NOLAN'S ODYSSEY OF EGO

One approaches a new Christopher Nolan film these days with the wary resignation of a man entering a cathedral built by a committee that couldn’t decide whether to worship God or the architect. The pews are magnificent, the acoustics impeccable, and yet the sermon keeps reminding you that the architect has read a great many books about sermons and would like you to notice. Mr Nolan’s The Odyssey, that latest monument to his own industriousness, has arrived trailing the usual hosannas from those who mistake length for profundity and budget for vision. Matt Walsh, a gentleman not normally given to queuing for three-hour spectacles, emerged blinking into the daylight with the air of one who has paid good money to watch a sacred cow defecate on its own pedestal. His verdict was merciless and, one suspects, entirely correct.

The casting, to begin at the beginning, is an act of vandalism so thorough it makes one wonder whether Mr Nolan received a grant for it. Homer’s Helen of Troy, she of the 'white-armed' epithet that has survived three millennia of textual transmission, is here rendered as a Kenyan-Mexican actress whose presence is presumably meant to remind us that beauty is a social construct and the Trojan War was, at heart, a diversity seminar that got out of hand. One pictures the ancient bards spinning in their graves with such velocity they could power a small Peloponnesian city-state. The rest of the ensemble appears chosen by the same HR department that once decided Bridgerton needed more Regency rakes of colour. It is not that these performers lack talent; it is that talent has been press-ganged into the service of a contemporary sermon no one asked for. The audience is not transported to the Bronze Age. It is transported to a very expensive modern American university campus where Odysseus has evidently completed a mandatory module on toxic masculinity and is now processing his feelings.

And what feelings they are. Mr Nolan has taken the wiliest, most resourceful bastard in Western literature and turned him into a solemn, guilt-ridden therapy patient who looks as though he might at any moment abandon the journey home to Penelope in favour of a safe space and a weighted blanket. This is not adaptation; it is emasculation with a side order of IMAX. One almost longs for the days when Hollywood heroes were permitted the moral complexity of a cheeseburger. Instead we get trauma. Always trauma. The man who outwitted Cyclops and charmed Circe is here plagued by the sort of introspective melancholy that would have had him cashiered from any self-respecting Mycenaean warband. It is as if Mr Nolan, having exhausted every other way of signalling seriousness, has decided that the surest route to artistic credibility is to give the greatest trickster of antiquity a case of the moderns.

The film itself, aside from these conceptual howlers, is a structural shambles: verbose and rushed, self-serious and yet somehow empty, like a TED Talk delivered inside a cathedral. Dialogue clunks along with all the poetic grace of a committee memo. One waits in vain for a single line that might echo down the centuries; instead we are treated to speeches that sound as though they were focus-grouped by people who have never met an ancient Greek but have strong opinions about representation. The much-vaunted visuals, those sweeping Nolan vistas that supposedly justify the ticket price, fail to conjure any genuine sense of the archaic world. You never feel three thousand years removed from the present. You feel as though you are watching expensive Americans in fancy dress performing a very long Acknowledgement of Country.

This, of course, is the problem with late-period Nolan. Remove the Dark Knight trilogy — those rare occasions when genre conventions forced him to be disciplined — and what remains is a filmmaker who has mistaken complication for complexity. Inception was a clever puzzle box; Interstellar reached for the stars and achieved a certain grandeur despite itself; but the later works have grown ever more bloated, ever more convinced of their own profundity. Mr Nolan builds his films like supertankers: enormous, impressive from a distance, and yet strangely unseaworthy once one boards them. One cannot help wondering what would happen if the man were forced to make a picture on an actual budget, with actual constraints, the sort of low-budget indie affair where ideas must stand or fall on merit rather than spectacle.

The result, I fear, would be chastening. Stripped of his favourite toys — the non-linear timelines, the thunderous Hans Zimmer scores, the endless exposition dumps delivered at seventy miles an hour — Mr Nolan might discover that he has rather less to say than his reputation suggests. A filmmaker who truly understood the ancient mind, as Robert Eggers did in The Northman, can conjure an entire worldview with mud, blood, and a modest running time. Mr Eggers transports you; Mr Nolan lectures you. The difference is the difference between poetry and a PowerPoint presentation with really good graphics.

Audiences, one suspects, are growing weary of these over-long historical epics that mistake scale for stature. Three hours of self-important gloom is a great deal to ask when the story being told has already been told, with infinitely greater economy, by people who did not have access to computer-generated imagery or the services of every available Oscar nominee. Homer did it in verse that still sings. The old Hollywood craftsmen did it in two hours with Max Steiner on the score and a decent script. Mr Nolan does it in three hours with the emotional range of a particularly pompous TED speaker and the historical sense of a man who has Googled 'ancient Greece' and liked what the algorithm showed him.

The pedestal, in short, is cracking. Mr Nolan remains a technician of considerable gifts, capable of moments of genuine cinematic awe. But the awe has become predictable, the gifts ever more in service to a sensibility that confuses contemporary pieties with timeless truth. The Odyssey is not a disaster so much as a cautionary tale: what happens when a talented director is allowed to indulge every whim while simultaneously submitting to the even greater whims of the age. The result is neither ancient nor modern, neither entertaining nor particularly enlightening. It is simply loud — an expensive, self-important pageant that mistakes its own noise for significance.

One leaves the cinema, as Mr Walsh apparently did, with the distinct impression that the emperor’s new toga is rather less impressive than the tailor would have us believe. And somewhere, in whatever Elysium reserved for dead poets, Homer is laughing his bearded head off.

THE BURNHAM ASCENDANCY

One must admire the British public’s capacity for self-harm; it has the serene inevitability of a man who, having survived a heart attack, immediately lights a celebratory cigarette. We had grown weary of the last lot, as one does. Promises unkept, delivery vans circling the M25 like vultures over a dying ox, and that peculiar modern habit of apologising for existing while simultaneously raising your taxes to fund the apology. So, with the grim determination of a man choosing between lukewarm tea and no tea at all, the Labour Party reached for something different. And lo, they have given us Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, now Premier of these sceptered isles.

One pictures the new regime’s first great triumph: shaving a heroic five percent off one corner of the average energy bill. Cue the bunting and Burnham’s expression of a man who has just split the Red Sea rather than trimmed a standing charge. It is the politics of the participation trophy elevated to governance—declare victory over a fraction of the problem you helped inflate, then bask in the applause of those who have forgotten what relief feels like. The remaining ninety-five percent will march on, fuelled by net-zero zealotry and the belief that British households should subsidise global virtue while wearing extra jumpers. Winter is still coming, the meters will still click, but the press releases will already have moved on to the next five-percent miracle.

The irony is almost too exquisite to bear. For years the polling booths have whispered, in their quiet, embarrassed way, that the British people rather fancied a spot more competence, a touch less ideology, and perhaps a government that did not treat the concepts of 'border' and 'budget' as colonialist constructs best deconstructed over a flat white. Yet here we are, lurching leftward with the grace of a shopping trolley whose wheel has fallen off in a disabled parking bay. Burnham, that smooth-faced apostle of the municipal left, arrives not as a radical firebrand—God forbid, the man has the rhetorical temperature of a dishcloth—but as the acceptable face of a drift that feels increasingly compulsory. The public wanted right-leaning pragmatism; instead, they have been offered the politics of the focus group and the transport committee, now elevated to the national stage. It is rather like asking for steak and being served a lentil bake “in the spirit of the request.”

One shudders at the prospect of the Second Winter of Discontent, that inevitable sequel nobody asked for. The first one, you will recall, gave us rubbish piling up in Leicester Square and the dead unburied, a spectacle so grim it made even the trade unions nostalgic for moderation. This time the bins will be ideological. Expect the strikes to come dressed in the language of 'social justice,' the power cuts explained as necessary decarbonisation, and the inevitable bread queues rebranded as community fridges. Burnham, being a decent sort in the old Labour mould, will no doubt look pained on the evening news, furrowing that dependable brow while explaining that the lights are going out because of Tory weather or global capitalism or insufficiently enthusiastic clapping for the NHS. The man has form: Greater Manchester under his watch became a byword for ambitious announcements and quietly deferred problems. Now the entire country gets the extended cut.

The erosion of freedom of speech proceeds, as it always does on the modern left, not with jackboots but with polite emails from human resources. One can already hear the soft, managerial language: 'vibrant communities,' 'safe spaces,' 'evidence-based dialogue' (by which they mean dialogue that reaches the correct evidence). Comedians will be warned, academics sidelined, and the casual pub conversation about immigration or net zero costs will carry the faint whiff of professional risk. Burnham himself is no Robespierre; he is far too polished for that. But he rides a tide that views dissent less as a democratic feature and more as a behavioural issue requiring training. In the new Britain, you will be free to say whatever you like, provided it has first been approved by a diversity officer with a degree in decolonising the kettle.

And then, of course, the cycle. Britain specialises in these political washing machines: centre-right government elected in a fit of exhaustion, promptly blamed for failing to fix in eighteen months what accumulated over decades, followed by the tearful return of the centre-left promising kindness and investment (i.e., more spending and more lectures). The right is punished for not delivering miracles; the left is rewarded for delivering the problems that required the miracles in the first place. It is the political equivalent of breaking your leg, going to hospital, and then voting for the drunk driver who hit you because the surgeon was insufficiently empathetic about your pain.

Under Burnham, one fears the cycle will simply accelerate. The centre-right, when it eventually returns—as it always does, like a particularly stubborn case of athlete’s foot—will inherit a larger state, higher debts, more entrenched bureaucracies, and a cultural climate in which suggesting that perhaps we should have fewer people on benefits and more people in work is treated as a hate crime. They will tinker, cut here and there, make the usual noises about enterprise, and be turfed out the moment winter bites or a train is late. Then back we go to the warm bath of leftish governance, where outcomes matter less than intentions and 'investment' is the polite term for mortgaging your children’s taxes.

It is all so wearisomely familiar. The British electorate behaves like a man who marries the same sort of woman repeatedly, each time convinced that this time she won’t redecorate the house in beige and lecture him about his emotional availability. Andy Burnham is perfectly cast: competent enough to be plausible, left-wing enough to satisfy the party, and sufficiently media-savvy to look statesmanlike while the country quietly slides into the sort of genteel decline we have perfected over the past half-century. One can imagine the victory speech already—measured, decent, heavy on 'working people,' light on measurable deliverables. The lights will dim a little more slowly than under a genuine radical, which is what passes for consolation these days.

Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Perhaps Burnham will surprise us all and govern like a man who has read his Hayek as well as his Bevan. Stranger things have happened, though mostly in fiction. More likely, we shall muddle through in that uniquely British way: complaining bitterly, voting against our previous choices, and maintaining the polite fiction that the next lot will be different. The bin bags will pile up, the rhetoric will soothe, and the long retreat from vigour will continue, draped in the language of progress. God help us all. We shall need it, and perhaps a decent overcoat for the winter that is coming. Again.

EDWARD STOURTON (1957 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Edward Stourton, the broadcaster whose voice could make even the shipping forecast sound like a mildly disappointed butler announcing the end of civilisation, has finally signed off at the age of 68. One suspects the Grim Reaper, after years of listening to Radio 4, simply couldn’t face another courteous introduction to the apocalypse. 

Born in Lagos in 1957 to parents who clearly believed the British Empire still required outposts, Stourton was packed off to Ampleforth, where the Benedictines taught him that suffering builds character, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he discovered that suffering also builds a decent Union presidency. He emerged with the sort of cut-glass accent that could shatter a wine glass at twenty paces and a career trajectory as smooth as his delivery. 

He helped launch Channel 4 News when it still believed news might matter, became its first Washington correspondent in the twilight of the Reagan years, and reported from Beirut, the Balkans, Rwanda and other places where history was being made with rather more enthusiasm than on the Home Counties. The BBC, recognising talent when it saw it, made him Paris correspondent, then dragged him back for the One O’Clock News and, inevitably, the Today programme. For a decade he co-presented the nation’s breakfast ritual of bad news delivered in reassuring tones, earning the affectionate nickname “Posh Ed” – a tribute both to his enunciation and to the quiet suspicion that he owned most of Wiltshire. 

Later he fronted Sunday, a programme that pondered the religious and ethical dimensions of the week, which for Stourton – a Catholic who retained the faith while observing its institutional custodians with a journalist’s beady eye – must have felt like coming full circle. He wrote books, including a memoir that gently suggested the BBC was not always the flawless temple of impartiality its staff imagined.

He lived with prostate cancer from 2014, facing it with the same unflappable professionalism he brought to air. He leaves his wife Fiona Murch and four children, who presumably grew up thinking all fathers spoke in perfectly modulated paragraphs. In an age of shouting heads and performative outrage, Stourton represented an older, drier school: the belief that the news was serious enough without the presenter adding his own nervous breakdown. The Corporation will replace him, of course. Whether it will replace the style is another matter. The shipping forecast, one feels, will miss him most.