Modern audiences may have vague ideas about that troublesome Ancient Greek homecoming hero, 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:Odysseus“ (1842), James Joyce’s Defiant 1922 novel of the same nameor the masterful work of Nikos Kazantzakis The Odyssey: a modern sequel (1924). Or maybe they’re familiar with retellings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2006) or Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), who also follow a centuries-old tradition of pulling on narrative threads to reweave them from new perspectives. Like Penelope—who held off the suitors who arrived after Odysseus’ supposed death by promising herself to one of them only after completing a garment she wove by day and undid by night—storytellers are constantly remaking from the same old material in contemporary style. time.
Uberto Pasolini’s film, The return (2024), starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, is the latest – but certainly not the best – entry in the tradition of reweaving OdysseyS. In it, Fiennes is an impressively muscular, middle-aged veteran who comes home to a people and family he hasn’t seen in twenty years. The landscape he returns to is dry and dirty, a sepia-toned environment alternately washed away by the sun and the dull monotony of the yellow brick buildings. The smoky, dimly lit interiors of medieval Italian buildings are decorated here and there as replacements for the palaces and hovels of the Mycenaean era (c. 1600–1100 BCE) within which the original Odyssey was meant to take place. But despite serious attempts to recreate Homer’s environment Odysseyit misses one of the most important threads of its story: the importance of the art of storytelling.
The Odyssey asks its audience to reflect on a man who tried and failed to bring his people home, challenging the country to make meaning of intertwined themes of survival, homecoming, identity, and the double-sided nature of the story. The joys and perils of storytelling are central to the epic, from the first notes to the end: it famously begins with an invocation to a muse to ‘tell me the man’s story’, 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 prove so crucial to Odysseus’s real homecoming: his reunion with who he was before he went to war, through a series of recognitions by a mother figure (his nurse, Antikleia). , his wife, and his father.
The returnon the other hand, the plot loses. It makes many reasonable and necessary choices by sticking to just one of the epic’s storylines and leaving out the gods. Athena in a realistic portrayal would be almost comical or absurd because of her excessive power and divine difference. (Our modern gods are distant and mysterious; rare is the moving image that translates ancient gods well.) It follows the spirit of works like those of Jonathan Shay. Odysseus in America (2002), which sees Odysseus as a wounded, tormented warrior who brings the war home with him. But the film also makes the man uncomplicated, to rock out Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. The return‘Odysseus is laconic: he does not tell stories about his past and does not use them to manipulate others. He stares. And squinting. And occasionally bows, even when aping a weaker man of an older age.
Homer’s version of Odysseus – and dare I say Joyce’s or Kazantzakis’s – is both complex and playful. He is smart and his behavior is sometimes questionable: he is a man who has suffered and changed. And yet the Odysseus of The return has no awareness of his past. The film seems to exist in an unmentionable present. This is seen most clearly in the reenactment of the famous scene in which EurykleiaOdyseuss’ old nurse, recognizes Odysseus by his scar. As a scholar Erich Auerbach As is famously noted, this contrasts the narrative traditions of the Greek epic with the Hebrew Bible: the former, according to Auerbach, emphasizes superficial phenomena and narrative details, while the austerity of the latter requires more audience involvement. The scene is crucial to Homeric poetics because it demonstrates the associative power of storytelling: everything in the world – and everyone – is an opportunity for another story, another perspective, another view. When Eurykleia sees Odysseus’ scar, it triggers 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 YieldOn the other side, Eurykleia sees the scar and says she remembers Odysseus coming home from the hunt. Not anymore. We don’t see the scar; we cannot see the story. This in itself is a miniature criticism of the film as a whole: it constantly gestures towards those CliffsNotes moments of the film. Odysseywithout touching its soul. From the beginning, The return‘s earnest promise of a psychologically realistic portrayal of the hero’s homecoming is repeatedly undermined. His body – on display in full frontal nudity – is a microcosm of the film’s strange decisions, a virtual catalog of missteps that place him neither in an epic past nor in a moving present. The veteran who was repeatedly shipwrecked and found at sea has main veins popping on sinewy biceps, or a pack of eight that gleams as if polished as an extra for Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006)? The story suffers from the separation of place and time and seems to form a moral center. The suitors, with the exception of Antinoos, are almost comically vicious, parading and threatening sexual violence and murder against anyone who will listen. Telemachus, who certainly 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 ‘brought with him the best men’, but this storyline is threadbare throughout and ultimately lost. A cascade of disjointed images follows: Penelope, sad, watching enslaved women have sex with the suitors; Odysseus, naked, beaten and disheveled.
The death of Odysseus’ father Laertes in the film – an event that never occurs in Homer’s narrative – is one of the stumbling blocks that concerns 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 through Odysseus’s reunion with Laertes and his incomplete reconciliation with his people. Because no one has a past The returnHowever, the exclusion of this last book is logical. Even the story of the dog Argos is wrong: he is in the film, but instead of recognizing his owner by the smell – a characteristic Melissa Mueller has mapped out such as the enrollment of Argos into the series of reunions that confirm the hero’s identity – it is Odysseus who says the dog’s name, prompting a recognition that is put to rest by the dog’s subsequent death.
One could charitably argue that the mystery in this film lies not in the fact that others recognize Odysseus, but in the fact that he remembers himself. Still, the lack of uncertainty makes a story about ambiguities – and yes, complexity – somewhat stale. Eumaeus seems to know who Odysseus is all along: he admits that he has recognized his master when he becomes frustrated by his passivity halfway through the film. While the Odyssey‘s Penelope is an unanswered and always 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 her joining the game when she tells Telemachus, during the scene where she asks the suitors to shoot Odysseus’ bow to prove their eligibility, to “give the bow to you father to give’. There is little here to encourage the audience to think more deeply, other than the suffering in the protagonist’s eyes.
“People love stories,” Odysseus of Fiennes announces as he retells part of the siege of Troy. But there is no sense of joy, love or even interest in the stories he tells. Odysseus only brings world-weariness back to this Ithaca, even though they already have plenty of that to offer. The film grows stronger as it gets smaller: in the shadow of Odysseus’ house, he kills a man in battle and mutters about “killing a man to amuse people” as he stares into the distance. And Penelope interrogates him, believing the fiction that he is a war veteran and asking more and more forcefully: “Did my husband rape, did he kill women and children?”
I imagine you see it this Odysseus as an allegory for ‘Western man’. Here one might weave a critique of our complicity in violence as we watch wars and horrors abroad, raising the fundamental question at the heart of our claim to a just civilization: what does it mean to be father and son, to care for families and cities even as we destroy them abroad? The serious performances of Fiennes and Binoche indicate such a possible depth, but the tone is too often wrong. Eurykleia’s line before Odysseus begins to mow down the suitors speaks more about it Jason Vorhees then 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 we should all know: no one is a monster to everyone. The final scene of violence is strikingly slow and brutal. It is not a massacre as you would expect, but a deliberate action thunk-thunk of arrows that end the lives of the suitors.
Every retelling of the Odyssey says as much about its time and audience as it does about the tradition of myth surrounding it hero of many turns. I think this is something we can move away from The return: It is a fantasy of violent revenge that becomes reality despite the recognition that trauma in turn shapes both the victim and the perpetrator. This Odysseus has neither future nor past, only the cooling comfort of bloodshed, which in turn will only create more.
