The Return comes to us from Uberto Pasolini, an Italian count who’s been producing movies off and on for over 30 years. He directed and produced this one, also co-writing the screenplay alongside John Collee and the late Edward Bond. None of them have done much of anything you’re likely to have heard of. (Collee helped write Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World back in 2003, that’s the best I’ve got.)
This movie was sold pretty much entirely on the star power of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, respectively playing Odysseus and Penelope. Yes, it’s a Greek mythology adaptation, and those two names are the only ones with any recognition in this whole cast and crew. Yeah, this definitely feels like something to release in the weird little doldrums between the blockbusters of Thanksgiving and the awards contenders after Christmas.
If you need a refresher on the story… well, shit, how far back do you want me to go? I mean, there’s some dispute over whether Thetis refused Zeus’ romantic advances out of courtesy to Hera, or whether there was a prophecy that any son of Thetis would grow to become more powerful than his father. Regardless, Thetis was a nymph raised by Hera and so beloved by the gods that she was set up to marry the great mortal king Peleus, and pretty much everyone was at the wedding except for Eris (who got denied an invitation simply because she was the goddess of chaos), so Eris responded with a golden apple that belonged “to the fairest”…
Yeah, let’s skip ahead to the part where two kings fought over a woman and it spiraled into the longest and bloodiest war the world had yet seen. Odysseus — king of the island nation Ithaca — took all the best and bravest of his subjects with him to fight in the Trojan War. Ten years later, the Trojan War finally ends. Another ten years later, Odysseus and all his fellow Ithacan soldiers are either dead or still unaccounted for.
By now, Ithaca has gone a full generation with nobody to serve as king. Thus the island has been effectively taken over by men too weak and spineless and stupid to be of any use on the battlefield. Their greed and gluttony have pretty much reduced Ithaca to a lawless wasteland, and Penelope is too busy holding out for the return of her husband to do anything about it. The most ambitious and self-important of Ithica’s resident goon squad are pressuring Penelope to choose a husband, with the threat of venting their frustrations out on each other and the rest of the island until she makes a choice.
To sum up, what we’ve got here is a timely parable in which everything has gone to shit and the people are suffering, due in no small part to the fact that peasants are getting killed and raped and exploited for the pleasure and profit of the wealthy idiot few. Also, said wealthy idiot few are squabbling among each other and the whole island has been reduced to collateral damage. This nation is badly in need of new leadership and everyone is calling for a new leader to take charge, but all the options are terrible and there’s no candidate who can possibly hope to wright the ship.
But of course, you may already be asking about Odysseus. Surely, the rightful king, the genius who singlehandedly won the Trojan War with his brilliant Trojan Horse maneuver would have the guile and political clout to take back power and restore Ithica to its former glory, right? Yeah, about that…
Over the past twenty years, Odysseus has changed to the point where even his own wife can barely recognize him. His own son (Telemachus, here played by Charlie Plummer) is of the full-grown generation of adults that never knew him. Odysseus is so much older, and he’s gone through so much physical trauma in the decade of fighting and the decade getting back, he looks to all the world like one of the many downtrodden beggars all over Ithaca. Thus we get our timely statement about society’s treatment of the unhoused, most particularly our unhoused veterans. Which brings me to the next point.
Odysseus is going through some serious PTSD and survivor’s guilt. Remember, he took his best and brightest citizens with him — all those fathers and husbands — and none of them came back alive. All the widows and orphans back home, all that time gone away leaving his kingdom to rot, and he brought back nothing to show for it. After all that, what the hell could Odysseus say to everyone left on Ithaca? What could he tell his own wife and son?
Moreover, Odysseus had been at war for so long and killed so many people, even before he literally burned all of Troy to the ground for no reason at all. He’s been scarred so deeply, and been living with those scars for so long, it’s entirely possible that he’s forgotten how to be a king or a father or anything other than a soldier. At one point, Odysseus himself outright says that the soldiers who died in Troy were the lucky ones.
It’s important to remember that unlike so many great heroes in Greek mythology, Odysseus was not a demigod. He was very much human, in all possible meanings of the term. His closest Olympian relative that I can find was his great-grandfather Hermes. Contrast that to Achilles — I imagine that befriending a literal demigod and watching him fight up close would put a mortal man’s own place and capabilities into stark perspective.
The point being that we’ve got a conflict here between Odysseus as he used to be and Odysseus as he presently is. Even more to the point, we’ve got a conflict between the larger-than-life invincible hero that everyone needs and hopes Odysseus to be, and the fallibly flawed man that Odysseus irrefutably is.
On one level, this speaks to the modern deification of politicians; with the recurring cycle of hyping up a political figure to be the only one who can solve all our problems with a few short years in office, followed by disappointment when they inevitably fail this Herculean task. On another level, this speaks to the modern cultural worship of war heroes, like nobody’s military service counts unless Clint Eastwood or Michael Bay can direct a film adaptation of their life story.
(Side note: I recall a scene from The Best Years of Our Lives — perhaps the defining work of cinema on the topic — in which Captain Fred Derry [Dana Andrews] is interviewing for a job. The interviewer keeps talking about Derry’s wartime service in glamorous terms straight out of a propaganda recruiting reel, while Derry keeps trying to explain that his only job was to make sure the bombs got dropped on the specified targets.)
This is an aggressively grounded movie, with nothing supernatural or explicitly godlike. (I consider it a glaring omission that Athena never gets a single passing mention, but whatever.) The chase scenes and fight scenes are all shot and edited in so there’s not much in the way of fun or excitement. That lack of energy or flair may be a drawback for a great many filmgoers, but it’s really kinda the point. This is very much a movie about rejecting the glamorization of violence and war. The filmmakers even went so far as to reject the original Greek myths in the process of rejecting the elevation of veterans and battles to mythical status. Gotta say, I respect that kind of brass.
Ralph Fiennes has handled this topic matter before (see: His self-directed starring turn in Coriolanus), so of course he’s well within his wheelhouse here. Likewise, Penelope is probably the most definitive “grieving widow” archetype in the history of fiction, so of course Juliette Binoche is making a meal out of it. All the other actors are really only here to prop up those two starring actors, but the true MVP of the supporting cast is Charlie Plummer. Telemachus was truly a thankless role here, as the character keeps struggling to mediate between all the different characters while also managing his own inner turmoil and daddy issues, but Plummer does fine work with it.
The Return is a tricky film to judge. Much like the protagonist, this is an unassuming and deceptive movie that feels like it should be much grander than it really is, but going bigger and louder would defeat the purpose entirely. I don’t see any high school teachers putting this on the curriculum, we’ll put it that way. It’s an epic movie with intimate conflicts, in which the characters’ personal issues and squabbles carry much larger stakes and powerful statements on modern culture. Even with only two hours and what must have been a relatively small budget, it’s impressive how much this movie gets done.
You won’t be missing much if you wait for home video, but this is absolutely a film worth tracking down.