Elliot Page Steals ‘the Odyssey’ in Just a Few Scenes, and It’s His First Big Studio Movie Since 2017
By Sari Moon
Elliot Page is onscreen for only a handful of scenes, but Elliot Page plays the one soul in Christopher Nolan’s war epic who refuses to give up his decency. It’s the role that pulls the whole film into focus.
Spoiler warning: don’t read on if you haven’t seen “The Odyssey” yet.
Page, 39, plays Sinon, a Greek soldier who doesn’t appear in Homer at all. Nolan pulled the character from Virgil’s “The Aeneid” and built him into the film’s moral center, what several critics are already calling the movie’s “surprise soul.”
Sinon dies early. Speared down by Trojan soldiers on a beach, he tells them the giant wooden horse outside their city is a gift for Athena, never knowing Odysseus and his men are hiding inside to sack Troy. The officers drag the horse through the gates and set it by the Temple of Athena, and the city falls hours later.
He returns as a ghost. When Odysseus reaches the underworld, Sinon rises from the ground with black grit and blood smeared across his face and mourns the betrayal that turned his words into a massacre. Odysseus argues the lie won them the war. Sinon answers that it gives him no comfort while he wanders among the dead. Reviewers have singled out the Hades sequence as the film’s most haunting stretch, with Page’s performance described as sublime and “plucked from Hades itself.”
It’s also a quiet subversion. Sinon reads at first like the naive boy soldier fated to die, and Page turns him into the conscience the whole epic keeps circling back to, the face Odysseus can’t look away from in the afterlife.
“You’re looking to put a face on certain elements of what Odysseus has done, what that means for the world as a whole,” Nolan told Rolling Stone UK. “You’re looking to put a face on the tragedy of war. And I think [Page] did an incredible job.”
The casting drew a wave of transphobic backlash online in the run-up to release, fueled by rumors Page was playing Achilles. The actual role, and the reviews now catching up to it, have made most of that noise look ridiculous.
It’s Page’s first major studio movie since 2017’s “Flatliners.” He broke through at 18 in “Hard Candy,” earned an Oscar nomination for “Juno” in 2007, and spent two decades moving between indies like “Whip It” and “Tallulah” and blockbusters like Nolan’s own “Inception” and the “X-Men” films. Since coming out as a trans man in late 2020, he’s worked mostly as a producer and as Viktor on Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy.”
“The Odyssey” is in theaters now.
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