My son wanted to see it on film.
Not just on a screen. On film. 70 millimeter, IMAX, the format the thing was actually shot in, which turns out to be a rare enough way to watch a movie in this country that the closest place to do it was three hours away in Atlanta. He’s eighteen. He loves movies. He knows the difference between formats and he cares about it, and he has ideas about costume design that I mostly don’t follow but like listening to.
So we drove. Three hours there, three hours of movie, three hours back.
It was sold out for weeks, which is how we ended up at an 11:30 am showing on a weekday. That was the only time left with decent seats.
I want to tell you it was worth the drive, but that undersells it. I have never seen a movie look like that. I still don’t have the words for how big it felt. We didn’t just watch a movie, we had a cinematic experience. It moves fast and loud for a stretch, and then it slows all the way down and nobody in the audience moves. Just his ship on the water. The ocean felt eight stories tall and that boat looked small and alone on it. And then a storm, and your seat is shaking.
I cried twice.
Once at Penelope. Twenty years of a woman holding a house together and refusing every sensible argument for giving up on a man she loved but everybody else had already buried. And once when Telemachus finally looks at the stranger and understands he is looking at his father. The way the boy’s face changes.
I didn’t tell my kids that. I didn’t hide it either. I still don’t know if they noticed.
Here’s what I’d been hearing about that movie for weeks.
That Helen is played by a Black actress and Homer called her white-armed. That Athena is too. That a trans actor was cast, and for a while people were angry about a role he turned out not to even be playing. That a rapper got a part. That the ships looked wrong and the costumes looked like Batman villains. That a character says “dad” instead of “father.” Some of it came from men with very large followings. The last trailer got hundreds of thousands of dislikes. There were people saying with real confidence that the thing was headed for disaster.
My kids had picked up on a lot of that. Somewhere on the way back, one of them said he couldn’t understand how a word, or who got cast, ruins a whole movie for somebody.
I told him what I think: Some people have figured out how to make money by telling us what we should be mad about.
That’s not a partisan thing. There’s big money in it on my side too, and I’ve been sold it before.
But not everybody was faking. Some people actually know and love that poem. They’ve had a picture of it in their head since they first read it and they didn’t want somebody else changing it. That isn’t politics. That’s just caring about something. And we’ve all been there about something.
Set all of it aside for a minute, though, because here’s what I keep coming back to.
This movie is about a wife who waited twenty years. It’s about a son who wouldn’t quit on a father he couldn’t remember. It’s about a man so far from home that for a long stretch he forgets he even has one, and the minute he remembers, there is nothing on this earth that’s going to keep him from getting back.
Faithfulness. Endurance. A family that won’t let go of each other. Home as the only thing worth all that trouble.
All of that is up there. Three hours of it in the biggest film format anybody makes.
And the argument was about whether the boy says “dad”.
I think a lot of us are getting robbed and don’t quite notice. There’s a story right there about the things people down here say we’ve lost, and many never got near it, because somebody else picked what we were going to be mad about that week. And we just went along with it.
That whole conversation, in the car, took about four minutes.
The rest of the nine hours was the music. The lighting. The acting. The costumes. The practical effects. The director. The feeling of being in that theater. A dozen behind-the-scenes things they’d been reading for a month and were dying to tell me. It came in waves. Quiet for a while, then somebody remembers something and we’re off again.
That’s most of what I have from the day. Not the argument. The argument was a footnote in a car that was mostly full of my kids talking.
Somewhere on the way home I figured out what the day was actually for. He’s got a month left in this house. And at some point, maybe even a long time from now, he’s going to tell somebody: my dad drove us all the way to Atlanta and back in one day just so we could see that movie the right way.
That’s what nine hours buys.
Outrage is free. That’s why there’s so much of it. Everything actually worth having costs you something. Penelope knew that. Odysseus found out the hard way. My son knew it too, in his way, when he asked me to drive.
One Way to Say It
When somebody tells you the casting ruined it, you don’t have to defend the movie. You can just be curious out loud.
“Really? I thought she was great in it. What was it about her that didn’t work for you?”
Half the time there’s no answer, because the opinion arrived preassembled and he’s never had to take it apart. And you haven’t argued with him. You’ve just asked him what he actually thinks. That’s harder than it sounds and kinder than it looks.