Bronze Age Fragility

A Review of The Return

Exhausted with superhero movies, Hollywood has turned its baleful eye towards other source material to corral men into the theatres. Is bronze age vitalism going to be the next content mine for movies? One has to imagine that the chatter in the manosphere eventually works its way to the ears of producers. After all, what stories do guys tend to like above all others? Without a doubt, stories about big muscular men in ancient times avenging by the sword all the wrongs done to their families. Like in Braveheart. Or Gladiator. Or, more recently, the Northman. Finally, this year, there is The Return.

It is a brilliant choice of narrative framing. Odysseus after long years away in war and wandering returns to Ithaca to set things right in his household. This has a primal appeal. As Johnny Cash knew, we all long to see what happens When The Man Comes Around. This film is a very earthy adaptation of only that homecoming depicted in the latter half of the Odyssey, declining to reference the wilder stories or really any supernatural elements of the epic. Personally, I think it makes the film weaker to have left out the goddess Athena’s role in this sequence. But that would maybe involve too much glory. That’s not what the film wants to be about. The film is about the most earthly limitations of men, their sorrows and failures.

We are at a potent moment for political allegory –we fear political instability more than ever in our nation. The Protestant ruling class that once made America great seems to be dwindling into history. We, the young, stand like Telemachus, impatient, unready, surrounded by cunning would-be successors who have come across land and sea for a shot at the throne. 

The central question I had going into the film was this: would it manfully convey the aristocratic ethos of the heroic age, or would it bend the story to fit modern-day feminist sensibilities? Dear reader, I must express regret that I found the story of this film painfully twisted, with the same pitiable contortions wracking the bodies of the beggars shambling and tweaking along the sidewalks outside the movie theatre I attended today. If only kingly men might return to our land and deal justice in the city — but for now I am only equipped to deal with the injustice of story.

As soon as the characters began speaking to each other, I could sense the film was failing my test, and it just got worse and worse as the story rolled on. The Disney Channel ethos at work here is hardly capable of conveying a society of nobility and honor. The Return makes that fatal mistake of emphasizing its characters’ relatability rather than the glory of their ancient foreignness. The film’s 2022 analogue, the Northman, did much better on this front, striving to convey the spirit of another age with few adjustments to modern piety. But here the enchantment is all lost in a murk of 21st century moralizing. We miss so many great opportunities to see magnanimity in action that you have to wonder whether it’s incompetence or deliberate.

The people of Ithaca depicted here do not act and talk like ancient people, except in moments of the most hamfisted and clunky dialogue seeking to explain the nefarious deeds of the suitors, repeated over and over to make sure the easily bewildered modern audience gets the social dynamic at play. 

Worst of all, Odysseus himself is not kingly — instead he has internalized his beggar status. He’s shattered. Traumatized by war. We only catch glimpses of the godlike Odysseus described by Homer. Here only in the stringing of the war bow do we see him exert unquestioned prowess over the other men. The rest of the time, he looks ready to crumple like a paper doll. Even his slaughter of the suitors is rendered as a pathetic affair. They’re not honorable foes. They cower behind tables and fall one by one without a fight. It feels more like a school shooting than a king executing justice. Nor is there any sense of rallying a band of loyal men to his cause as in the epic. Eumaeus the swineherd, instead of helping his lord faithfully in the battle, watches on sadly from the wall as the highly curated multiethnic assortment of millennial dudes groan in pools of their own blood. It borders on satire, but nobody’s laughing.

I’m going to guess this is all intentional on the part of the filmmakers. They are willing to play with some ambiguities, but mostly they seem to be scolding Odysseus for killing the men who they’ve spent the whole movie hyping up as savage rapists and thieves. The filmmakers also lack the cojones to depict scenes such as Telemachus hanging the unfaithful servant girls. Not that I think we need more violence in cinema, but I’m merely trying to point out the way that the customs of the present day distort our desire to represent the past accurately.

It’s this kind of prudishness in our era that requires the storytellers to dull the very edge by which the bronze age ethos and its raw power are so marvelous to us. Anyone willing and able to read through Homer (or the Old Testament) will find heavy metal stories operating on a level of testosterone inconceivable to us. Instead, today we have therapy-infused cinema such as this, devoid of glory, only able to offer hand-wringing moralizing, doubts, anguish.

Should Christians wholeheartedly embrace the violence of the ancient pagan glory ethic as a compulsive reaction against effeminacy today? Of course not. But I submit that the ancient pagan glory ethic is simply more truthful to the nature of reality, and attentiveness to its violence and its passions will teach you a lot more than the self-righteousness of contemporary therapeutic storytelling.

Juliette Binoche gives a fine performance as Penelope, sorrowful yet cunning, tinged with desire, but by the end, her character is tragically rewritten in the most obnoxious ways possible. She is appointed as something like the ‘voice of morality’ according to the whims of the writers. Rather than being grateful for her king’s return and the justice he executes on the people who have been tormenting her, she reprimands him for the slaughter in her house and challenges him on other war crimes he likely committed back at Troy. Meanwhile, they have to continue making her character ‘more complex’ with insinuations that she and Antinous had some sort of profound emotional connection with one another, that maybe in some mysterious way he’s a better man than Odysseus, because he doesn’t fight back but sits primly on his moral high horse. 

Pacifist Antinous asks Penelope about her blood-soaked husband during the slaughter: ‘Is this the love you wanted?’ and then she screams ‘no!’ as her family butchers the man. She then claims to disown Telemachus for his part in the killing. Why on earth would an ancient queen lament her son becoming a man capable of slaying those threatening to kill him and take his kingdom? Where are they getting this ethic from?

The drama there feels laughably forced. The film concludes with Odysseus hanging his head like a naughty dog who has torn up all the furniture and gotten caught. He asks forgiveness from his wife, desperately begging her for moral approval. For some inscrutable reason, only then she decides to forgive him, bathes away his bloodstains, and assures him, ‘they’ll grow old as friends together.’ What? Friends? What am I supposed to take away from that — that she’s thankful he did all the dirty work, but he’s so weak and icky she’ll never really love him again? 

The essential moment of the homecoming then, the loving reunion of Odysseus with his wife, is completely butchered. If you have the misfortune to make it all the way through this film, at the very least do read Book 23 of the Odyssey right afterward to cleanse your mind. Here’s how Pope renders it:

Touch’d to the soul, the king with rapture hears,

Hangs round her neck, and speaks his joy in tears.

As to the shipwreck’d mariner, the shores

Delightful rise, when angry Neptune roars:

Then, when the surge in thunder mounts the sky,

And gulf’d in crowds at once the sailors die;

If one, more happy, while the tempest raves,

Outlives the tumult of conflicting waves,

All pale, with ooze deform’d, he views the strand,

And plunging forth with transport grasps the land:

The ravish’d queen with equal rapture glows,

Clasps her loved lord, and to his bosom grows.

Nor had they ended till the morning ray,

But Pallas backward held the rising day,

The wheels of night retarding, to detain

The gay Aurora in the wavy main;

Whose flaming steeds, emerging through the night,

Beam o’er the eastern hills with streaming light.

The other character relationships are also senselessly ruined. The filmmakers are perversely willing to torch good character development in order to drum up fake momentary drama that doesn’t end up meaning anything. Telemachus is not a prince but a whiny brat who resents his father for his absence. Bizarrely, Laertes dies offscreen without even seeing his son, meaning another chance to explore the kingly father-son dynamic is bungled.

In an odd sense, it might not even be the filmmakers’ fault. Maybe the filmmakers don’t trust us as an audience to have the capacity for wonder at the bronze age mindset of a man who feels no qualms about killing a hundred men inside his own house, who is not crippled by war trauma but was in fact made for it, because he is a lordly man unlike us in bearing. Or maybe they just don’t want us to sympathize with a man who claims what is rightfully his.

Must a good man only be haunted by his past battles? Now, I can’t complain too much about Odysseus being portrayed as sorrowful about the past because that is a universal human experience, and the epic itself, at points, does depict him as deeply moved by his war stories.

Touch’d at the song, Ulysses straight resign’d

To soft affliction all his manly mind.

Before his eyes the purple vest he drew,

Industrious to conceal the falling dew;

But when the music paused, he ceased to shed

The flowing tear, and raised his drooping head;

And, lifting to the gods a goblet crown’d,

He pour’d a pure libation to the ground.

But there’s also kleos in the epic’s recollection of the past, too. There’s a paradox, sorrow and glory mingled. The filmmakers’ unwillingness to portray glory as glory, and other Homeric notions alien to us, robs the story of its power. Maybe we don’t deserve it. We can’t comprehend the concept. We don’t know what glory is. We don’t know what a king is. It’s all very well if you want to challenge a particular man’s claim to glory or kingship — it’s not hard to imagine an unchristian love for glory. But our culture is so radically opposed to the very idea of kingly glory to the point of being antichrist, by breaking down our ability to even conceive of who Christ is.

Ultimately, the film is a disappointment, and it intends to be. It doesn’t want you to feel good about kingship, war, or even being a man. Men in this film are weak, broken, passive, unready, or sadistic, but never good or strong. Standing imperiously above them all is the infinitely valuable queen, whose moral approval they crave. It’s not just that they need to win her as the ultimate prize; it’s that woman is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil in men, so to be at rest, they must acquire her ethical endorsement. It’s pathetic.

As such, the filmmakers have either essentially mistaken the nature of those two core themes of Greek epics: kleos (glory) and nostos (homecoming). Or they don’t care, or they deliberately want to obscure those concepts. Regardless the result isn’t good.

There are glimmers of beauty in the visual composition. The filmmakers know how to play with sunlight, flame, and shadow, creating a fabulistic glow that permeates the film’s visuals. Some blocking of particular exterior shots takes great influence from classical painting. The best moments are distant shots of men in loincloths quietly navigating the enchanted landscape of Corfu. However, the problems begin as soon as characters start speaking. Up close, one no longer feels transported to an unfathomably ancient realm, but instead, it feels like watching any other film made for Netflix. The interaction of the cast resembles something halfway between a photoshoot for Vogue and a sitcom for the Disney Channel.

This film is not great, but it at least tries to gesture in the direction of greatness. The best we can hope for is that this film is a herald of new things on the horizon in the film industry, and that more films that take greatness seriously may be on our way. But if you’re looking for a meaty cinematic tale of honor, kingship, warfare, and justice, you’re not going to find it here. This film reveals a lot more about masculinity in our day than it reveals anything about the masculinity of the ancients. Maybe someday we’ll get a great cinematic adaptation of Homer. Until then, I’ll stick with Alexander Pope’s rendering:

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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