Christopher Nolan’s new epic, The Odyssey, is out this weekend, in case you didn’t know. But you knew. Because this is how Christopher Noal films work now. Every single one is an EVENT. A stacked cast. New feats in modern filmmaking (The Odyssey was filmed entirely in IMAX). Fawning press coverage. And a certain cultural inevitability: Nolan films are too big to fail. Proceed accordingly.

This is why I made it a point to ask for space on Angelica Jade Bastién’s calendar this week. She’s one of my favorite film critics, in large part because she’s unafraid to have an incredibly well-informed, controversial opinion, especially when it seems the rest of the entertainment industry is saying the opposite.

I talked with Angelica about something both she and I have noticed in several Nolan films: he doesn’t really get women. I’ve excerpted a bit of my chat with Angelica here. To hear more of her — on how auteur theory is maybe the root of all of the movie industry’s problems these days, why she disagrees with Quentin Tarantino over his controversial thoughts on COVID and filmmaking, and how Olivia Wilde got it right this year — check out the rest of the episode on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Happy Odyssey weekend. Write me back and lemme know what you think of the film?

-Sam

How did you like Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey?

This is going to be a complicated answer. I should just say this from the jump. It's an incredibly handsomely made film… I think there's a lot of awe and grandeur, especially to the more fantastical sequences. My favorite sequences happen to be the Cyclops sequence, and then with my girl Circe, played by Samantha Morton... But Christopher Nolan's genius ends when a woman enters the frame.

Say it again.

Christopher Nolan’s genius ends when a woman enters the frame. We got to talk about it.

He's a smart director — incredibly intelligent director — and has rich themes in mind. But I always bristle when people call him a genius, because I'm like, writing a woman is not hard! And it's interesting to me, thinking about his forebearers — directors who you could say have had an influence on him, although he's very one of one in a way… I don't think he necessarily looks like a reflection of, let's say, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Mann. Although you can see that he exists in the way he does because of their previous work.

He's in their wake.

He’s in their wake. And it's fascinating to see the way he's improved upon, remixed, and become his own person in a lot of ways, his own artist. But while I can, of course, say a lot of things about how Kubrick and Hitchcock treated the women on set. Their women were interesting.

They gave them roles. They gave them plot. They gave them interiority.

The thing about The Odyssey that I've been thinking about, in part because [of] the translator Emily Wilson — she did a very notable recent translation [of The Odyssey], that Nolan has mentioned as part of his thinking with this movie. She was interviewed for Vulture, and it was a fascinating interview, partially because she pushed back on how her translation is looked at as feminist, and to paraphrase her, she was basically like, "I think we should have a higher bar for what qualifies as feminist.”

Caring about women characters enough to be careful in how you translate them is not inherently feminist. That should just be the baseline, right? But she made an interesting point: that The Odyssey is a story that has been retold and remixed countless times. Which means you can do a lot with the story. Do whatever you want. You are not beholden to what any translation is saying. You can remix. You can reinterpret. So we could have gotten more… Helen!

I am thinking of the Madeleine Miller novel Circe, which imagines this whole story through Circe's eyes. It is doable.

The only limit is the artist's imagination, right? Obviously, you know, I wouldn't expect Nolan to pull, you know, Madeline Miller Circe. That's not his vibe. But there's something interesting about how he kind of pulls back when it comes to the women, like there's almost like this trepidation to go deeper.

I think he's in an interesting place where you can witness this awareness that these women are important to the plot and to the male characters, but he does not know how to go beyond the most obvious and trite rendition of these women.

– Sam

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