The Return
By 
I had the opportunity to watch The Return yesterday in a nearly empty theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. The film is absolutely beautifully shot, apparently mostly on Corfu. Both Fiennes and Binoche and absolutely amazing. Fiennes is given a lot more to do and in particular is asked to do a lot more with his body (the man is ripped, but in the sense that he looks like someone who’s been at war and in exile for twenty years, as opposed to someone who’s been hitting the gym and drinking protein shakes recently). We’ve seen so much of actors trying to do post-war PTSD that it’s nearly become a cliche, but with Fiennes you really believe it. He speaks of the fall of Troy in a measured way, and does not speak of the other events in the Odyssey at all (there is a brief mention of his time with Circe and a fleeting allusion to the cyclops). When I went in I was thinking that it would have been nice to cast Sean Bean in the role and thus make it a quasi-sequel of Wolfgang Peterson’s very underrated Troy, but just a few moments of watching Fiennes inhabit Odysseus removed that consideration.
Binoche’s performance is quieter, but she commands every scene that she’s a part of. She has given up hope that her husband will ever return, and is dealing with an extremely difficult political situation. She’s appropriately resentful and angry and she slowly comes to the realization that the weird stranger in her midst might actually be that husband. The cornerstone of the film is a very slow, very careful confrontation between Binoche and Fiennes where they simply talk, alone, in a dark room for several minutes. “Who are you?” is the subtext but of course she knows; Odysseus won’t confess his identity, nor will he confess to the terrible things he did at Troy or the decisions he made on the way home that got all of his followers killed. But he doesn’t have to; she already knows.
The suitors are suitably awful, running roughshod across Ithaca and inflicting damage and torment that go beyond disgracing Penelope’s court. They were distinct enough in appearance and mannerism to make me dislike each in their own particular way. Marwan Kenzari as Antinous and Tom Rhys Harries as Pisander are the standouts here, particularly the former. Kenzari plays Antinous more restrained than the source material, but he’s all the more creepy for being halfway reasonable. The contrast in physique between Harries (who does look like he spends 16 hours a day in the gym) and Fiennes was particularly notable and appropriate.
It’s very good film that sometimes touches greatness, but there are flaws. It doesn’t know what to do with Telemachus from either a character or a plot point of view, and Charlie Plummer might not have been the ideal choice of actor. It’s not a long movie (slightly over two hours) but the plot is overstuffed and the director probably could have dropped thirty minutes without really losing anything important. Most importantly, Umberto Pasolini… is not an action director, and it shows. In the hands of someone with more experience the denouement would have been fast-paced, tense, and intelligible; in this case, a bunch of things just kind of happen at an unhurried pace and in no particular sequence. I was unreasonably bothered by Odysseus’ endless quiver of arrows (c’mon, man; there are more arrows in the quiver now than 30 seconds ago and the old guy just shot like five dudes) and by the fact that the choreography was just poor. The characterizations of the different suitors is wasted as each dies in pretty much the same way and in no recognizable order. Telemachus is there for some reason and does something for some reason but neither the actor nor the director are sure what those reasons are.
A measure of redemption comes at the very end, which is another quiet scene between Binoche and Fiennes. They resolve to tell their stories to one another, which is of course the whole point of the thing; this is a story that has been told so many times and in so many ways that it does not really require much justification to tell it again, and yet they still manage to offer compelling reasons to speak with one another.
Worth your time? Depends on how you value your time, but I don’t regret seeing it in the theater.