ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does The Odyssey confirm that Christopher Nolan is camp?

We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho. Damon rocks a beard of varying lengths and grayness, and wears an expression of becoming seriousness. At various points in the trailer, he makes it clear that he wants to go home. This is becoming a trait of Mr. Damon. He has also made this clear in Saving Private Ryan, The Martian, Interstellar (another Nolan jaunt) and Elysium. Looked at dispassionately, Mr. Damon is the actor who seems keenest to go anywhere, least of all Hollywood.

Well, he’s been lucky with The Odyssey. And the fact that he has slimmed down to near-skeletal proportions suggests that he has committed to the bit. As, indeed, has his co-star Robert Pattinson, playing the villainous suitor Antinous. I am a great admirer of Pattinson, who was the saving grace of Nolan’s solitary misfire Tenet, but I would suggest that no actor alive could deliver the line, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard”.

Spider-Man vs Batman (Pattinson vs Tom Holland): how could audiences possibly resist? But whatever happens, there is the suspicion that Sir Christopher has let loose after his earlier exercises in Sturm und Drang and offered audiences a film that they will want to see in some quantity. It’s budgeted at $250 million – some reports suggest that it ended up costing even more – which will make it by far the most expensive film of his career. Oppenheimer was a relatively cheap $100 million, and that featured the biggest bang of them all. Studio Universal no doubt hopes it is his biggest hit yet.

Speaking of camp: The Hollywood Reporter on The Odyssey: Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice.

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan‘s adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic set in ancient Greece. An operatic, fantastical tale of Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous and Athena. “Not just a story,” as director Christopher Nolan declared at CinemaCon, “but the story.”

And also: Dude. Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.

On Tuesday, Universal dropped the latest and most footage-filled trailer yet (below) for the highly anticipated film. Fans are impressed by the film’s scope and compelling star-studded cast. They’re also a bit thrown by one choice: The characters sound American and use contemporary-sounding language — more Ithaca, New York, than Ithaca, Greece. At one point, Matt Damon’s Odysseus leads a battle charge by crying, “Let’s go!” Even stars Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, who are English, sound American.

The choice is a striking departure from the unwritten Hollywood rule of characters in historical epics employing British accents — from The Ten Commandments to Ben-Hur to Gladiator to HBO’s Rome. Obviously, The Odyssey characters speaking the various dialects of Homeric Greek, Attic and Hellenistic Koine wouldn’t make for a very accessible film. But the modern British accent is traditionally considered universally pleasing and “just foreign enough” to convey a timeless quality (even though it’s only existed in its current form for 250 years or so).

The actors in ’50s Hollywood bible-themed epics such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur often spoke with transatlantic accents, since that was a popular choice in Hollywood ever since talkies came into vogue at the end of the 1920s. But I don’t recall Edward G. Robinson speaking with a British accent in The Ten Commandments: 

Or John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told: 

I’m happy that Stanley Kubrick had his entirely American cast speaking with their regular accents in 1957’s Paths of Glory rather than having to endure a film of Inspector Clouseau-wannabes. I’m glad that David Lean avoided his mostly British actors doing Mr. Chekov impersonations in Dr. Zhivago. In the 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, the director cast several supporting actors who had been in earlier WWII-themed movies such as Kenneth Branagh in 2000’s Conspiracy and Christian Berkel from 2004’s Downfall. Everybody spoke with his local accent except for the actor who played Hitler, who was dubbed by another actor with a terrifying Austrian accent. That seemed like a far better compromise than having Cruise and his supporting actors all sound like they had all stepped out of a Hogan’s Heroes episode.

Earlier: The Critical Drinker on The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…