Sharpe: relic of a lost Britain

Whatever the merits of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and Matt Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus as a suburban American dad, weary and stricken with guilt over his role in the Great War on Troy, it is hard not to feel something central to Homer has been lost in the decades since Sean Bean’s 2004 portrayal of the Greek trickster hero. Devious, cynical, “a complicated man” uncomplicatedly at ease with violence in the service of his noble patron, Bean’s Odysseus derives directly from his earlier role as the modern British adventurer, ITV’s Sharpe. Based on Bernard Cornwell’s novel series, a commercial assembly line with no relation to literature, as the author happily admits, the Nineties cycle of feature-length dramas equally cannot be termed cinema. But if Sergei Bondarchuk’s great Soviet war epi