Is the Odyssey a Christmas Movie?
Thoughts on Uberto Pasolini's The Return.

With the holidays behind us, it could be as good a time as any to start feeling nostalgic about Christmas. But Christmas is already a bitter-sweet holiday. We miss it, even as it is happening. Consider the song ‘White Christmas’. It was originally written with an explanatory verse. Before any dreams of snow start, the singer tells us they are trapped in Beverly Hills, LA, where a White Christmas is impossible: hence the nostalgia for holidays back home in some less sunny clime. Later, when the US entered WWII, the song became more popular. Absent troops abroad were eager for material to shape their fantasies of home. But now the narrowness of the verse got in the way: the troops were everywhere but Beverly Hills. Accordingly the songwriter, Irving Berlin, ordered that it be removed from both later recordings and sheet music. The specificity of a dream from LA clashed with a more general desire for a longed-for Christmas from anywhere, and anywhere is a significant increase in market share. Keep specific details out if you want to sell a lot of records, Berlin realized, and don’t let reality get in the way of a good fantasy.
In the US, at least, the great Christmas songs are often surprisingly elegiac, as if the centrality of a family Christmas to happiness makes it vulnerable, and brings to mind its possible loss. The melancholic kicker of ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas’ is that we find out it will happen ‘only in my dreams.’ In Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland sings ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ with the shadow of the family abandoning their St. Louis home hanging over them. They spend Christmas together, but know it might be their last, and so Garland imagines a future period of exile and eventual return: ‘until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.’ If this doesn’t seem particularly merry, Frank Sinatra agreed. He recorded the song on his ‘A Jolly Christmas’ album, but asked for the lyrics to be changed. And so we have the more ‘upbeat’, and Christian, ‘hang a shining star upon the highest bow’, and minor other changes that help focus on present jolliness, and, at least for me, ruin the mournful essence of the song.
But not just in the US. The most beloved UK Christmas song, ‘A Fairy Tale of New York’, is a gritty, edgy, realistic elegy to lost romantic dreams. Yes, the modern Christmas, as the yearly batch of seasonal romcoms prove, can take a romantic turn. The happiness of the bells ringing out for Christmas day in New York is framed by a drunk fondly remembering a lost love, even as the woman in question duets by brutally picking apart their failed, romantic New York experiment. In a few bars we go from nostalgic recollection of their first happy encounter, to bitter, curse-filled (and hilarious) recriminations, and finally, a hint of redemption: the man’s closing words that he never betrayed his lover’s dreams but, instead, ‘put them with his own’. But only a hint. Even if we believe in ‘a better’ New Year for them, we’re identifying with the male lover’s dreams, with no real evidence from the song to think it could actually happen. As with White Christmas, the song encourages our longing by separating actual happiness from our desire for it. The actual ‘Fairy Tale of New York’ is a fairy tale.
In other words, the Anglo-American Christmas seems peculiarly Odyssean. We imagine home, long for it, and miss it even as we celebrate it. And if one were to musicalize The Odyssey, one could insert any of these songs in any number of places. So finally we get to the matter at hand: Uberto Pasolini’s recent film version of The Odyssey, The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche taking on the lead roles. For despite its late-2024 release date, it seems set on undermining all this Christmas pleasure-in-pain nostalgia. If anything, the movie universalizes the bitterness in failed dreams of ‘Fairy Tale’, suffusing the film with cynicism. To be sure, even in this re-telling there are the hopes and dreams of a return from the pro-Odyssean elements on Ithaca. Penelope, as we will see–yes, there will be spoilers–insists on it until the very end. But, in stark contrast to ‘White Christmas’, reality, and particularly the sullen character of the returning Odysseus, keeps waking us up.
Pasolini opts for a hyper-realist Odyssey, with the gods, monsters, romance, and fairy tales of the first 12 books all missing, and events starting as our hero lands home, exactly ‘in the middle of things’ of the actual poem, at the start of Book 13. But Ithaca, a place we so easily associate with enchantment and desire, is fundamentally disenchanted, and Odysseus, far from the resourceful, lying, trickster of Homer, hellbent on imposing his version of social order on the world of the suitors, is fundamentally broken. Not that he is weak; far from it. After the Trojan War, he cannot control his own addiction to terrifying violence.
I was reminded of Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary study of a violent hero returning home from the US invasion of Iraq in American Sniper, where peaceful family life is destroyed by his intermittent moments of paranoia, and blind, maniacal violence seems his only option. Pasolini takes it a step further: his wily Odysseus is well aware that violence controls him, but is just as sure he can do nothing about it. This gives the story a strange sense that the race is already run, no real character change is possible, still less any happy romantic ending. The suitors are as good as dead without knowing it, but any violation of a moral order seems to matter less because Odysseus knows too well he won’t be able to control his personal hatred. He is even too spiritually weary to care much. There has been a cluster of critical efforts, inspired by the work of Jonathan Shay, to psychologize Odysseus as a soldier torn by trauma. Shay fleshes this out by protracted comparisons of Odysseus to accounts from wounded US war veterans. The Return gives a sense of what this might look like, but without the hope.
A scene that epitomizes the gloom, and perhaps my favorite in the film, is Odysseus’ encounter with his old dog Argos. In Homer, the dog, after a 20 year wait, recognizes Odysseus, wags his tail but his master, still committed to his disguise, ignores the dog, sheds a tear, and walks onward to the palace; Argos dies. Critics love delving into its puzzling complexity. In The Return, things are much simpler. Odysseus recognizes Argos, Argos recognizes him, and Odysseus even gets to pet him. But the dog dies anyway. It’s as if Argos sees not just the old Odysseus, but this new, damaged, man of pure violence, and can’t bear to look; and so his race is run. The film tries to sweep away the poem’s (and hero’s) subterfuge and get to whatever emotional core is left over, and there are moments when this is genuinely fascinating.
What of Penelope? Here Pasolini’s model seems to be a vague Freudianism. The palace, far from the sense of a 24-hour party, is a strangely joyless place, with suitors aimlessly drinking and listlessly having sex without bothering to find any privacy. Penelope wanders through it not just with self-contained disdain, but much hysterical disgust, especially at the sex. In this film, Homer’s characters’ lies and masks are replaced by ongoing tell-tale, feeling-revealing close-ups, which allow the actors, at least, to have some fun. Telemachus is very much a mother’s boy, with plenty of hints at incestuous desires lurking behind his jealousy of the suitors. In the mass-killing, instead of his Odyssean role as killer of the maid servants, he’s allowed to kill the chief suitor, who in turn is genuinely, and therefore rivalrously, in love with Penelope. Unlucky for him, as Penelope seems aware of the sexualized nature of all the violence and feels even more disgust. So Odysseus does get home for Christmas, though we feel it might have been better had it been only in his dreams.
But it’s the ending where the film tries to offer its hint of redemption, even as it wanders into uneasy ethical territory. The Odyssey does much to spare Penelope the visual reality of her husband’s gore-spattered suitor-slaughter. When they meet, it is only after a timely bath, and his latest makeover from Athena: Odysseus wears another mask as the ‘real’ version of himself. The Return lets her see Odysseus in his vile, blood-spattered, reality and makes this the cliff-hanging romantic moment. Over 20 years ago, Deborah Warner shocked audiences by the way she changed the ending of Medea. There was no chariot to fly her out of Corinth to Athens, no deus ex machina to spirit her away from what she has done. Instead, she is left to talk/cry it all out, kids’ bodies present, with what’s left of the Jason she has destroyed. Pasolini repeats the gesture, with the suitors’ blood and gore, hardened like a contemporary tattoo on Odysseus’ body, replacing Medea’s children’s bodies. It felt to me like a mixture of love at the end of the world, and whatever comes after illusions of love disappear–the Pogues song, but again without the hope. And at this moment, in a turnaround I certainly didn’t see coming, Penelope overcomes her disgust to play therapist; she gently promises that she will listen to him talk through all the trauma of the lost 20 years.
What to make of all of this? It’s certainly bleak, a moral muddle, and a disquieting take on the poem. I appreciated the boldness of the effort to recreate Homer, even as I hardly recognized it. Yet the film is at its most interesting when it plays fast and loose with the original plot. It also puts center-stage aspects of the poem too often either ignored, most obviously the grotesque domestic violence of its hero, but also the bizarre sexual and family politics on Ithaca set in motion by the absence of the patriarch. Still, the ending’s turnaround seems as implausible as it is unpleasant: how much violence, after all, can we look in the eye and forgive? Pasolini, I think, is trying to look our current reality in the eye, and admit that finding hope in the soulless circumstances of our contemporary, all-too-destructive world requires an implausible leap of forgiveness. It’s a pity I wasn’t convinced, as rescuing reasons for hope seems a worthy project. Ultimately, the film isn’t very Christmassy, and I think that must mean that it’s not all that Odyssean. Take away the gods, and the lies, and the masks, and the enchantment, even with the lofty goal of finding some kernel of emotional truth, and you run the risk of taking away the poem itself. I can also hear Irving Berlin somewhere far away, chuckling to himself, that all this reality just won’t sell.
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