The Odyssey’s Distinct American Accent: Wrestling with Societal Sin and Our Longing for Home

Photo by Ashutosh Gupta on Unsplash

Before the release of Christopher Nolan’s IMAX spectacle The Odyssey, some lamented the accent heard in the film adaptation’s trailer. Every actor, whether a citizen of the new world or not, spoke as though hailing from the middle of America. Even worse for some, American idioms made the final cut, too, i.e., Telemachus (Tom Holland) calls Odysseus (Matt Damon) “Dad.” Some X accounts assumed the choice reflected Nolan’s desire to translate the ancient text of Homer for modern viewers, updating the Greek for the present day. Obviously, Nolan would need to make concerted attempts through the two-hour-and-53-minute epic to contemporize one of the foundational works of Western literature. Still, relevance isn’t all he apparently has in his aim. Nolan, ultimately, aims at something more biting and programmatic: a withering critique of our postwar milieu.

While the theatrical release of The Odyssey has movie theaters worldwide enjoying the spoils of the battle at the box office, the setting for Nolan’s picture isn’t global or entirely Greek. The actors not only speak American English, but they also portray American mores and societal norms. Economic pressures, we are told, from the Trojans imposing themselves upon trade routes lead to the Trojan War, for which the honor of Helen of Troy acts as merely a post hoc rationale. The Greeks then attack Troy in defense of the Mediterranean proto-capitalist economy, keeping shipping lanes free and open—sound familiar yet? Ironically, the Greeks brutally attack a foreign power despite holding fervently to Zeus’s Law or xenia, which in Nolan’s Odyssey requires not only temporary hospitality for strangers (the more ancient idea) but love of foreigners more generally. Therefore, the Greeks fail to live up to their own lofty ideals. So much for “give me your tired, poor huddled masses.”

Moviegoers may think they’re justified in criticizing Nolan’s film as not being faithful enough to Homer’s text, but complete fidelity to the original was obviously never Nolan’s goal. Enough has been said online about Nolan’s casting, whether employing Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy or Elliot Page as Sinon—(a character borrowed not from Homer but Virgil’s Aeneid)—many online commentators have recoiled at what they’ve viewed as pandering to “woke” sensibilities. Yet, they miss Nolan’s larger statement with his casting choices. In Nolan’s Trojan campaign, Helen and Sinon participate in the expansionist program of the Greeks as unwitting accomplices, not entirely aware of how their actions and participation aid the Greeks in their greedy conquest. More than virtue signaling, assuming Nyong’o and Page represent not ancient constituencies but contemporary political ones, they become tragic figures illustrating how, in Nolan’s view, capitalist power players co-opt marginalized groups into their schemes.

And who exactly are the conquerors presented by the kings of Nolan’s Greece? Many have lamented how stark a departure Matt Damon’s Odysseus is from the witty trickster who can’t resist a good wheeze. Many explanations for said departure have been offered, from Damon’s own acting chops being at fault to Nolan’s lazy importation of a stock blockbuster hero. Nolan even strips Odysseus of his sexual escapades with Circe and Calypso; Odysseus just wants to get home to his white picket fence, kiss his wife, and play games with his son like the good suburban dad he is, ok? Yet, Damon’s character belies such simple explanations. Instead, he acts primarily as the Department of Defense technocrat within a dying Neo-Liberal order (He even says, “Our Bronze Age is collapsing”). He offers to the tactical problem of infiltrating Troy the technical solution of the Trojan horse deception. He approaches what’s presented as a moral question without pondering the weighty questions of honor or xenia. Rather, he, out of apparent necessity, solves the Greeks’ dilemma like a general procuring covert weapons systems from the defense industrial complex; or more to the point, like J. Robert Oppenheimer leading the world’s historic development of the nuclear bomb in secret.

Nolan has gone on record saying that The Odyssey was created as a sequel to his best-picture-winning Oppenheimer, released in 2023. (Odysseus’s deep regret over his actions at Troy mirror and extend that of the father of the nuclear age.) The Odyssey could be viewed as a product of that pre-November 2024 era, when an administration struggled to shore up its domestic situation because of foreign entanglements. However, Nolan’s Odysseus and the whole Greek army speak to the post-war consensus broadly construed: market liberalization as fighting for trade routes, globalization as the presumed threat of the Sea Peoples, limited interventionism in attacking Troy, the Greeks organized in a kind-of ancient NATO, the welfare state as caring for beggars in the court of Ithaca, and so on. The Odyssey picks up where Oppenheimer left off. While not possessing the bomb, the Greeks’ martial prowess for defeating faceless foreign powers in the East at a distance keeps trade going. Just in case Nolan’s objectives here aren’t clear to us yet, again, everyone speaks as though they’re from Indiana.

I don’t mean to comment on the validity of Nolan’s social commentary. The Odyssey is also about many more themes than I’ve suggested like marriage, guilt, tragedy, etc. If you haven’t seen The Odyssey (and you don’t mind gore and the infrequent expletive), then you should. The critics are right when they say it is an astounding cinematic achievement—likely the best picture of the year. Instead, I want to offer a comment on the social imagination underlying Nolan’s interpretation.

I’m not qualified to assess how true his depiction of Greek xenia is—perhaps he gets that entirely right. Still, the way it motivates the characters clinging to the old morality of their fleeting age transparently evokes the waning influence of Christianity in the West: a Christianity whose central tenet is the golden rule. Nolan, in fact, has said xenia becomes the “theological underpinning” of the golden rule in the movie. Rather than treat others how they wish to be treated, the Greeks and Odysseus’s morose band repeatedly take for themselves, unable to bridle their lust for wealth, sustenance, and power. They are the virtue-signalers par excellence, allowing beggars an occasional meal at home to appease the divine while murdering and pillaging across the sea. Throughout Homer’s poem and Nolan’s movie, their selfish appetites are their downfall. They can say with Paul in Romans 7, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”

Nolan’s politics aside, Americans of every political stripe can likely agree that such a statement describes well the experience of contemporary American life. We lament the allure of modern conveniences and new technologies—the way pocket-sized glass objects manage to transfix our gaze as though we’ve fallen prey to some siren song. The legalization of nearly every form of gambling reflects a people ever more beholden to ever more desperate means of realizing their ambitions. Despite the mounting evidence that no recreational drug can be called harmless, the drumbeat for legalizing all kinds of consciousness-altering substances continues apace. Very little, if anything at all, seems able to prevent our collective voyage deeper into captivity in search of supposed freedom.

Absent The Odyssey and, sadly, our popular discourse is Romans 8. We are fallen, unanchored, and adrift; cast about by life’s travails, searching always for home. Yet, the Spirit has come as a mighty rushing wind, powerful enough to carry us there. Neither death, nor captivity to our basest impulses, must determine our fates any longer. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead can be in you. You can live as Christ did, considering the interests of others as more important than your own. In this way, Nolan’s American Odyssey and all other versions point to a more universal story. The human flesh’s inability to live up to divine virtues has been exchanged for the ability of Christ’s human flesh to embody perfect virtue. Odysseus says, “Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.” To which Christ responds, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Caleb Louden is managing editor for The Salvation Army National Publications.