Richard Crouse

SYNOPSIS: Taking its inspiration from an ancient text, “The Return,” a new historical drama starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche now playing in theatres, is the story of a disgraced king returning from the disastrous Trojan War.

CAST: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer. Directed by Uberto Pasolini based on Homer’s Odyssey.

REVIEW: A story of loyalty and vengeance, “The Return” is a stripped-down version of the Greek poem “Homer’s Odyssey.” Epic in its themes if not in its execution, the story derives much of its power from the performances of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as lovers separated by the ravages of war and time.

Director Uberto Pasolini, who co-wrote the script with John Collee and Edward Bond, skips past the more fanciful parts of Homer’s poem. There’s no cyclops, divine intervention or multi-headed monsters. Instead, it skips to Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes), the legendary Greek king of Ithaca, returning home after twenty years at war. Assumed dead, unrecognizable and mistaken for a beggar, he finds his former kingdom in disarray.

His wife Penelope (Binoche) never remarried, despite the dozens of suitors who vied for her hand. As she is pressured to choose a husband to take the throne, her son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) is threatened with death by ambitious wannabe-kings.

Before he can return home to his wife, son and throne, Odysseus must come to grips with his past as a warrior responsible for his vanquished army. “What will the people say when they see I have returned alone?” he asks. “That I led all their men to their deaths.”

Fiennes embraces this more earthbound adaptation. His Odysseus is a man beaten by war, scarred mentally and physically. “It’s everywhere,” he says of war. “It’s in everything you touch.” Just as the movie is stripped down, so is his performance. Divested of the formality and archaic language that frequently comes along with adaptations of ancient stories, “The Return” allows Fiennes to concentrate on what fundamentally makes the character interesting, his humanity.

Weary from war, he is defeated, but we still get a sense of the warrior he once was and the guile that helped him survive. It’s a terrific performance that showcases the character’s duality, at once sorrowful and frail and yet, able to muster the power that made him a king.

And, at age 61, Fiennes is ripped, sinewy and shredded, as revealed by his loose-fitting toga and a full-frontal nude scene.

Binoche is regal, displaying the kind of dualism that makes Fiennes’s Odysseus so compelling. She’s mournful at the loss of her husband, the wreck her kingdom has become and the political maneuvering that threatens the life of her son. And yet, she persists, using her wits to control the situation.

“The Return” is not a spectacle by any means. The sets and wardrobe are kept to a minimum, but the simplicity works, bringing focus to a story that could easily have been distracted by flashier design or a load of CGI.

“The Return’s” slow-ish pace and conversations with more pauses than dialogue may take some getting used to, but they are all in service of building tension, which eventually explodes in the film’s fiery climax.