by Tom Shales
hatever else
it is, The Odyssey is definitely not television as usual. NBC's four-hour
miniseries based on Homer's famous epic poem is a gorgeous thing to behold,
full of awesome scenery, beautiful actresses, and magnificent monsters.
Unfortunately, at the heart of it is a mumbly ho-hum performance by Armand Assante, and that makes its heart pretty cold. Assante plays Odysseus, Homer's mythic hero, but he's not mythic and only vaguely heroic. There's plenty of splashy spectacle but little dramatic substance with which to become emotionally involved.
The film is more than a breath of fresh air. It's a great big gust.
Odysseus ages 20 years over the course of the story, but on first glance already looks flabby and seedy. The part calls for a younger and more vigorous man. Worse, Assante mutters and murmurs his dialogue, making him hard to understand. He seems to be doing a bad impression of Marlon Brando.
But around him spins a whirlwind, a lusty saga that begins when Odysseus' wife Penelope (Greta Scacchi) gives birth to a son -- on the very day Odysseus must leave Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War. As with the little band of tourists in Gilligan's Island (which was surely inspired by Homer's poem), this turns out to be anything but a three-hour tour.
After 10 years of war and seven more years of trying to get home, Odysseus says in his narration, "My hopes of ever reaching Penelope began to fade." Begin to fade? After 17 years? And he still has three more years to go. This is a patient man, though not nearly as patient as Penelope, who waits and waits. Scacchi makes Penelope as real and touching as one of these legendary characters can be.
While away, Odysseus and his dull-witted crew encounter strange worlds and superb monsters, starting with a sea serpent that swallows up a soothsayer outside the gates of Troy. Finally the war is won with the help of a certain large wooden horse and Odysseus gets a bit headstrong, bragging about his exploits. Poseidon, god of the sea, goes into a snit: "You will sufferrrrr," he warns the hero as his homeward adventures begin.
Next up in the monster parade is the giant one-eyed Cyclops, and a very good one thanks to special effects from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, which specializes in this sort of thing. On Circe's island, Hermes flutters up to Odysseus to deliver some news as Ody climbs a steep cliff; he's more of a sprite than a monster, of course. Later the horrible multiheaded Scylla and the watery vortex Charybdis, which looks like a giant crabby artichoke. It eats you; you don't eat it.
Meanwhile, back home, Penelope is warding off greedy suitors who want Odysseus declared dead, and his son grows to young manhood, determined to find his missing father.
Easily as spectacular as the monsters are the women who lure Odysseus into various forms of doom or glee. Vanessa Williams is absolutely dazzling as Calypso. Isabella Rossellini has no trouble looking goddessy as Athena. Scacchi is elegant. Bernadette Peters is kewpie-doll cute as Circe. And speaking of cute, the ever-elfin Michael J. Pollard is adorable as Aeolus, capricious keeper of the winds.
If it sounds like ideal family fare, keep in mind that the saga is not only lusty, with Odysseus succumbing to a seduction or two, but also gory. The eye of the Cyclops is put out with a giant stake, not long after he grabs one of the crewmen, tears him apart like a chicken, and gobbles him up. Scylla does some nasty chomping too. And the finale has the hero attacking all those suitors back home with arrows and spears.
But viewers who crave relief from TV's usual flat fare likely found The Odyssey to be satisfyingly bizarre. As directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, who co-wrote the script with Christopher Solimine, it's nothing if not eventful. And as sumptuously photographed in Turkey, Malta, and England, it's nothing if not breathtaking.