The best films based on ancient texts, in my opinion, are influenced by or resemble grand opera, which has a rich history of classical adaptation, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) and The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland (1641) to Richard Strauss’ insomniac Elektra (1909), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), and Helen in Egypt (1928). The operatic emotionalism of Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962), an ingenious modernization starring Melina Mercouri (Dassin’s wife), Raf Vallone, and Anthony Perkins, with a haunting soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis, seemed grotesquely overblown to critics and audiences alike, but this excellent film may simply have been ahead of its time. The most dazzlingly artistic film modernization of a classical story is probably Jean Cocteau’s surrealist Orphée (1949), which shows how a low budget can sometimes stimulate imagination.
Finally, dramatizations of classical stories must take into account the European high art tradition since the Renaissance, which has produced an overwhelming number of iconic Greco-Roman images in painting and sculpture that have entered the world canon. French neoclassicism in particular treated gods, heroes, and warriors in a forceful, luminous way that filmmakers should closely study. Good examples are Jacques-Louis David’s seminal Oath of the Horatii (1784), with its gleaming weapons and straining muscles, as well as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ glowering Jupiter and Thetis (1811) and his daunting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1827). Conventional Salon art soon reduced the spare, severe neoclassical style to mere illustration, but we must still admire the sheer craftsmanship of academic painters like Adolphe Bouguereau and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, with their ancient fantasies of nymphs, satyrs, ephebes, patricians, and emperors. By the fin de siècle, mummification set in: John William Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), for example, with its flying squadron of female-headed vultures, makes the bearded hero lashed to his mast seem like a spoon stuck in a jam pot being eyed by some rather large moths.
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NBC’s Odyssey must be measured against all these precedents in the depiction of ancient culture. Each viewer will of course bring his or her premises to such a project. My own, as set forth in my book Sexual Personae (1990), are that Homer is an instinctively “cinematic” artist and that he bequeathed his long sight lines and striving, densely visualized personalities to the rest of Western literature and art. While convinced that superlative films of the Iliad and the Odyssey can and should be made, I also think, as a fan of sensationalistic Hollywood “B” pictures and television soap opera, that I have realistic expectations about what network television can provide its mass audience.
Homer’s poem opens with an assembly of the gods, from which Athena descends to Ithaca to help Odysseus’ beleaguered son, Telemachus, step over the borderline into manhood. The warrior goddess disguises herself as a traveling prince for her visit, where she sees first-hand the disorder in the palace caused by queen Penelope’s callow, carousing suitors. Odysseus’ twenty-year absence has left a power vacuum in his realm. Telemachus receives the stranger with great hospitality, which in the ancient world had a moral meaning. The guest is seated comfortably, his hands are washed, and he is liberally provided with food and drink.
To discard these two matched, smoothly formulaic scenes, with their backdrop of human chaos, a modern screenwriter has got to come up with something better. Homer’s practical experience as a bard, reshaping and refining a huge, contradictory mass of inherited oral material, shows everywhere in the decisions he made about exposition, development, and climax. The NBC Odyssey begins in disorder, but for a newfangled reason: we see Odysseus himself running madly through the woods. Penelope (Greta Scacchi) has gone into labor, and all the men are hysterical. The servants are shrieking for Odysseus’ mother, Anticleia (Irene Papas), who drags her feet and never does get there in time. Instead, the infant Telemachus is born (suspiciously clean and dry) virtually in the open in Eumaeus’ hut, supervised by the handy Odysseus himself.
This arbitrary alteration of Homer’s plot is as ridiculous an example of political correctness as we have seen in years. Lest anyone think the production is glorifying machismo, evidently, we must have the great Greek warrior introduced as Mr. Mom, Lamaze graduate. Nowhere in world history until the advent of the obstetrician, with the proliferation of modern medical specialties, did men have any role in the birthing process. On the contrary, until this century, the latter was the primary occasion for women as a group to assert their special knowledge, power, and solidarity. Not only is it absurd to imagine that the king of Ithaca would make a spectacle of himself by running toward the scene (hightailing in another direction would be more the male style), but a man of any rank who tried to force himself into a childbirth would likely get swatted in the chops. In this case, Odysseus’ own nurse, Eurykleia (a wan Geraldine Chaplin), is already on the scene and would have automatically taken charge.
Director Konchalovsky made a big point of convincing the cast that they were depicting, in his words, “a tribal lifestyle”—something he appears to know little about. Modern touchy-feely liberalism is clueless about the formality and strictness of tribal life, which was a web of sacrosanct conventions. Konchalovsky misses every important theme in Homer’s opening: in this production, the gods are either omitted or feminized; no attention is paid to good government or household economy; and there is not a shred of feeling for the rituals of hospitality, food preparation and consumption, or gift-giving—all major themes in Homer.
Armand Assante was a credible choice to play Odysseus, but he obviously didn’t get much help from the director in understanding his role. Like Richard Burton as Mark Antony in Cleopatra, he seems to lack brawn and certainly wasn’t helped by the costume designers, whose prime inspiration seems to have been the daily garb of medieval serfs. Wobbling in approach from mumbling Marlon Brando to taciturn Sylvester Stallone, Assante changes very little in age or expression over the twenty-year span of the story; much of the time, he resembles a blowsy, unshaven, and very haggard Paul McCartney. Apparently, the cast and crew were constantly sick with flu: Assante had it four times and was later hospitalized with pneumonia.
The kick-off plot conceit of the NBC Odyssey is that the hero is abruptly called away to Troy on the day of his son’s birth—as if preparations of supplies for voyages, much less war, were not elaborate operations. Papas, a perennial in Greek movies, is excellent as Odysseus’ fierce mother, who bids him farewell (“Turn Troy to dust!”) by daubing his forehead with blood. However, Odysseus’ divine patron, Athena, despite her chillingly archaic statue in his household shrine, is treated abysmally. Her “advice” consists mainly of whimsical smirks and giggles, and except for one effective shot of her cold, blue eye, through which we pass to the next scene, there’s never any sense of what proficiencies of technical skill or mental agility the goddess represents. The casting is ludicrous: Isabella Rossellini might play Aphrodite, but never Athena. Here she looks like she stepped straight out of her usual Lancôme cosmetics ads. She’s dressed not in armor or a simple robe but in a poorly cut, pleated, dull khaki silk dress that I suspect is supposed to be olive-green, alluding to Athena’s connection with the olive tree. Her aegis is a gloppy pectoral that’s basically a brassy bib. Odysseus recognizes her by her glitzy golden sandals, which look like something Leona Helmsley might bag on Rodeo Drive.
The ramparts of Troy are impressively done by computer simulation, even if the beige stone is too clean and evenly planed: one would expect a more intimidating and roughhewn surface, as on the megalithic walls at Mycenae. The battle scenes on the plain are cursory and badly shot, mere skirmishes that look like a schoolyard shoving match. Assante looks good in Odysseus’ leather armor, but why is he fighting without a helmet? And why is Achilles, a Fabio lookalike with long blonde surfer tresses, fighting bare-chested? This production has completely missed the symbolism of armor as artifact in Homer: in the Iliad, the forging of Achilles’ armor and shield, with its multiple narrative scenes, is a me
taphor for the poem and ultimately for civilization itself. The production also ignores an important class distinction between the foot-soldiers and the chariot-riding kings and princes, whose plumed helmets were invitations to single combat. Konchalovsky is a lousy anthropologist: like the Marija Gimbutas school of goddess feminism, he thinks preliterate tribes were egalitarian.
The pivotal fight between Achilles and Hector is given short shrift (and Patroclus is conspicuously missing), but we get a dramatic helicopter shot of Achilles’ chariot dragging Hector’s body at full speed along a cliff road—a scene lifted from Phaedra, where Anthony Perkins as hysterical Hippolytus is killed in a crash while zooming his sports car along just such a road. What is Achilles doing with Hector’s body out there anyhow? The whole point is to drag it around the city walls to torment and humiliate the Trojans by abusing a princely corpse. And where exactly is that cliff? Troy was a promontory overlooking a now-receded harbor. Has Achilles’ Californian hair transported him to Big Sur? Bizarrely, we never see him get killed in turn—one of the most famous lucky hits in history, when Paris’ arrow strikes the vulnerable tendon that still bears Achilles’ name. We do get to see Achilles’ body (a large wax doll) burning up on its bier. Odysseus looks like he’s exhorting the troops with a showy funeral oration (à la Brando as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar [1953]), but wouldn’t that privilege have belonged to a commander like Agamemnon or Menelaus?
Meanwhile, back on Ithaca, there’s trouble brewing between Penelope and her mother-in-law, whom Papas plays like Helen Hayes as the weary, haughty empress in Anastasia (1956). Anticleia is picky, picky about Penelope’s leniency with Telemachus. Penelope oversees the making of olive oil, which is credible, but surely servants rather than the queen would be doing the actual muscle work of toting baskets of olives and pulling the press pole (though even today Mediterranean dowagers typically horn in to demonstrate to the useless young precisely how things should be done). At night, pining Penelope cools her libido off with indecorous and very un-Homeric sitz baths in the harbor, a scene that smacks of skinny-dipping Hedy Lamarr or lonely, pill-dazed Barbara Parkins staggering onto the dark beach in Valley of the Dolls (1967).
At Troy, the Greeks have left their trick gift of the wooden horse, which is convincingly done in rough, dun wood. Laocoön’s warning lacks punch, and when he is attacked by the sea serpent, guffaws surely shook the nation. We know this grisly scene too well from the restored Hellenistic statue group of a giant serpent strangling the heroically muscular priest and his two sons. NBC’s wormy monster, certainly at some pain to the budget, looks like a pretzel combined with a hair dryer, and it awkwardly whips Laocoön into the harbor like an errant Jet Ski at Disney World. The horse’s stately passage through the gates is done extremely well. The city falls, of course, but not apocalyptically. The writers failed to glean a few hints from Vergil’s Aeneid, so the burning takes very little time, and the slaughter is minimized. Some random profanation of altars would have been nice, but we do get a potent flight of hubris when Odysseus, seen against a picturesque natural rock arch pounded by heavy surf, insults Poseidon by boastfully taking full credit for Troy’s destruction.
Now begin Odysseus’ attempts to get home. The scenes on ship are too farcical at times, as if Joseph Papp had imported one of his go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator Shakespearean comedy casts, with their oafish, gratingly jolly “types.” I kept wondering where all the Trojan booty was on board; they’re traveling awfully light. The episode in Cyclops’ cave is fairly well-done, especially the giant’s zestful, crunching bisection of one of Odysseus’ men. But the stone blocking the cave entrance should be a boulder rather than a wheel, which looks too much like a rolling tomb door of old Jerusalem. In the escape from the cave, the screenplay inexplicably omits Homer’s memorable detail of Odysseus hanging from the belly of a ram.
The approach to Aeolus’ rocky island captures the constant anxiety of ancient seafaring in unknown waters. But then we hear Aeolus’ lispy voice emerging from an interestingly ghoulish apparition in a waterfall, and it’s Papp time again: in an irritating piece of stunt casting, Aeolus is played by a tittering, roly-poly Michael J. Pollard, who looks the part but whose braying New Jersey accent and smarmy Whoopi Goldberg shtik are foolishly disruptive. Nevertheless, the special effects wizards make this episode a spectacular success: summoned by Aeolus on his parapet, the winds come whistling down in a black tornado (inspired by the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments) and disappear into a leather bag. The sound effects are superb here—first the whooshing winds and then, onboard, the creaking of ropes and timbers. When the men see Ithaca—and get blown sky-high by the surreptitiously opened bag of winds—I was vexed by another matter: these sailors look way too pale for men who have spent their lives outdoors under a Mediterranean sun. For heaven’s sake, how much could body makeup cost these days, when self-tanning creams are a staple in every drug store?
The Circe episode begins inauspiciously when the entire story of the men’s disastrous metamorphosis into swine is told in advance, with excessive verbosity—a rare case where a film might improve on Homer by just showing the scene unmediated. Odysseus’ search for his men, however, is quite captivating. He explores a rocky gorge filled with a menagerie of exotic animals from all over the world and then sweats and strains up the sheer face of a cliff, with a magnificent panorama behind him of forests and sea. Suddenly, floating next to him in midair, with taunting supernatural ease, is the god Hermes (Freddie Douglas), a dimpled pretty boy with frosted curls, bare chest and feet, and winged, gold greaves who looks like a cross between David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and John Phillip Law as the effete blind angel in Barbarella (1968). The contrast between human frailty and divine perfection is brilliant. After archly delivering his instructions (and force-feeding Odysseus some tufts of grass, allegedly protective moly), the Ariel-like Hermes flits and dives away into the distance, with the exhilarating freedom of a bird.
When, with scraped hands and bloody fingers, he finally hefts himself to the top of the cliff, Odysseus oddly finds a complete Edfu-type Egyptian temple with a lion pacing the peristyle courtyard—not the most domestic of arrangements, even for a demigoddess. The music is appropriately eerie. But then all this tremendous, evocative build-up is wasted when we get a gander at the NBC Circe: Bernadette Peters, an over-the-hill musical comedy star who’s never done anything deeper than Dames at Sea and Pennies from Heaven. Why would anyone think that diminutive, cutesy-pie Peters, with her button mouth and squeaky, little-girl voice, has a prayer of playing one of the most seductive, sinister femmes fatales in world mythology? Words like “asinine” and “moronic” spring to mind. Perhaps chits from murky past show biz alliances were cashed in here, since it’s sure hard to believe that Peters won this choice role on talent alone.
Back on Ithaca, Penelope is bickering with Telemachus and trying to stop Anticleia, the ultimate guilt-tripping Jewish mother, from killing herself. After a lot of screeching on all sides, Anticleia, who misses her son a bit too much, marches off to drown herself in broad daylight in the very tranquil harbor—where one expects a bevy of Baywatch beauties to come bounding earnestly to her rescue. The scene is so misconceived and clumsily directed that it seems like a parody on the old Carol Burnett Show. Circe, meanwhile, is jealous that, despite all the amnesiac, edible lotus flowers that she and her Egyptian maidens have been pressing on the Greeks, her lover Odysseus still can’t forget Penelope, so she realizes she must let him go. But first there’s Hades: poor Bernadette Peters, having to deliver lines like “You must cross the river of fire and sacrifice a ram,” is as inept as Madonna in Shanghai Surprise (1986).
The voyage to Hades is highly effective. In fact, the sea always looks great in this production—its choppy waves, its changes of color from grey-black to turquoise-green. As Odysseus’ ship approaches Hades, with its burning water, smoke, and meteor showers of fiery rocks, there are some spectacular shot
s that resemble Turner paintings. Assante looks his best in this episode, as he disembarks and, hefting an unwieldy and sometimes impatient ram, strides up a corridor of huge pillars—a conception of hell far too architectural, incidentally, for this period in ancient mythology. Part one ends as the ghosts appear, materializing ominously from the air. When part two resumes at the same point, the follies begin. We meet a phlegmatic, then madly cackling but disappointingly non-androgynous Teiresias sitting by a steaming lava bath—a detail stolen from Fellini’s prelates-at-the-spa scene in 8½ (1963). Homer correctly, tribally had Odysseus dig a trench in the earth and cut the sheep’s throats over it, so the ghosts would drink the blood and speak. Here he cavalierly tosses the ram into the magma—which takes the Society of Sophists’ Dopey Writing Award. After two decades of slasher films, beloved by American adolescents, did the producers think incineration more decorous for the bourgeois home? Through all of this, we are inundated with spooky synthesizer music in the now clichéd Eurotech style.
The looming rocks of the straits of Scylla (forecast by Teiresias rather than Homer’s Circe) are impressive, but when Odysseus’ ship gets closer, things degenerate. It seems like we’re in another generic, dusky cavern instead of between towering, open-air rocks, and Scylla is photographed so poorly that the enormous expense of her construction is wasted. There’s a blindingly fast in-and-out of something that looks vaguely like an aluminum can-opener capped with plastic dandelions, accompanied by the whizzing, slicing sound of a scythe and a pulpy shower of blood and sawdust, and that’s it. With her spindly arms, lunging claws, serpent necks, and bared teeth, Scylla just seems like a rip-off of the Alien monster whom Sigourney Weaver started grappling with eighteen years ago, leading to inevitable sequels. Scylla would be much more frightening, in my opinion, if she were recognizably female and therefore part of Homer’s ongoing sex theme.
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