Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, two of the greatest global actors of their generation or any, stage an “English Patient” reunion with Uberto Pasolini’s stately and somber “The Return.” The epic film, shot in Greece and Italy last year, retells Homer’s classic and oft-recycled epic “Odyssey” through a stripped-down lens that frames the story of Odysseus (Fiennes), Penelope (Binoche), and their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) as a tale without gods and monsters and instead more of a dysfunctional family narrative. What’s lost is the heat and swashbuckling adventure of the original tale, a humanist turn that finds Odysseus at the end of his mortal coil, Fiennes at first haggard, awash naked on the shores of Ithaca after a shipwreck has left him unmoored and divorced from his former kingdom. The actors are prime, but the movie is a solemn affair that could use more grandeur.
When Odysseus awakens on the beaches of Ithaca, guilt-ridden knowing that none of his arsenal of companions on a military ship survived the Trojan War overseas, he’s back on home soil to worse revelations. His kingdom has fallen apart, his wife Penelope is being arranged for new marriage, and his son Telemachus is surely going to be killed by one of her new suitors.
There is a lot of pain and hurry-up-and-wait as Ithaca falls apart without him. He’s forced to watch from afar, in caves and other underlit locales, as Penelope and his son fend off as best they can an occupation and prepare for a new father figure to step in. Much of the film finds Binoche pensively working a loom, weaving a wedding gown for the next nuptials she’s in no rush for. By night, she’s unraveling the garment to buy more time for Odysseus to come home. Her worrying, working pain is compelling to watch. No surprise from the actress who astounded us all in movies like Michael Haneke’s “Cache” and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Blue,” movies that deal with grief in their way, too, and buoyed on courageous acting.
Binoche is typically strong in a performance that relies on a series of fixed gazes of grim determination — much like Plummer as Telemachus, who starts the movie off by gazing out into the sea, awaiting the return of his father. The script, written by Edward Bond, John Collee, and Pasolini, gives her little in the way of dialogue, but she’s a memorable force. Fiennes, similarly, playing a role that’s been inhabited by the likes of Kirk Douglas in 1955’s “Ulysses” or much more comically in the Coens’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” by George Clooney, is strong and silent, his physique jacked. And this is in a movie that certainly ladles on the homoeroticism, male nudity abounding as is understood for the overflowing Grecian sensuality of the time and this one. Penelope is hounded by muscular new suitors awaiting the throne, while Odysseus isn’t recognized anymore due to the scars of war, though Fiennes is in top physical shape. Some questions hover, though, as to why would Penelope not remember that this man is also the father of her child.
Telemachus is also on the chopping block as a takeover of Ithaca looms. Plummer, an extremely gifted actor with a face of stone and hurt in films ranging from “Lean on Pete” to the queer rodeo story “National Anthem” earlier this year, cuts a haunting silhouette as a son caught in a political battle. But Pasolini, choosing to remove the more grotesque monstrous figures from Homer’s original story, lets his actors hang in the balance in often airless scenes that lack drama or movement. Cinematographer Marius Panduru shoots the film with a fairly elementary, straightforward grammar, the lush environs of the Aegean sea minimized by what becomes a stately drama where shots feel more like coverage than thoughtful.
The film is after all only focused on the latter entries of Homer’s “Odyssey,” meaning we miss a lot of the mythological hugeness of the material that’s been sliced and diced before by other (and surely less capable) filmmakers. If you’re familiar at all with the original text, you might miss the sea monsters and sirens that paint its stormy and mythologically over-the-top narrative. Pasolini’s commitment to realism here — despite as ever magnetic performances from his actors — fails to get at the violent, dark heart of the classic story. But if Binoche and Fiennes staring into the void is your thing, “The Return” will bring plenty for you.
Grade: C
“The Return” is in theaters from Bleecker Street on Friday, December 6.
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