There are two loud ways of talking about Elliot Page right now, and they have more in common than either would like to admit. One camp celebrates: he is content, he is in love, he is in the year’s biggest picture — a tidy list held up as proof that his critics have lost. The other camp seethes about a casting it decided to hate from a few seconds of trailer. Both are arguing about a symbol. Neither, in the noise, has bothered to watch what the actor actually does on screen.

That is the quiet scandal of the week, and it is a cinephile’s complaint before it is a political one. The celebratory framing means well and lands wrong, because it accepts the terms of the fight it thinks it is winning: it turns a performance into a scoreboard and an actor into a mascot. Christopher Nolan, of all people, put the better argument most plainly when he waved off the pre-release outrage — the conversations that happen before anyone has seen the film, he said, are the ones that never matter. He was defending a casting. He was also, without meaning to, correcting the people cheering for it.

Because the casting itself is the argument, if you let the film be a film. Page plays Sinon — not the hero, not the warrior the fake videos insisted upon, but the Greek who stays behind at Troy and talks the enemy into wheeling their own destruction through the gates. Sinon is antiquity’s great persuasive liar, the false witness whose testimony is believed precisely because he seems so legible, so sincere. To hand that role to an actor whose very legibility — the simple fact of who he is — has been the object of years of public disbelief is not a diversity footnote. It is a director reading his ensemble as meaning, casting against the grain of the grievance, and trusting the audience to feel the charge.

Nolan has done this before, and the people who booed have short memories. A generation ago a comic-book villain went to a young actor the internet had already convicted, and the outcry curdled into one of the most admired performances of its era. The lesson the director says he took from it was simply to stop listening to the verdict that arrives before the work does. His new film, shot on the largest format cinema has and staged as a return to myth at monumental scale, is not a referendum on anyone’s identity. It is a machine for making an old story feel dangerous again, and it uses Page the way it uses everything — as a specific instrument, tuned to a specific note.

What gets lost in the scoreboard is the plainest and best headline of all: Page is a working actor again, inside the frame rather than beside it. The arc since he stepped away — the wrenching, small-scale return of his last drama, the book that reset the terms of his own story, the character he carried across four seasons of television — has been the unglamorous business of building a career back plank by plank. His relationship with the comedian Julia Shiplett, public for a while now and warm in the way private things occasionally are in public, belongs to him and not to the argument. So does his happiness. The mistake of the kind coverage is to conscript both as evidence in a trial he did not ask to be the defendant in.

The film opens this week, released by Universal at the height of summer as a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar wager that spectacle and Homer still fill a room. Early projections put its global bow past two hundred million, which would make it the director’s largest opening in more than a decade. Those are the logistics, and they belong at the bottom, where logistics go.

The real test arrives in the dark, once the lights drop and the arguing stops. Sinon persuades because we want to believe him; the film will work if, for a few minutes in a supporting role, an actor the world spent years refusing to see makes a whole theater lean in and take him at his word.

Tags: Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey, castings, Elliot Page, Julia Shiplett

Elliot Page’s role in Nolan’s Odyssey answers his critics better than the noise celebrating him

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