If only the women of “The Odyssey” were as complex as its men

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

Penelope sat alone on the throne for 20 years. In Homer’s The Odyssey, the queen of Ithaca is a symbol of unyielding fidelity; she spends two decades protecting her son, Telemachus, and fending off vile suitors to defend her husband’s kingdom as he makes his epic journey home from the Trojan War. While not the hero, in many ways she embodies the heart of the story. After all, what would The Odyssey be without Penelope, the woman Odysseus goes to hell and back for?

And yet, in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of the epic poem, Penelope feels less like the heart and more like an obligatory prize at the end of the journey. The moment when we see her shine most comes near the end of the film. as Penelope, deftly played by Anne Hathaway, delivers a cutting monologue that lays out her discontent with the men in her world. Despite her love for her overzealous son, played by Tom Holland, his plea to take the throne himself sparks her indignation. In the all-too-brief outburst, Penelope unleashes a well of mounted pressure built up from years of running the kingdom without due credit, and we finally feel her power. Then, like nothing, we quickly move on.

Penelope, to be fair, is afforded a sizable allotment of screen time in Nolan’s The Odyssey, often seen batting off the romantic, power-hungry advances of Antinous (Robert Pattinson) or speaking candidly with her son about his father. Yet, often, Hathaway is perched behind a screen or speaking through a wall. This could be an interpretation of the source material: In a recent interview on The Daily, novelist Madeline Miller (known for her reimagination of Circe’s story in Circe) explained that “in the text, [Penelope] is absolutely meant to be brilliant,” but she’s also difficult to fully know, “a little bit of mistlike quality to her.” In the film, it’s that brilliance—which, in Homer’s writing, is on par with Odysseus’s—that feels dulled, giving us a Penelope less enigmatically guarded and more flatly one-note. Not that it’s Hathaway’s fault; it’s in part because she is so magnificent when she truly taps into Penelope that one is left wanting.

Penelope’s not alone in her dilution. Several key, complex women characters in The Odyssey feel squandered, including deities Athena, Circe, and Calypso, all played by some of Hollywood’s leading actresses. And this is far from the first time Nolan has received such criticism for women characters; he’s faced similar analysis throughout his career, from Talia al Ghul and Rachel Dawes in his Batman trilogy to Emily Blunt’s turn as Kitty Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. In each case, we’re given flimsy or truncated female characters. Much like Hathaway’s Penelope, Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer is given a single moment to truly shine within the film’s 180 minutes: a devoted monologue defending her husband against false accusations in the deposition room.

Yet The Odyssey also exemplifies what Nolan does best: constructing an intricate, immersive world that orbits one relentless leading man. And Odysseus (Matt Damon) is the perfect hero for Nolan. Much like Coop (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Oppenheimer, or the Protagonist (John David Washington) in Tenet, this ancient Greek hero is carried through a story of epic proportions by a single trenchant purpose. While these protagonists are all nuanced in his own way, whether troubled by a regretful past or grappling with a shaky sense of self, the crux of their story lies in how they overcome the elaborate machinations of the world that Nolan has built around them. It’s an approach by which Nolan has undeniably made many great movies—and one that often reduces female characters with potential for complexity down to narrative devices in a “man on a mission” arc. Here, with Odysseus as our guilt-ridden protagonist, those devices unfortunately include many of the epic poem’s most interesting supporting characters.

Athena, for instance, is canonically critical for Odysseus’s survival; without her, the Greek hero would certifiably be dead, trapped in Hades with a merry band of companions. Unlike the other gods, Athena at least has a physical form—and it’s Zendaya’s, no less. Still, the character pops up only occasionally to offer convoluted pieces of advice or directions. It’s a far cry from Athena’s active role in the epic poem. There, she saves him from drowning, from spending his life with Calypso, from dying at the hands of 108 suitors. In the film’s final confrontation, Athena is nowhere to be found. It almost would have been better to intentionally leave her out altogether, like her fellow gods, so we aren’t left wishing for more.

Then there’s Calypso, an immortal nymph played by Charlize Theron and one of the first characters we meet in Nolan’s movie. Odysseus washes up on her island, and she feeds him lotus flowers to hinder his memory—leaving him in aimless bliss for seven years. In the poem, her love of Odysseus causes conflict with Zeus: When he scolds her for taking on a human lover, she fights back, calling out his hypocrisy. In the film, though, she’s simplified to a sympathetic ear and expository tool, as Odysseus gradually recalls his journey in her presence. Circe (Samantha Morton), another minor goddess, suffers a similar fate, ultimately lacking texture and falling prey to a monstrous archetype (although she does have the movie’s most horrifying sequence). In fairness, Homer himself used Circe as a symbol of the dangers of excess, yet he still offered a more tactful composition in which her attempt to foil Odysseus isn’t simply an instinctual, shallow act but motivated by disgust.

Time is a major consideration when distilling a story of The Odyssey’s magnitude into a palatable moviegoing experience. Nolan expertly weaves the smallest details into Odysseus’s journey home. He skillfully includes Telemachus’s early trials and journeys to find out about his father’s disappearance, known in the book as the Telemachy. He successfully packages the 3,000-year-old story as a political tale about how a single act of deception can spark a chain reaction that ultimately threatens civilization. And The Odyssey is, of course, about Odysseus. So, it’s only right that the story focuses on our hero.

The strongest indictment of the absences in Nolan’s adaptation, though, lies in Homer’s poetry itself, which affords such care and humanity to the world in Odysseus’s periphery, to the characters who orbit our mythic hero. And with such powerhouse actresses inhabiting these supporting roles, it’s difficult not to fantasize about what they could have offered if given the opportunity. Penelope steered the kingdom and protected the throne for 20 years; too bad we only know that because she states it so explicitly.