The Odyssey’s Circe Is the Best Female Character Christopher Nolan’s Ever Written

Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s genius ends when a woman enters the frame.

Throughout the director’s oeuvre, women are a means of a man’s becoming, either mother or muse. Their stories are only important insofar as they propel the goals of the men around them. This holds true in his latest behemoth of a film, The Odyssey, with one exception: Circe, the first witch in what has come to be known as western literature and an emblem of all that men fear about women. She is too complex a mythological figure to be forced into this binary. Played with tricksy force and a glint of anger in her eyes by Samantha Morton, Circe is at the center of the greatest scene in The Odyssey, one that foregrounds the grandeur and uncanny qualities of myth. Nolan may have recurring weaknesses when it comes to writing women, but what doesn’t exist on the page Morton conjures through a keen gaze, gritted teeth, and a barbed demeanor.

The Odyssey is at turns a fascinating and frustrating film. Despite its two-hour-52-minute run time, its pace is absorbing, particularly after the jagged editing of the first hour. Some of Nolan’s aesthetic gambits are successful, including the diversity of its cast, his commitment to practical effects and on-location shooting, and the decision to have everyone sport an American accent. Others are near-damning: the emptiness of his frames, the muted color palette of sand and ink with only occasional richness in the red of sails and the deep cerulean of Penelope’s (Anne Hathaway) garb. The performances are sometimes stunning, particularly from John Leguizamo, Robert Pattinson, and Lupita Nyong’o in a brief appearance. (Meanwhile, Hathaway is straining considerably to make Penelope someone of more profundity than Nolan’s text imagines. But effort should not be mistaken for depth.) Other performances are lackluster, including Tom Holland as Telemachus, Odysseus’s yearning son, and Zendaya as a passive vision of Athena. But it is Morton who gives the most visceral performance in the film, one cultivated by flesh and its attendant complications.

After their victory in the Trojan War, Odysseus and his fleet endure a series of cataclysms on the way back home to Ithaca, including arriving on an island only for pewter-armored giants to lay waste to two of the three ships in their fleet. Their numbers now decimated, they arrive on the island’s other side, and Odysseus is confronted with what he’s suspected: His men have lost faith in him. “Is this a mutiny?” he asks. “That’s up to you,” Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), his second-in-command, replies. The men go separate ways: Odysseus goes to slaughter what will be their food while Eurylochus, with the other men, heads up the curving path of a verdant mountain, dotted with wild animals, to the small cabin whose chimney plumed with smoke speaks to a resident’s presence. They enter the home expecting to be welcomed with hospitality, but no one is there.

When its inhabitant, Circe, returns to find Eurylochus and the other men inside, she runs, falls upon the ground, and begs for mercy: “Please don’t hurt me.” Eurylochus takes off his helmet and assures her they aren’t that kind of men. The threat of sexual violence is dashed as quickly as it is introduced, to the point that it is hard to glean if that’s what Nolan is putting down. “Your weapons, your armor, put it out back,” Circe advises, now calm. In doing so, Eurylochus catches the dulled remnants of a field of armor from men long gone. Curious. Circe serves them a stew of meat and vegetables and herbs. The men are ravenous. As they slurp down their food, Circe studies their visages acutely. “Men with their appetites. Too much is never enough,” she says, grazing her hand across Eurylochus’s face. His ear is no longer human but that of a pig. Soon enough, it looks as if they are fighting against the food, unable to stop stuffing their gaping maws. 

Circe molds their bodies as if they are clay. Her hands roughly reshape their flesh, elongating and compacting it. You hear the crunch of bone and porcine squeals of horror. The cunning of Morton’s character rises to the surface. In the curve of her posture and grace of her gestures is a truth: Circe lives for this. Her face displays a certain relish. This is a woman who can’t be bowed or broken. These warriors are no longer in control of their own fate. She is. 

Elsewhere, Odysseus has just finished killing a deer. But when he walks to the spot in the tall grass where it fell, he finds not a deer but a man. It is this that cues Odysseus to the fact that his men are in grave danger. 

When he arrives at Circe’s cabin, he finds her tending to her horde of pigs. She tells him to drop his armor out back. He is aware she is not to be trusted and, as we learn later, he keeps a blade on him. Circe serves him food and watches him intently, but he refuses to eat. “You have sharp eyes,” he says. “Sharpened by the gods,” she responds. Her voice carries the quality of song, as if each word carries a hymn and double meaning. Odysseus asks about his men. Circe lies. Then he upturns a woven basket revealing their rings and Circe’s deception. In an instant, Odysseus takes his hidden blade to the throat of the crow caged near the table, while Circe takes her blade to his. We learn the bird is in fact her sister, whom she transformed. (“We get along better this way.”) Shot in an unflinching close-up, allowing audiences to drown in the volcanic force of Circe’s anger and Morton’s complex rendering of it, she says, “I didn’t turn your men into anything.” She remarks that they’ve all “raped and pillaged across the world for you” and that Odysseus mistakes their “savagery for discipline.” He sent them to her with “empty bellies and hot blood,” she says. “Did they hurt you?” Odysseus asks Circe. “They would have,” she answers. 

What intrigues me about this scene up until this point is how it contains a regrettable adaptation choice. Nolan is so keen on casting Odysseus as a good man that he can’t see him as a complex one. Nolan foregrounds the nobility that guides the character (his guilt, his dedication to his men, his yearning for his family) and neglects his wily cunning and egotism. Odysseus’s sense of honor is why Penelope is so loyal to him, to the point that it is all that we understand about her. This is also why Nolan is so timid in addressing Odysseus’s unfaithfulness to Penelope during his seven years on Calypso’s (Charlize Theron) island. Even during the fall of Troy, Odysseus becomes a mere witness to the terror his men inflict more than a participant. And whatever terror his men do inflict is dimmed by a cowardly camera that turns elsewhere whenever they’re about to slit women’s throats and ignores the sexual violence that soldiers have always used as a method of war. In this context, Circe’s words are not a confrontation of the violence of Odysseus and his men. They are hysterical, a paranoid assumption based on nothing we have actually seen them do, in contrast to Homer’s text, where Circe can see the future and knows of its turns. But Morton chafes against such stark and incriminating simplicity. She imbues Circe’s emotional life with a richness never seen before in the women Nolan has crafted. 

What Nolan adapts, he flattens. What he can’t, he scrubs clean from the text. (He cuts Circe’s sexual relationship with Odysseus entirely.) Without the nuances of Morton’s performance, the Circe scene as written by Nolan is rooted in men’s questionable fear of being accused of violence against women rather than the tragedy of how women navigate that very real threat to our lives. Consider how Emily Wilson’s powerful translation of Homer’s poem deliberately brings to the surface of the story that the women house-slaves on Ithaca are raped by Penelope’s suitors, obliterating any romanticized portrayal of these women as maids who willingly take these men into their beds. In Nolan’s rendition, the threat of sexual violence never quite materializes for Penelope and her slaves, nor for any woman in the story. There is a way to address sexual violence and loss of power without having a cold, traumatizing scene directly demonstrating it. And in eliding that reality of war entirely, Nolan reconstitutes Odysseus’s men as the greatest victims of violence. 

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and Circe come to an agreement, and she turns the men back to their original forms. “Back into your disguise,” she whispers to them as hooves become hands once more. They may think of themselves as liberating warriors — essentially good men swept up by divine forces larger than themselves — but she sees their true destructive, cruel nature. Unfortunately, the rest of Nolan’s text doesn’t support her reading. Those revealing whispers from Circe — the last words she speaks to Odysseus’s men — carry a minuscule flash of the character’s complex understanding of the world around her. That aspect of the character offers so much more potential, which is why it is a driving force in Madeline Miller’s novel Circe.

In her 2018 novel, Miller reimagines the witch’s tale as one of a woman’s becoming. Odysseus becomes a cameo in Circe’s life rather than the other way around, and the interior lives of women are more than mere fuel for the psychology and whims of troubled, great men. Circe is, to quote Miller’s text, “A witch. With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.” She disrupts what the patriarchy — a hierarchical system that is anti-life — deems the natural order. Her power of creation and transformation is not wedded to motherhood but her own intelligence and desires. She remains one of the most stunning and fascinating depictions of a witch in all of the western canon, literary or cinematic. She is also a symbol of why women look to the witch archetype as a clarion call, a reminder, a prayer. Morton’s performance has the spark of that, even as Nolan remains incurious about her inner life and the context of the anger she points at Odysseus’s men. The Odyssey is limited by cinematic sexism — one that takes the shape of not violence, but incuriosity. After all, what is interest without curiosity but objectification?