In ‘The Return,’ Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche Aid Director Uberto Pasolini in Paying Homage to Homer

How conversant does a movie-goer have to be with “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey” to enjoy Uberto Pasolini’s “The Return”? At the Upper West Side preview for the film, an executive from one of its production companies, Bleecker Street Media, introduced the picture by testifying to the ubiquity of Homer’s seminal works. Every student, he averred, had been assigned to read the epic poems at one point or another in their academic lives.Not this student: The Utah State Board of Education had other fish to fry, notwithstanding that the Beehive State has the largest Greek population in the United States west of the Mississippi. Adulthood hasn’t helped: Individual attempts to crack Homer’s encompassing tale of heroic men, patient women, and capricious gods have been frustrating and fruitless. For this critic, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” have proven eminently resistable.Not even the muscle-bound interventions of Kirk Douglas and Brad Pitt, both of whom featured in Homeric movie adaptations, helped to give a leg up on the blind poet of yore. My solution, then, to coming in prepared for Mr. Pasolini’s picture? Taking along a Greek friend who claims to have read “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” on a semi-annual basis since being introduced to them as an adolescent. And you know what? It only kind of helped.The long-time-in-coming reunion of our hero Odysseus and his long-suffering wife Penelope — it’s okay, I think, to spoil a story that dates back almost 5,000 years — has, I am told, been vexing readers for years. Forget a denouement drenched in blood-and-guts: The rationales offered for Odysseus’s hemming-and-hawing upon making his presence known at Ithaca after having been gone for decades seem flimsy. My Grecian aide-de-camp noted that “The Return” is, in that regard, all too true to its literary source.Ralph Fiennes in ‘The Return.’ Via Bleecker StreetBut what about a night out at the movies? Daunted by taking on a vital component of Western literature, Mr. Pasolini spent 30 years whittling down Homer’s adventure story, using introductory intertitles and some awkward moments of exposition to give the uninitiated a sense of grounding. The more fantastical aspects of Homer’s story have been downplayed or excised in service to the “sadly relevant” repercussions of war and their effects on family and community.Notwithstanding the epic inspiration, “The Return” is anti-epic in terms of cinematic form. Forget a cast of thousands: A cast of dozens is more like it. The screenplay by John Collee, Edward Bond, and Mr. Pasolini takes liberties with Homer’s text in the hopes that the results “are very much in the spirit of Homer.” Scholars of antiquity can weigh in on how true the script might be to the text and the time, but the screenwriting team have, to this ear anyway, avoided anachronistic or stilted circumlocutions of language.Mr. Pasolini has put together a good-looking entertainment. We should commend the director and his crew for paying homage to Homer even as we have to wonder if they should have been less wary about stepping on his toes. The results are admirable if stolid. Fortunately, we have two movie stars in tow: Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, both of whom have screen presence to burn and are, thank you Zeus, consummate actors. Take the scene in which Odysseus and Penelope test each other’s mettle upon reacquaintance: It is, for all intents and purposes, a master class in psychological bobbing-and-weaving. That, and it helps that Mr. Pasolini loves his leads. The attention he lavishes on Mr. Fiennes’s craggy features and the elegant contours of Ms. Binoche’s profile is just short of adoring, and made all the more ruddy and warm by Marius Panduru’s cinematography.The supporting cast does pretty well by its duties, with Marwan Kensari being particularly engaging as the wily Antinous. One can only wonder if Homer’s original adventures have a bit more razzamatazz. Say this much for “The Return”: It’s enough to make a grown man head to the library after exiting the theater.

In ‘The Return,’ Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche Aid Director Uberto Pasolini in Paying Homage to Homer

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