What They've Done Recently With Hamlet and The Odyssey at the Movies
I've got good news and bad news
Coming soon to movie theaters is yet another Shakespeare’s-Life movie, Hamnet, by veteran and beloved director Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”). That’s out this December.
And then there’s Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with a brief teaser-trailer recently released in theaters.
That one has the execrable tagline “Defy the Gods” — the ancient historians who read me, I kid you not that this is the real marketing slogan for the film— as if Homer and his kin were flaming atheists. Anybody who has read ten lines of Homer knows that this is total bunk.
That kicks off my bad news for this post, but please just wait until its second-half, where there’s good news which is a movie I am recommending highly to some of you. Read on for more.
Anyway, along with the nonsensical “defy the gods” tagline is the 2024 Odyssey-based movie The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes and featuring Books 13-22 of Homer’s Odyssey.
I said Odyssey-based, but it is not *based.* I haven’t hated a movie like this, for certain odd reasons, in a long while.
Why The Return Commits Unforgivable Artistic Sins
As I said, last year’s The Return focuses on the usually ignored sections of Homer’s Odyssey, books 13-22 of the classic 2800 year-old Greek epic poem. In these sections the demigod Odysseus returns home to Ithaca, where suitors plague his estate, hoping to marry queen Penelope. Disguised, Odysseus must test the loyalties of various Ithacans and plot revenge carefully, so that he can regain his rightful role as warlord-king of his homeland.
I say “ignored sections” because in my brief experience, American school curricula highlight books 5-9 of The Odyssey, the vastly expansive mythological journeys of Odysseys across the Mediterranean. Those include encounters with Circe and the Cyclops. Mostly, schools excise readings from the poem, rather than presenting it in its entirety.
In a film that has limited run-time, presenting any part or all of Homer’s Odyssey is welcome. However, given its array of choices, the best that The Return could've achieved is “Good BBC-like Costume Drama.”
It has, thereby, low expectations for itself, presumably because of budgetary constraints.
It may well be that budgets held this movie back, forcing it into an Emo mode of repeated shots of actors doing rapt, desperate longing. There’s not a minute stretch that doesn’t feature a major character or two looking forlornly off-camera for thirty seconds. Half the movie, thereby, is forlorn longing looks.
Whatever the budget was, this movie has no excuses at all for excising most of Homer’s philosophical and theological concerns.
No gods appear in the film. No gods, as far as I heard in the dialogue, are mentioned. No sacrifices are made by anybody. No libations poured out. I don’t think anybody even utters an epithet such as “by god.”
What I just said should offend us all. This choice unforgivably reduces Homer to bland social concerns. The Return, at its best, postures as a dopey anti-war tale about how bloody violence feels unacceptably mean even though the suitors on Ithaca are pig-headed jerks.
With no mention of the gods and no transcendental aspect to it, The Return watches as the expurgated, atheist’s version of The Odyssey. I doubt that even the atheists in the audience would appreciate that.
Homer, of course, need not be completely honored, since all artistic adaptations conform in part to the times they are conceived in. And I have no skin in the game, since I'm not a Zeus worshipper. I think we can all agree that the ancient Greek gods do not actually exist.
Yet to cut out the poem’s greatest concerns — the necessity of piety as a default human posture; the great question of fate and free will; the need of sacrifice and worship to establish social harmony, order, and trust — reduces it all to something that could be no better than Death Wish.
But Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, et al, at least weren’t BBC Emo.
For example, in The Return Athena never shows up. She’s a great feminine presence in the original poem, the older-sister goddess guide of Odysseus, the figure of wisdom and cunning, strategy and oratory, and of the ordered city (Athens). Why cut her out?
Moreover, The Return looks like a lower-budget costume drama, as if this production had no budget for anything sensational. No shots of big ships sailing the seas, no appearance of Athena or any gods at all, no magical transformations.
About those transformations, the choice of 62 year-old Ralph Fiennes to play Odysseus does make some sense. He’s too old to be a mid-40s Odysseus, but in book 13 Athena transforms Odysseus into an old beggar so that he can play covert ops on Ithaca.
So in this part of The Odyssey, Odysseus is supposed to look saggy, closer to the nursing home than Muscle Beach.
However, the movie’s not clear on the fact that Fiennes’ figure is really a disguise. Odysseus just shows up naked on the beach at the beginning of the film. To anybody forced to watch this in eighth grade who stays awake, they might think Mr. Fiennes is the spitting image of Homer’s Odysseus.
By the end, Odysseus is not properly transformed back into an HGH-consuming demigod of a hunk, as he should be, the kind of guy who can best 20-something bros in any sport on the isle of Phaeacia.
Instead, Fiennes only looks as ripped as possible during the slaughter scene (which incomprehensibly lasts maybe 45 seconds), and decently old and saggy everywhere else. Likely for that slaughter scene, they did the old dehydration trick with Mr. Fiennes, whom I’m sure he worked out hard for the part. But don’t try the dehydration trick at home, children.
That this movie completely ignores about 90% of the intellectual and spiritual content of Homer’s nostalgia epic should render this movie dustbin material. It’s execrable to reduce the most classic art ever, because it erases the fabric of beliefs that make up not just Homer but the entirety of ancient Greece, the same place that gave us, foundationally, nearly everything.
Again, I’m no Zeus worshipper. But good god, please include a scene where Odysseus pours a libation, or where the loyal swineherd Eumaeus talks about trusting the gods just because that’s what good people do.
This would be like people in the year 4500 making a movie about modern America and including no money, no commercialism, no monetary transactions whatsoever, no mention of jobs and people working jobs – in other words, completely ignoring the total trust in and vast activities of economic reality today.
You should be laughing aghast at the possibility of such a staggering artistic miscalculation.
Yet it’s here in “The Return.”
I should mention as well that the movie’s ponderously boring, not fit for the eighth-grade captive audience whom some teachers will subject to this movie. Sleep must follow, as the rhythm’s a largo tempo at times, far from Homer’s sprightly dactylic hexameter. If the Odyssey is anything, it is *music.* An adaptation needs to be musical, not by including songs but having a strong editing rhythm plus on-screen movement.
Instead, by the second shot, we are staring at a blonde Telemachus staring forlornly back at us as if he’s about ready to karaoke-sing an Evanescence song.
But now for the good news . . .
Grand Theft Hamlet is an Aesthetically Rich, and Weird, Documentary
As much as I hated The Return, I am much higher on Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) than the average critic. It’s growing in my mind as a really profound film.
Stunning to say that, since the entire documentary is comprised of shots and moments from GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto videogame experience where players from all over the Earth converge to make virtual money, flash bling, rob, kill, snipe, punch, and flame-throw each other repeatedly.
In the case of Grand Theft Hamlet, a couple of out-of-work British actors during early 2020 — COVID lockdown time — decide to try to put on an entire production of Hamlet within the GTA Online universe.
This would be the first time that a Shakespeare play would be entirely performed within a videogame.
This is a bit more than a stunt. Players in GTA Online can communicate over voice-chat, so all parts for the play could be spoken by real humans. Moreover, their plan is to find places in GTA Online that work well for various sets of Hamlet. These end up include a yacht named Camp Elsinore and a giant blimp at night, on which the first scene is staged, in which Hamlet thinks he sees his father’s ghost.
And the GTA avatars can act. The actors end up trying to rehearse extensively so that they can get their avatars to have the right gestures at the right times. This is a true, albeit really weird, performance.
The two men — Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen — attempt to recruit a cast of actors to pull off the play, random avatars within GTA Online.
This proves very difficult. GTA Online seems to be the exact opposite of a highly coordinated aesthetic production. Attempts to rehearse the play usually end up in bloody shoot-outs, finished abruptly when one or more characters die because randos pull a piece and *pop pop pop*. Several scenes conclude with avatars dead and the screen reading “Wasted!”
That’s one of several remarkably stark contrasts in this fascinating documentary — the juxtaposition of Shakespearean language and drama, and the violent GTA randomness.
Because of all the stark contrasts contained within Grand Theft Hamlet, I laughed at this, a lot.
Another contrast is between the actors in the documentary trying to act in a virtual world. During COVID, they are quite bored, needing social engagement. Is GTA Online a suitable replacement for that? The addition of Shakespeare to it, which means forging new relationships with strangers online, means the men are longing for something that they can’t have, thanks to a worldwide epidemic.
Their attempt to forge an organized mini-society capable of rehearsing and putting on a four-hour play, within a virtual world of psychopathic behavior with no consequences, seems hilariously impossible.
Despite the hilarity, the documentary features occasional interjections of the men’s real struggles with COVID-lockdown blues, lack of social meaning, and being out of work. Presumably they are acting in GTA Online to ply their trade as actors. Presumably, also, they are “acting” in this documentary to do the same.
About that, I could not tell what was real and what was scripted here. Possibly all of it is a put-on, though I don’t think so. This uncertainty is a fictive beauty of this film. The real men play out a theatrical fantasy within a digital fantasy realm, double the virtual distance from real-life documentary stuff by default. Can great art like Hamlet break through all of those barriers into the lives of real people, forging meaningful relationships in something as anonymously antisocial as GTA?
So the movie’s partly about the nature of acting as a component of modern life, as Shakespeare sometimes is, as Hamlet is, since Hamlet the character is at least partly acting while trying to discover Claudius’ murder of Hamlet’s father.
“Life is a stage” and all those Shakespeare bits about life being performative seem to extend into GTA Online, where some people, maybe all, might completely lose themselves.
In spite of consisting entirely of videogame footage, Grand Theft Hamlet does seem to be a movie at heart. It has a typical three-act structure (not that movies must have this). It knows, thanks to the co-directors, when to use levity and when to pull back into seemingly genuine emotion. They use establishment shots found within the game, and establishment montages that, if filmed in real life, you’d find in the top directors.
Here then is the hybrid combo of videogame art that allows for theatrical art, within the cinematic medium. Grand Theft Hamlet, pondered at length, becomes as allusively complex as it is a funny statement of COVID boredom.
It is among the most delightfully weird Shakespeare things ever put to film.