…vs 38 year-old Kirk Douglas as the titular Ulysses, which was shot in 1954.
I’m sorry but an ancient adventure tale focusing on a rough-and-ready fellow in the prime of life (lae 30s) is obviously different if the central figure is creased and weathered and approaching the final chapter (60-plus). You can’t dispute this. You can’t deny the ironclad terms of the clock.
Damon will soon play Odysseus in Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.26.26), which sounds hugely interesting and which will certainly rank as Nolan’s costliest film ($250 million).
71 years ago Douglas played the same Greek character (Ulysses is the Romanized or Latinized version of Odysseus) in a much more modestly budgeted film…basically a cheeseball popcorn flick aimed at the serfs and none-too-brights.
Douglas was age-appropriate for the role of a brawny, wandering adventurer, but the real-life Damon — face it — is too long of tooth. It would be one thing if Damon was 45, but he’s a decade past that.
The real-life Damon is now at an age where men have more or less figured things out and have put down roots and are nurturing families, And yet following the Trojan War Nolan’s old-guy Odysseus has failed to return to his wife and son for years, sailing the Aegean an infinitum, grappling with the Cyclops and the Sirens and going for the gusto and whatnot?
The time for that adventure-for-its-own-sake shit was 10 or 20 years ago, dude. Stand up, act your age and be a responsible man.
Who needs ten years to return home? A year or two, maybe, but not a full decade. Odysseus’s wife Penelope (apparently to be played by Anne Hathaway in Nolan’s film) had logical suppositions that would lead any reasonable woman to believe that her husband is dead. Who wouldn’t presume this after a couple of years?
What kind of wife shrugs her shoulders and says, “Ah, well…my husband has obviously been delayed on his way home, but I trust that he’ll return so I will wait and keep myself chaste until the glorious day of arrival.” Commendable but not when you’ve been waiting ten fucking years. That’s ridiculous.
What if Odysseus couldn’t find his way back until 12 years have passed? Or 15 or 20? How many years of absence are tolerable or understandable? I say no more than two. Okay, three max.
If I were Penelope I would say after four or five years, “All right, screw it…Odysseus has obviously drowned or been killed or has settled down with another wife somewhere. I guess it’s time to start thinking about finding a replacement husband. What am I supposed to do? Wait until I’m 50 or 55 years old?
“And someone younger this time. My husband had begun to slow down, erection-wise, before he left. God knows what he’ll be like in the sack when he returns. If I’m going to remarry I want a man with a phallus like a piece of petrified wood.”
And so, naturally, the word gets out and several suitors start hanging around Penelope…all of them looking to “make it happen”. But then Odysseus finally returns, and in a big thundering climax he and his son Telemachus murder all the guys who were hoping for a little Penelope action.
Dying would-be suitor, arrow in his chest, bleeding on the floor: “What the fuck, dude? You’ve been gone for ten years and you expected your wife to…what, just wait and wait and wait? If you had been among us and some other king of Ithaca had been absent for ten years, you know you’d be looking to win Penelope’s favor and maybe discreetly do her on the side when no one’s looking…you’d be acting no differently. So why have you and Telemachus killed so many of us? What have we done that is so awful? Nothing.”
Douglas’s version was mostly a pasta-and-tomato sauce costumer, produced by Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. Whereas Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey will go for a deeper, classier tone, and it could even veer into the spooky.
Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous, Nausicaa, Alcinous, Eurylochus, Hepatitis, Diabetes, Archimedes…I tend to devolve into a Woody allen mindset when contemplating anicent Greeks.
