Trendy audiences may need hazy notions of that difficult Historic Greek hero of homecoming, Odysseus. They could find out about his return to Penelope, his patiently loyal spouse, or his considerably annoying son Telemachus. Extra literary-minded readers may even consider Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses“ (1842), James Joyce’s difficult 1922 novel of the identical title, or Nikos Kazantzakis’s magisterial The Odyssey: A Trendy Sequel (1924). Or they might be aware of retellings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2006) or Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), which additionally observe an historic custom of pulling at narrative threads to reweave them from new views. Very similar to Penelope — who held off the suitors that arrived after Odysseus’ presumed loss of life by promising herself to one in every of them solely after she accomplished a garment that she wove within the daytime and undid at night time — storytellers are always remaking the identical historic cloth in up to date instances.
Uberto Pasolini’s movie, The Return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is the most recent — although definitely not the best — entry into the custom of rewoven Odysseys. In it, Fiennes is a middle-aged, impressively buff veteran arriving dwelling to a folks and household he has not seen in 20 years. The panorama he returns to is dry and soiled, a sepia-toned atmosphere washed out in turns by the solar and the uninteresting monotony of the yellow brick buildings. The smoky, ill-lit interiors of medieval Italian buildings are dressed up right here and there as stand-ins for the Mycenaean period (c. 1600–1100 BCE) palaces and hovels inside which the unique Odyssey was meant to happen. However regardless of earnest efforts to recreate the environments of Homer’s Odyssey, it misses one of the vital essential threads of his story — that’s, the significance of the artwork of storytelling.
The Odyssey asks its viewers to consider a person who tried and did not deliver his folks dwelling, difficult it to make sense of interwoven themes of survival, homecoming, id, and the double-sided nature of narrative. Certainly, the pleasures and perils of storytelling are central to the epic from its first notes till its finish: It famously opens with an invocation to a muse to “tell me the tale of the man,” and ends with an outline of the goddess Athena nonetheless within the “voice” of her disguise. These are the threads that join the current to the previous and that develop into so important for Odysseus’ true homecoming: his reunion with who he was earlier than he went to battle by a sequence of recognitions by a maternal determine (his moist nurse, Antikleia), his partner, and his father.
Dora Wheeler Keith, “Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night” (1886), silk embroidered with silk thread, 45 x 68 in. (114.3 x 172.7 cm), held by the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork (picture through Wikimedia Commons)
The Return, alternatively, loses the plot. It makes many cheap and vital selections by sticking to only one of many epic’s narrative arcs and taking the gods out of the equation — Athena would verge on comical or absurd in a realist rendering on account of her outsize energy and divine distinction. (Our fashionable gods are distant and mysterious; uncommon is the transferring picture that interprets historic deities effectively.) It follows the spirit of works like Jonathan Shay’s Odysseus in America (2002), which sees Odysseus as a wounded, haunted warrior who brings the battle dwelling with him. However the movie additionally uncomplicates the person, to crib from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. The Return’s Odysseus is laconic: He doesn’t inform tales of his previous or use them to control others. He stares. And squints. And sometimes flexes, even whereas aping a weaker man of extra superior age.
Homer’s model of Odysseus — and I dare say, Joyce’s or Kazantzakis’s —is each sophisticated and playful. He’s intelligent, and his habits generally questionable — he’s a person who has suffered, and altered. And but the Odysseus of The Return has no sense of his previous. The film appears to exist in an unnameable current. That is seen clearest in its restaging of the well-known scene during which Eurykleia, Odyseuss’s longtime nurse, acknowledges Odysseus due to his scar. As Scholar Erich Auerbach famously identified, this contrasts the narrative traditions of Greek epic with the Hebrew bible: The previous, based on Auerbach, emphasizes floor appearances and narrative element, whereas the latter’s austerity requires extra viewers engagement. The scene is important for Homeric poetics as a result of it reveals the associative energy of storytelling: Every thing on this planet — and everybody — is a chance for an additional story, one other perspective, one other take. When Eurykleia sees Odysseus’ scar, it conjures up a flashback that tells the story of his title. The story — all tales, together with our personal — turns into limitless and everlasting by this fixed weaving and unweaving.
In The Return, alternatively, Eurykleia sees the scar and says she remembers Odysseus coming dwelling from the hunt. No extra. We don’t see the scar; we are able to’t see the story. This, in itself, is a thumbnail critique of the film as an entire: It always gestures in the direction of these CliffsNotes moments of the Odyssey, with out getting on the soul of it. From the start, The Return’s earnest promise of a psychologically realist depiction of the hero’s arrival house is repeatedly undermined. His physique — on show with full frontal nudity — is a microcosm of the film’s odd selections, a digital catalog of missteps that place it neither in an epic previous nor in a transferring current. What veteran repeatedly shipwrecked and located drifting at sea has cephalic veins that pop on sinewy biceps, or an eight-pack shining as if polished to be an additional for Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006)? The story suffers for its separation from place and time, appears to forged about for an ethical heart. The suitors, excluding Antinoos, are virtually comically villainous — they strut, threatening sexual violence and homicide to anybody who will pay attention. Telemachus, who positively hears them, appears too previous to be so ineffective and whiny. We do hear the primary notes of a political theme: that “the island is dying” within the absence of Odysseus, who “took the best men with him,” however this narrative strand is threadbare all through, and by the top, misplaced. A cascade of incohesive photographs observe: Penelope, unhappy, seeing enslaved girls have intercourse with the suitors; Odysseus, bare, crushed, and bedraggled.
Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope in movie nonetheless of The Return (2024), directed by Uberto Pasolini (picture courtesy Bleeker Road)
The loss of life of Odysseus’ father Laertes within the movie — an occasion that by no means happens in Homer’s telling — is among the stumbles that troubles me most. Famously (for students of Homer), historic critics advised that the epic reached its conclusion on the reunion of husband and spouse in e book 23, failing to know that the ultimate chapter, e book 24, resolves important themes of the poem through Odysseus’ reunion with Laertes and his incomplete reconciliation along with his folks. Since no one has a previous in The Return, nonetheless, the exclusion of this remaining e book kind of is smart. Even the canine Argos’ story is off: He’s within the film, however slightly than recognizing his grasp by odor — a characteristic Melissa Mueller has marked out as enrolling Argos within the sequence of reunions that affirm the hero’s id — it’s Odysseus who says the canine’s title, prompting a recognition quieted by the hound’s subsequent loss of life.
One may charitably argue that the thriller on this film resides not in others recognizing Odysseus, however in him coming to recollect himself. But, the dearth of uncertainty makes a story of ambiguities — and, sure, complexity — considerably pat. Eumaeus appears to know who Odysseus is all alongside: He admits he has acknowledged his grasp when he will get annoyed along with his inaction midway by the movie. Whereas the Odyssey’s Penelope is an unanswered and ever-intriguing query — we don’t understand how she feels, when she truly acknowledges her husband, or her ideas in regards to the future — the Penelope of The Return undoes the whole query of whether or not she is in on the sport when she tells Telemachus, throughout the scene during which she asks the suitors to shoot Odysseus’ bow to show their eligibility, to “give the bow to your father.” There’s little right here to enjoin the viewers to suppose deeper, aside from the struggling within the eyes of the principle character.
“People love stories,” Fiennes’s Odysseus broadcasts as he retells a part of the siege of Troy. However there’s no sense of pleasure, or love, and even curiosity within the tales he tells. Odysseus brings solely world-weariness again to this Ithaca, though they have already got loads of that to supply. The movie grows stronger because it grows smaller: Contained in the shadows of Odysseus’ dwelling, he kills a person in a battle and mumbles about “killing a man to amuse folks” as he stares off into the space. And Penelope questions him, shopping for into the fiction that he’s a veteran of the battle, asking with rising pressure, “Did my husband rape, did he murder women and children?”
Lovis Corinth, “Odysseus in the battle with the suitors” (1913), oil on canvas, 89 3/10 x 107 2/5 inches (89.3 x 273 cm), held on the Berlinische Galerie (picture through Wikimedia Commons)
I can think about seeing this Odysseus as an allegory for the “Western man.” Right here, one may weave a critique of our complicity in violence as we watch wars and horrors overseas, posing the basic query on the coronary heart of our declare to righteous civilization: What does it imply to be a father and son, to take care of households and cities, at the same time as we obliterate these overseas? The intense performances of Fiennes and Binoche level to such a attainable depth, however the tone is just too typically fallacious. Eurykleia’s line earlier than Odysseus begins to mow down the suitors speaks extra of Jason Vorhees than an epic hero: “My boy is back. Now you can kill them all.”
Maybe collapsing horror and epic was the plan all alongside — Odysseus is definitely one in every of literature’s biggest serial killers. On this studying, Penelope’s eventual acceptance of her husband speaks a reality that we must always all know: No person is a monster to everybody. The ultimate scene of violence is aptly sluggish and brutal. It isn’t a massacre like one may anticipate, however a deliberate thunk-thunk of arrows ending the suitors’ lives.
Every retelling of the Odyssey says as a lot about its time and audiences because it does in regards to the custom of fable round its hero of many turns. This, I feel, is one thing we are able to take away from The Return: It’s a fantasy of violent revenge that transpires regardless of acknowledging that trauma shapes each sufferer and perpetrator in flip. This Odysseus has neither future nor previous, simply the cooling consolation of bloodshed that can solely create extra in flip.
Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus in movie nonetheless of The Return (2024), directed by Uberto Pasolini (picture courtesy Bleeker Road)