The Odyssey is on the up. Emily Wilson’s wonderful 2017 translation has revealed the poem can be as compulsive as anything by Lee Child. The modern master of epic, Christopher Nolan, is filming his own version of The Odyssey for release next summer, with a $250m budget and a ridiculously starry cast. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, with bit parts taken by Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson and Charlize Theron. Nolan is scripting. Reality slippage? Time-travel? World-bending? We expect no less.
Meanwhile here’s The Return, a more modest effort, adapting not all of The Odyssey but only the second half, starting from Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, after 20 years of absence. The great adventures – Cyclops, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens – are skipped. We’re left with an entirely naturalistic scenario, furthered by the elimination of the gods from the story. The Return is the passion project of director, Uberto Pasolini. Pasolini, a Londoner, made his name as the originator and producer of The Full Monty in 1997, only turning director himself in 2008.
He first approached Ralph Fiennes about The Odyssey in 2011, after Fiennes’s directorial debut, Coriolanus, suggesting he both direct and play the hero. Fiennes demurred. When Pasolini tried again ten years later, Fiennes agreed but suggested Pasolini himself should direct – and that Juliette Binoche should be the inevitable Penelope to whom Odysseus returns. So, having been Heathcliff and Cathy together in Wuthering Heights in 1992, and Almasy and Hana in The English Patient in 1996, here they are, reunited on screen after nearly 30 years, rather longer than Odysseus himself went astray. This time-travelling gambit pays off and it is why The Return works to the extent that it does.
The script does not help them at all. Attributed to the late playwright Edward Bond, the Australian writer John Collee (Master and Commander, Happy Feet) and Pasolini, it’s effectively a late Edward Bond play, obsessed with the immorality of violence. Odysseus, cast up on the shore of Ithaca, is crushed by guilt over his lifetime of warfare, so depressed he can barely string a few words together. His eloquence and deceptiveness, as much part of his greatness as his martial prowess, have been completely deleted. Instead we have a story about a warrior returning shamed by the deeds he has committed, suffering from PTSD, as if from Vietnam or Iraq. About Troy all he can say is that “we burnt it to the ground and then drowned the flames in blood”.
To make sure we get the point, Penelope, when first talking to Odysseus again, believing him to be a old comrade of her husband’s rather than the real thing, improbably demands, in Binoche’s unyieldingly French accent: “Why do men go to war? Why do they burn other people’s houses? Why do they rape? Why do they murder women and children? Aren’t they happy with their own family? Did my husband rape? Did he murder women and children?” Odysseus turns his head away.
Binoche is exquisite, as distinguished and affecting as ever, but her character is peculiarly inconsistent – rather than, as in Homer, provokingly opaque. Fiennes, though, is magnificent. He displays (there’s a tip-top full frontal) an extraordinary, weathered physique, all ropey tendons and veins rather than gym-built muscles, a body that’s scarred and abraded, a palimpsest of trials endured. His face is no less epic, worn and roughened, full of inward suffering in its flinches and withdrawals, while the eyes remain so vital, blue and glittering. It’s a full-on Shakespearean performance, despite the poor dialogue, with clear allusion to Lear, even a touch of Hamlet’s tormented conscience. Fiennes alone makes the film, long and slow as it is, worth seeing.
The climactic scene, the bending of the bow and the slaughter of the suitors, is superbly staged, if lacking the explanatory preparation of the poem. Rachel Portman, Pasolini’s former partner, contributes an effective score throughout. The cinematography, using the landscapes and seascapes of Corfu and Italy, firelight and candlelight, is all the better for being low budget.
Sadly, the same constraints may be responsible for the subsidiary cast being conspicuously weak. As Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, Charlie Plummer (Lean on Pete) seems to have wandered in from an American college film. Others seem like the luckless kids in the school play who just can’t act. The way ahead is clear for Christopher Nolan. Meanwhile, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, presented to Binoche by Fiennes and mesmerising her, is not to be missed.
“The Return” is in cinemas now
[See also: Kazuo Ishiguro’s everyday dystopia]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025