“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course once he had sacked the hallowed heights of Troy.”
These opening lines from Robert Fagles’s Odyssey may apply almost as much to Christopher Nolan as to their titular hero. Reluctantly, on Tuesday night I joined my brothers-in-law to see this recent blockbuster, fully expecting to be disappointed by another postmodern deconstruction of a much-beloved story. That is not what I found. Instead, I found one of the most thoughtful and faithful retellings a lover of Homer could reasonably have hoped for. Perhaps that is also its one major flaw.
