Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey disappoints in its portrayal of Homer’s women

Casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen and Elliot Page as Sinon the soldier were bold and exciting choices in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Both signalled a departure from conventional, hyper-masculine Hollywood treatments of Greek myth. The comments of Elon Musk and many others on X confirmed Nolan’s success in that regard.

But as a scholar of ancient Greek literature and culture, I found the film disappoints in its portrayal of women.

Nolan’s women are (mostly) strong independent characters central to his anti-war theme. However, they play singular roles — wife, mother, caregiver, queen, witch — that lack the sexual and intellectual complexity of Homer’s poem. Their desires, agency and choices are either not as vibrant or lost.

Homer’s women are so psychologically complex in The Odyssey that in 1897, British writer Samuel Butler argued its author was actually a woman. (The Odyssey emerged from an oral tradition, and its authorship remains unknown. “Homer” is more of a literary convention than historical fact).

Penelope

Nolan’s Penelope knows the powerlessness of a queen whose husband has been absent for years, and whose kingdom is threatened by men seeking to take his place.

She uses her skill as a weaver to delay the suitors pressuring her to remarry, claiming she must finish weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law while secretly undoing her work each night.

Her role as a faithful wife and dedicated mother are pivotal to Homer’s Odyssey. Penelope at her loom has become shorthand for female sexual virtue, appearing in art from classical red-figure vase paintings to neoclassical portraits, like that of Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807).

In Nolan’s film, Penelope is never far from her loom. Significantly, one of the most important moments in Homer’s story is missing: her test of Odysseus after his return.

The Homeric Penelope wishes to verify Odysseus’ identity after his long absence. Knowing he carved their marital bed from a rooted olive tree, she tells a servant to make the bed up outside the bedchamber to see how Odysseus responds. He suspects she has been unfaithful until he learns the bed has remained fixed in place.

Her trick of the bed cements her as the equal of the polutropos man (“the man of many wiles”). But it also requires her to voice the possibility of her own infidelity.