ever, and the banter between her and Batman crackles.  There are some exceptional CGI effects of Manhattan’s partial destruction. There’s a cool personal hovercraft, the Bat, and an equally cool combo motorcycle/cannon, the Batpod.

Unfortunately, that’s all the good stuff in director Christopher Nolan’s newest chapter of the Batman saga.  The problem is the screenplay, dotted with the corniest of dialogue and laden with pretentious Batman mythology.  When Catwoman tells him “you don’t owe these people any more! You’ve given them everything!”, Batman solemnly replies, “Not everything. Not yet.”

The plot simply exists to transition from action set piece to action set piece.  There are too many times, when a good guy is in peril, that another good guy pops up utterly randomly and just in the nick of time – too many even for a comic book movie.

With her bright wit and lithe sexiness, Hathaway fares far better than her colleagues.   Christian Bale continues his odd husky growl as Batman.   As the villain, an uber buffed Tom Hardy glowers from behind a fearsome mask.  The hackneyed screenplay wastes the rest of the extremely talented cast:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman.  We barely glimpse Liam Neeson.  The captivating Juno Temple is apparently dropped into the story just enough to set her up for the sequel with Gordon-Levitt.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, which worked well for the long shots of NYC and made the fight scenes more chaotic.

Love and Other Drugs

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Love and Other Drugs has the advantage of two winning leads and lots of sex.  Anne Hathaway gives a profoundly deep and textured performance as a smart and horny woman urgently living life to the fullest in a desperate race with Parkinson’s Disease.  Jake Gyllenhaal nails the role of a charismatic and relentless serial seducer. And the two of them have lots of sex.  Fully naked sex.

Unfortunately, Love and Other Drugs peters out into a Disease-of-the-Week movie, albeit pretty good for that forlorn genre.

One moment in particular illustrates how much better this film could have been.  Hathaway emerges from a Parkinson’s support group uplifted and empowered, while Gyllenhaal has just received an unvarnished description of living with Parkinson’s from the husband of a later stage patient.  We see what she doesn’t – that the two are no longer on the same page.  Peter Friedman plays the patient’s husband with an authenticity that will be recognized by anyone who has experienced caregiver fatigue.  It’s a great scene – but then the movie turns sappy.

Sadly, the overly broad comic relief attempted by Josh Gad as Gyllenhaal’s little brother merely distracts from the story.  So does the sappy score – beware soulful piano in the third act. And when a movie climaxes by having the boy race to catch the girl in the nick of time, it’s as much of a cliché to catch up to the bus as it is to pant up to an airport loading gate.