The Return

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche scale Greek mythology down to the human level.

Greek mythology has always been a tricky thing to render on film. While the legends of the classical world remain foundational texts of Western literature, they’re not always easy to pin down within the tightly boxed genres of narrative film or television. Not that it hasn’t been tried many times, but often something gets lost in translation. Sometimes the violent and salacious hard edges are sanded down to render fantastic yarns for kids, such as the classic adventures of special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen — for which I have great affection, even though they’re a bit corny by today’s standards.

Or the supernatural elements, taken at face value in the original myths, get tossed out in favor of a historical epic treatment, as in Wolfgang Petersen’s turgid “Troy” from 2004. Trying to nail the essence of Greek myth on film is as tough as — well, as shooting an arrow through twelve axe heads.

Enter director Uberto Passolini, with a new and unexpected take on the final chapter of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey.” “The Return,” opening in theatres December 6, presents Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche — together again for the first time since 1996’s “The English Patient” — as the legendary Odysseus and Penelope in a stark and intimate retelling of the hero’s reunion with his family and kingdom.

Most of us who read Homer’s epic in high school English know the story being retold here — and if you need a spoiler alert for a 2,700 year old story, here it is, I guess.

Odysseus (Fiennes), legendary Greek hero of the ten-year Trojan War (the guy who built the horse), has been lost at sea for a decade following the war’s end, so he has not been home to the island of Ithaca for a whopping 20 years by the time he washes back up on its shores.

Meanwhile, his wife, the Queen Penelope (Binoche), is beset by a small army of suitors who wish to marry her and claim the kingdom for their own. Telemachus, her son (Charlie Plummer), is just coming of age and has no memory of his father. He and his mother are powerless to stop the beastly suitors from camping out in the castle, eating and drinking them out of house and home while Penelope does everything she can to stall the inescapable decision to remarry.

Odysseus is taken in by his old servant and swineherd Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria), who does not recognize him at first, and comes to the castle disguised as a beggar, where he patiently suffers the abuse of the suitors. Sensing that her husband has returned, Penelope proposes a contest: She will marry the man who can string Odysseus’ old bow and fire a shot straight through twelve axe heads. Odysseus, the only man who has ever accomplished this feat, does it again, and in doing so, reveals himself as the rightful king. Odysseus and Telemachus proceed to slay the villainous suitors, Odysseus and Penelope are reunited, and all is right with the world again.

Or maybe it isn’t that simple.

That’s the premise behind Passolini’s treatment of the Odyssey. Homer uses the story of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca to frame his fantastical adventures at sea, the part of the tale that most people remember when they think of the Odyssey. Passolini, working from a script by Edward Bond and John Collee, cuts out the fantasy bits in the middle and takes the opportunity to dig deep into the human element behind the myth. (Amusingly, Homer is also given a writing credit by IMDb.)

“The Return” definitely falls into the demystifying camp when it comes to the extremes of Greek myth on film. Did any of Odysseus’ legendary adventures at sea even happen? Fiennes’ Odysseus, and by extension the film itself, is silent on this subject. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but that’s not what Passolini is interested in exploring.

There are sly references in the dialogue to the well-known stories. In one scene, Eumaeus tells a friend that Penelope’s suitors “haven’t turned us into animals yet,” while his pigs squeal in the background; which calls to mind Odysseus’ imprisonment by the witch Circe, who turned his crew into pigs. When Telemachus first asks Odysseus, “Who are you?” the hero replies, “I’m nobody,” which is of course the name he gave to outwit the cyclops Polyphemus. Beyond these scattered references, though, there is scarcely a mention of the supernatural nautical quest.

Instead, “The Return” focuses on the human-scale questions of a family and a kingdom torn apart by war: What’s it like for a son to await the return of a father he’s never met? Charlie Plummer’s Telemachus seethes with impotent rage, angry at Odysseus for his absence, angry at his mother for her inability to move on and accept what seems to be inevitable, angry at the men who occupy his palace and torment him. When he finally gets his chance to vent that rage, he may not find it as satisfying as he thinks.

What happens to a queen without a king in a patriarchal society, a woman trapped between unresolved grief for her missing husband and the pack of vultures waiting to claim her and the kingdom as their prize? Juliette Binoche’s Penelope is brittle and heartbroken, tenaciously clinging to the hope that Odysseus is still alive, maybe not even for his sake anymore, but because it’s the only thing holding up her own sense of an independent self. She yearns for comfort, wandering the halls of the castle and seeing lovers coupling in the night. Instead, she turns away to the project that keeps her alive and the suitors at bay; desperately making and then un-making a garment on her loom, whose completion means she will finally have to choose a husband and sacrifice what’s left of herself.

And what of the man who’s spent a decade at war and another adrift? Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus is less convinced of his own heroism than anyone else he speaks to, and avoids revealing himself to anyone on Ithaca for as long as he possibly can. He’s a shell of a man, hollowed out by war and whittled into a shape as hard, knotted, and sun-baked as a piece of old driftwood. He has a raging case of what we’d now call PTSD, though of course the Greeks didn’t quite have a word for that. He stumbles through most of the story clothed in just a blanket, and tersely shoots down anybody seeking stories of the heroic Odysseus. As he recounts the famous episode of the Trojan Horse to Eumaeus and his friends, he intimates that the conquest wasn’t as impressive as it seems from the outside – there simply wasn’t much of a city left to sack once a years-long siege had ravaged Troy.

Unfortunately, “The Return” takes quite a long time to get these compelling characters together to evoke true drama from their conflict. Much of the first half of the film consists of a long setup; and father, son, and mother spend a lot of it in frustrated isolation. This is partly the point, of course. Bond and Collee’s script is economical, to be sure, and sometimes wrings aching beauty from only a few words punctuating long silences. But the silences stretch on like shadows over the story after a while. Odysseus is often taciturn to the point of inscrutability, and while Fiennes wrings every nuance he can from what he's given, it is still difficult to tell what’s taking him so very long to act in any way. As the film contrasts his inertia with the growing tension of Penelope and Telemachus’ situation with the suitors in the castle, we can begin to understand some of the son’s antsy impatience for a resolution of any kind.

Once Odysseus does show up at the castle, nearly everyone seems to figure out who he is before he gets around to revealing himself — everyone, that is, but the pig-headed suitors. Fiennes and Binoche share a heartbreaking scene in which Penelope interrogates the still-unidentified man about his experience in the war. She wonders aloud whether her husband participated in some of the most barbaric of war’s crimes, and what could possibly be keeping him away from his home and his queen. She clearly knows, or at least suspects, who the man before her really is, and he knows that she knows, but neither can bring themselves yet to unmask themselves to the other — the weight of their pain holds them back, and the viewer can practically feel it in the room with them. It’s a shame that this is one of the only extended scenes that these two magnificent actors share throughout the whole film.

It’s only when the suitors, led by the conniving Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), try to hunt down and kill Telemachus that Odysseus is forced into action, which finally gets the plot moving toward its mythic conclusion. Still, it’s not the splendid spectacle of revenge that we moviegoers might be conditioned to expect from such a story — one preview article I read described Fiennes’ Odysseus as a “Greek John Wick,” which not only sets hyperbolically false expectations for this film, but also completely misses the point.

This Odysseus does fight and kill with the ruthless efficiency and devious tactics of a hardened soldier, but when the final destruction of the suitors occurs, the climax quickly becomes anticlimax, and this is the point. The soul-scarred warrior whose past killings haunted him to the point of paralysis has shaken off his slumber to kill again. Now what? A line spoken to Eumaeus earlier in the film echoes in the mind. When told that the war is over, Odysseus replies that it never ended: “The war is everything . . . waiting for me to make it happen again.” Can he make anything else happen now?

The ending between Penelope and Odysseus offers some promise that he can, but it won’t be easy, nor will it happen quickly. Reunited, Fiennes and Binoche rekindle their tremendous screen chemistry and remind us why we care about the characters, despite their many faults and failings, even as they struggle to find words for their deep trauma. But “The Return” ultimately leaves the viewer wanting more.

To be sure, the brooding is beautiful to look at, as lensed by cinematographer Marius Penduru, and even lovely to listen to, with a lean and yearning score by Rachel Portman that at times seems to echo the minimalistic pensiveness of Philip Glass. “The Return” is well crafted in every way, and has its moments of beauty, excitement, and tremendous emotion interspersed with long stretches of passivity. I only wish we could have had just a little more of the heroic with the humanity.