Modern audiences might have hazy notions of that tricky Ancient Greek hero of homecoming, Odysseus. They may know about his return to Penelope, his patiently loyal wife, or his somewhat annoying son Telemachus. More literary-minded readers might even think of Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses“ (1842), James Joyce’s challenging 1922 novel of the same name, or Nikos Kazantzakis’s magisterial The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1924). Or they may be familiar with retellings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2006) or Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), which also follow an ancient tradition of pulling at narrative threads to reweave them from new perspectives. Much like Penelope — who held off the suitors that arrived after Odysseus’ presumed death by promising herself to one of them only after she completed a garment that she wove in the daytime and undid at night — storytellers are constantly remaking the same ancient fabric in contemporary times.
Uberto Pasolini’s film, The Return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is the latest — though certainly not the greatest — entry into the tradition of rewoven Odysseys. In it, Fiennes is a middle-aged, impressively buff veteran arriving home to a people and family he has not seen in 20 years. The landscape he returns to is dry and dirty, a sepia-toned environment washed out in turns by the sun and the dull monotony of the yellow brick buildings. The smoky, ill-lit interiors of medieval Italian structures are dressed up here and there as stand-ins for the Mycenaean era (c. 1600–1100 BCE) palaces and hovels within which the original Odyssey was meant to take place. But despite earnest efforts to recreate the environments of Homer’s Odyssey, it misses one of the most important threads of his tale — that is, the importance of the art of storytelling.
The Odyssey asks its audience to think about a man who tried and failed to bring his people home, challenging it to make sense of interwoven themes of survival, homecoming, identity, and the double-sided nature of narrative. Indeed, the pleasures and perils of storytelling are central to the epic from its first notes until its end: It famously opens with an invocation to a muse to “tell me the tale of the man,” and ends with a description of the goddess Athena still in the “voice” of her disguise. These are the threads that connect the present to the past and that turn out to be so critical for Odysseus’ true homecoming: his reunion with who he was before he went to war through a series of recognitions by a maternal figure (his wet nurse, Antikleia), his spouse, and his father.
The Return, on the other hand, loses the plot. It makes many reasonable and necessary choices by sticking to just one of the epic’s narrative arcs and taking the gods out of the equation — Athena would verge on comical or absurd in a realist rendering due to her outsize power and divine difference. (Our modern gods are distant and mysterious; rare is the moving image that translates ancient deities well.) 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 war home with him. But the film also uncomplicates the man, to crib from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. The Return’s Odysseus is laconic: He doesn’t tell stories of his past or use them to manipulate others. He stares. And squints. And occasionally flexes, even while aping a weaker man of more advanced age.
Homer’s version of Odysseus — and I dare say, Joyce’s or Kazantzakis’s —is both complicated and playful. He is clever, and his behavior sometimes questionable — he is a man who has suffered, and changed. And yet the Odysseus of The Return has no sense of his past. The movie seems to exist in an unnameable present. This is seen clearest in its restaging of the famous scene in which Eurykleia, Odyseuss’s longtime nurse, recognizes Odysseus because of his scar. As Scholar Erich Auerbach famously pointed out, this contrasts the narrative traditions of Greek epic with the Hebrew bible: The former, according to Auerbach, emphasizes surface appearances and narrative detail, while the latter’s austerity requires more audience engagement. The scene is critical for Homeric poetics because it shows the associative power of storytelling: Everything in the world — and everyone — is an opportunity for another tale, another perspective, another take. When Eurykleia sees Odysseus’ scar, it inspires a flashback that tells the story of his name. The story — all stories, including our own — becomes limitless and eternal through this constant weaving and unweaving.
In The Return, on the other hand, Eurykleia sees the scar and says she remembers Odysseus coming home from the hunt. No more. We don’t see the scar; we can’t see the tale. This, in itself, is a thumbnail critique of the movie as a whole: It constantly gestures towards those CliffsNotes moments of the Odyssey, without getting at the soul of it. From the beginning, The Return’s earnest promise of a psychologically realist depiction of the hero’s arrival home is repeatedly undermined. His body — on display with full frontal nudity — is a microcosm of the movie’s odd decisions, a virtual catalog of missteps that place it neither in an epic past nor in a moving present. What veteran repeatedly shipwrecked and found drifting at sea has cephalic veins that pop on sinewy biceps, or an eight-pack shining as if polished to be an extra for Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006)? The story suffers for its separation from place and time, seems to cast about for a moral center. The suitors, with the exception of Antinoos, are almost comically villainous — they strut, threatening sexual violence and murder to anyone who will listen. Telemachus, who definitely hears them, seems too old to be so useless and whiny. We do hear the first notes of a political theme: that “the island is dying” in the absence of Odysseus, who “took the best men with him,” but this narrative strand is threadbare throughout, and by the end, lost. A cascade of incohesive images follow: Penelope, sad, seeing enslaved women have sex with the suitors; Odysseus, naked, beaten, and bedraggled.
The death of Odysseus’ father Laertes in the film — an event that never occurs in Homer’s telling — is one of the stumbles that troubles me most. Famously (for scholars of Homer), ancient critics suggested that the epic reached its conclusion at the reunion of husband and wife in book 23, failing to understand that the final chapter, book 24, resolves essential themes of the poem via Odysseus’ reunion with Laertes and his incomplete reconciliation with his people. Since nobody has a past in The Return, however, the exclusion of this final book sort of makes sense. Even the dog Argos’ tale is off: He is in the movie, but rather than recognizing his master by smell — a feature Melissa Mueller has marked out as enrolling Argos in the series of reunions that confirm the hero’s identity — it is Odysseus who says the dog’s name, prompting a recognition quieted by the hound’s subsequent death.
One could charitably argue that the mystery in this movie resides not in others recognizing Odysseus, but in him coming to remember himself. Yet, the lack of uncertainty makes a tale of ambiguities — and, yes, complexity — somewhat pat. Eumaeus seems to know who Odysseus is all along: He admits he has recognized his master when he gets frustrated with his inaction halfway through the film. While the Odyssey’s Penelope is an unanswered and ever-intriguing question — we don’t know how she feels, when she actually recognizes her husband, or her thoughts about the future — the Penelope of The Return undoes the entire question of whether she is in on the game when she tells Telemachus, during the scene in which she asks the suitors to shoot Odysseus’ bow to prove their eligibility, to “give the bow to your father.” There’s little here to enjoin the audience to think deeper, except for the suffering in the eyes of the main character.
“People love stories,” Fiennes’s Odysseus announces as he retells part of the siege of Troy. But there’s no sense of joy, or love, or even interest in the stories he tells. Odysseus brings only world-weariness back to this Ithaca, even though they already have plenty of that to offer. The film grows stronger as it grows smaller: Inside the shadows of Odysseus’ home, he kills a man in a fight and mumbles about “killing a man to amuse folks” as he stares off into the distance. And Penelope questions him, buying into the fiction that he is a veteran of the war, asking with growing force, “Did my husband rape, did he murder women and children?”
I can imagine seeing this Odysseus as an allegory for the “Western man.” Here, one could weave a critique of our complicity in violence as we watch wars and horrors abroad, posing the fundamental question at the heart of our claim to righteous civilization: What does it mean to be a father and son, to care for families and cities, even as we obliterate those abroad? The serious performances of Fiennes and Binoche point to such a possible depth, but the tone is too often wrong. Eurykleia’s line before Odysseus begins to mow down the suitors speaks more of Jason Vorhees than an epic hero: “My boy is back. Now you can kill them all.”
Perhaps collapsing horror and epic was the plan all along — Odysseus is certainly one of literature’s greatest serial killers. In this reading, Penelope’s eventual acceptance of her husband speaks a truth that we should all know: Nobody is a monster to everyone. The final scene of violence is aptly slow and brutal. It isn’t a bloodbath like one might expect, but a deliberate thunk-thunk of arrows ending the suitors’ lives.
Each retelling of the Odyssey says as much about its time and audiences as it does about the tradition of myth around its hero of many turns. This, I think, is something we can take away from The Return: It is a fantasy of violent revenge that transpires despite acknowledging that trauma shapes both victim and perpetrator in turn. This Odysseus has neither future nor past, just the cooling comfort of bloodshed that will only create more in turn.
Homer’s Odysseus is complicated and playful — a man who has suffered, and is changed. Pasolini’s Odysseus squints, and occasionally flexes.
