So, Who is Odysseus?

“Tell me about a complicated man.” So opens Wilson’s (somewhat controversial) translation of The Odyssey. “Complicated” here is translated from the ancient Greek word polytropos, which literally means “twisty-turny” or “much-turning”—a term that speaks both to Odysseus’s rollicking adventures and to his many-sided nature. What does it mean to be a man? Can someone who’s undergone many experiences return home and even be recognized? These are the poem’s central questions.

But the titular hero frustrates any straightforward answer. Odysseus is a king, a thief, a warrior, a leader who loses his men, an absentee father, an adulterer, and a devoted husband yearning for home. Ironically, his most stable trait is that he’s a masterful liar. In the poem, he even lies to his long-suffering father, Laertes, about his identity, then watches Laertes cry. More often than not, Odysseus’s deceit is manipulative and self-serving.

Yet one reason both Athena and the nymph Calypso, played in the film by Charlize Theron, favor him above other mortals is because they view his capacity for generating unending fictions as a form of cleverness that’s similar to their own. Homer’s Calypso playfully calls Odysseus a “scalawag;” Odysseus rightfully mistrusts her because she’s a trickster too.

“I don’t think there’s anything in the narrative that suggests we should really scold Odysseus for telling lots of lies. I think we’re invited to think it’s really fun to be in the company of somebody who’s always going to have an interesting story,” says Wilson, who hasn’t yet seen the film as of our conversation. His cunning is part of his charm, and he’ll happily tell a few untruths to get home. For an ancient Greek audience, his lies offered stories within the larger story, extending the poem’s narrative and capacity to entertain.

While Matt Damon’s Odysseus also seems eager to return to Ithaca, he’s much more ambivalent about his history of trickery. In the poem, we’re not told what Odysseus hears when he’s tied to the ship’s mast and listens to the Sirens’ call. In the film, though, he reveals that they have told him what he already knows: He doesn’t really want to return home. When a disguised Odysseus eventually reunites with Penelope in his palace, we learn that he’s tormented by the violence in Troy, all wrought by his deceit. In Nolan’s telling, his ambivalence about returning isn’t just about whether he’ll receive a hero’s homecoming, but whether he’s the right man to lead Ithaca after what he’s done.

Odysseus’s Adventures: Monsters and Goddesses

While Odysseus’s mythical encounters on his seafaring voyage are the poem’s most iconic episodes, most of The Odyssey is not about them. The epic includes 24 books; the first 4 focus on Telemachus as he seeks to learn about his father, and the last 13 follow Odysseus after he finally lands home on Ithaca’s shores. But it’s the middle books that most ignite people’s imaginations.

Like Christopher Nolan, Homer loved a flashback. Most of The Odyssey’s adventure scenes are actually stories recounted by Odysseus to the Phaeacians, a sophisticated and extremely hospitable people (the ideal practitioners of xenia). Nolan does away with the frame and cuts out the Phaeacians, but the film’s adventure episodes remain largely faithful to the poem. Still, there are some key differences.