When people talk about I’m Still Here, the general conversation before the movie came out was whether it was a fake.  I had seen Joaquin Phoenix’s disastrous interview on the Letterman show, and I was genuinely interested in the movie even though I assumed it was a stunt of some kind.  By the time the movie got to the top of my Netflix queue, the word was out that is was a “performance,” but it was still on my list.  Just after Casey Affleck admitted that it was not a real documentary, conversation about the movie shifted to the presumption that its point was to mock our fascination with celebrity flame-outs and public self destruction (cf. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan).

Now maybe it’s because I had been reading Ulysses for a couple months before I watched it, or maybe it’s because this was the point of the movie, but my thesis is this: I’m Still Here is the inverse Ulysses.  I actually doubt that the movie was conceived in this way by its creators–not many actors, directors, or really just people in general slug their way through Joyce’s masterpiece.  But hear me out, this isn’t just some conceit put out there by someone who studied English literature in college.  OK, maybe it is.  But hear me out anyway.

Homer’s Odyssey is the myth of a hero of antiquity who saw unbelievable sights, battled monsters, slept with witches, trucked with gods, and survived a ten year journey to return home and regain his kingdom.  Joyce’s Ulysses turned this idea on its head.  Instead of a mighty hero, Leopold Bloom was a normal guy in an unhappy marriage.  Instead of a decade on the high seas, Joyce set the story within a single day on the streets of Dublin.  And likewise for every monster, every battle, and every struggle, all took place between normal Dubliners going about their daily lives.  The effect of Ulysses on the reader is subtle and often missed.  Our everyday struggles and desires are no less grand than the epics of antiquity.

I’m Still Here opens with a 1981 home video of Joaquin as a child, swimming with his father beneath a waterfall in Panama.  In the shot, he climbs up a rock into the waterfall, and then jumps into the pool below while his father looks on.  The documentary proper then begins, its subject being Joaquin’s unexpected retirement from acting.  A few minutes in, Joaquin reveals that he wishes to pursue a rap career.  Most of the movie covers his pursuit of this ill-fated career change, and the drugs and debauchery he chases along with it.  One gets the impression that he is running from his own life, and after an hour or so of failing publicly and privately, all in front of the camera, Joaquin returns to Panama to visit his father.  No words are spoken in the final ten minutes, as he drinks a beer with his father and then returns (without his father) to the waterfall of the opening sequence.  He climbs up the waterfall and dives into the water, again with a camera watching.  The camera submerges with him and follows him underwater.  The final minutes are spent following Joaquin as he first swims, and then wades through the waters.

As regular people, we want to believe that celebrities do as they please.  They provide us with a fantasy that obviously serves some sort of basic human need.  And the other side of this coin is true as well, we clearly enjoy watching the fall of the mighty.  The genius of I’m Still Here is not that it puts a celebrity’s fall from grace on display, but that it uses these ideas to make a set of much more powerful points.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the reader is given the strong impression that sure, Odysseus wants to return home, but more than that he wants to live life to the lees.  Joyce’s Ulysses is the Odyssey once-removed.  Leopold Bloom is a man who enjoys life but truly and desperately wants to return to a happy home.  His triumphs gain the air of heroism mostly because we know they are analogues to the Odyssey.  In I’m Still Here, we now have Ulysses once-removed.  Our protagonist starts on top of the world, doing and saying as he pleases.  He is shown to have no meaningful attachments, and even the affections of his hangers-on he squanders.  His struggles involve a who’s-who of actors and celebrities, but each attempt brings unspectacular failure.  Joaquin is frequently on the losing end of every conversation, being mercilessly shot-down by David Letterman, and then mocked at the Academy Awards by Ben Stiller.  The cumulative effect of watching Joaquin’s downfall is not unlike the feeling you get when a heckler ruins a good show, or an uncle shows up drunk to a long family dinner.  The movie turns the idea of Ulysses on its head by showing that the lives and struggles of celebrities are no more grand than our own.  The trappings of fame and fortune are a cheap substitute for happiness.  Decadence is not glamourous in the daylight, or in the camera’s flash.  But bigger than all of these is the central idea shared between the three odysseys, that each of us must seek and find our happy home.  In each work, the hero must conquer his own desires, take a hard look at himself, and realize that his deepest need is to return to his home and family, to wholeheartedly resume the life he once abandoned.

I’m Still Here will never be as influential as The Odyssey, or as widely studied as Ulysses.  Our world prefers the collected works of Dan Brown and Tyler Perry, and the popularity of this little movie will never compare there either.  But I encourage you to watch I’m Still Here and consider how its central idea applies to your life.  The greatest art is that which tells us the truth about ourselves.