Christopher Nolan and his Matt Damon-led blockbuster “The Odyssey” have a fan in Joyce Carol Oates. The author leapt to Nolan’s defense Wednesday after classicist and translator Emily Wilson’s thrashing of the movie went viral earlier in the week, slamming her negative review as “crude” and “haughty.”
“Her tone of dismissal and haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Carol Oates wrote on X, responding to a follower who argued Wilson would’ve been “hostile to any adaptation” of Homer’s epic poem.
“Rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan’s film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers,” the author continued. “Within the world of translators, this seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective and not equivalent to the original text.
“One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”
Wilson has indeed benefitted from Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey.” While his Universal Pictures summer blockbuster has held strong atop the box office with over $725 million globally, Wilson’s 2017 translation of the classic surged to over 1 million copies sold and hit No. 3 on the Amazon charts and No. 11 on Barnes & Noble.
Nolan has cited Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” and particularly the opening line of it, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as major points of inspiration for his adaptation of Homer’s epic. However, while the film has received almost unanimously positive reviews from critics and continues to dominate the worldwide box office, Wilson has made it clear that she is not a fan of the movie.
Writing a review of the film for the London Review of Books, titled “An Uncomplicated Man,” Wilson took issue with not only Nolan’s depiction of “The Odyssey” protagonist Odysseus (played in the film by Damon), but also the filmmaker’s guilt-driven view of his decades-spanning journey home to Ithaca.
“‘The Odyssey’ features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality,” Wilson wrote of Nolan. “The film’s vision is too confused, its characters too underdeveloped, to deliver what it half-promises in terms of big ideas — although it is very good at conveying big bangs and big giants.”
“Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ lacks many of the elements that make the poem great,” Wilson’s scathing review continues. “It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbors. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth.”
“Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible,” Wilson adds, confessing, “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”
Carol Oates, meanwhile, sang Nolan’s praises on Wednesday and also recommended fans watch the 1997 miniseries co-produced by Francis Ford Coppola.
“What I’d read of Emily Wilson’s translation was not for me but assume it was deliberately written to appeal to an audience comfortable with YA (young adult) directness and spareness of vocabulary — that is, with the intention of being marketable, adopted by high school classes,” Carol Oates added of Wilson’s text.
