Is this all there is to Alejandro González Iñárritu? Visually immaculate films
that are thin and almost totally empty, whose only true thematic concerns are
what a great filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu is? It’s starting to seem
that way, and The Revenant is just the latest gorgeous, hollow and largely
pointless work from a director who has convinced so many that his stark nudity
is actually a sumptuous set of clothes.
Loosely - and I mean LOOSELY - based on the novel of the same name, which was
based on the true story of frontiersman Hugh Glass. The Revenant sees Leonardo
DiCaprio mauled by a bear, left for dead, and stumbling through the wilderness
in search of vengeance. In the true story Glass did it all just because the men
he was with had left him behind, weaponless, to die. The movie adds a murdered
son (a half-breed, so we can get racial injustice in there as well) to the
equation to really give us that extra dose of Hollywood pathos. That dead son
brings little to the film except more minutes to endure.
You could walk in on any one scene of The Revenant and assume you’re watching a
masterpiece; the cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki is often stunning, and the
frames are composed with a master’s confidence. But they don’t mean anything - a
particularly
gorgeous shot of Glass walking alone on a frozen river, flanked by great grey
gloomy ridges of mountains makes for a fine image but imparts no new emotional
information at that moment in the story. A great cinematic image is made up of
more than composition and lighting, it’s made up of intrinsic contextual
meaning. One of the reasons I hate the “One Perfect Shot” school of
cinematography appreciation is that it leaves context behind; a great shot is
partially great because of the story it is telling, the emotion it is conveying,
the character it is describing. Great shots cannot be disconnected from the
whole because truly great shots inform the whole. So little in The Revenant
means anything that I assume the One Perfect Shot crowd will be going apeshit
over its meticulously composed, emotionally sterile imagery.
DiCaprio grunts, groans, screams, crawls and grimaces his way through the film,
but he only captures the red hot madness of Glass once. Late in the film,
explaining that he will not stop seeking vengeance, he becomes convincingly
demented and we can finally see the furnace of hate that has fueled his trip.
But before that DiCaprio often comes off as hapless, less a force of nature and
more a feather tumbling on the wind, a particularly grungy Forrest Gump in the
forest.
If the performance had more of that hate it would have been better, but the way
he plays Glass feels more like a passion play in which his angelic features (DiCaprio
never convinces as a
weathered mountain man) take the brunt of two hours of sadistic abuse. The
awards marketing angle for the movie has been how tough the conditions were
(it’s the arthouse version of Tom Cruise does his own stunts), but eating dirt
doesn’t make a great performance. What’s worse, the movie’s precision of
filmmaking often robs scenes of their visceral impact, never allowing the
audience to truly feel the cold and the pain.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Tom Hardy as Fitzgerald, a cruelly
selfish trapper who kills Glass’ son and leaves the man buried alive. Hardy’s
brand of mumbling and oddball internalization works wonders here, and he creates
a delicious villain who brushes right up against being hammy. There is no actor
more fun to watch than Tom Hardy, and when the film focuses on him it comes
immediately to life. Hardy isn’t chasing an Oscar or trying to prove himself
here, he’s just sinking into his heavy furs and grungy make-up and is being this
guy.
Hardy is joined by Will Poulter’s Bridger, looking perfectly like a first
generation back county shire boy, and their relationship is what kept me going
through the film’s interminable runtime.
Poulter is the youngest member of a beaver trapping expedition that gets waylaid
by a vicious Indian attack, and he is one of the few survivors. He gets caught
up in the drama surrounding Glass - the group’s guide - when the man is savagely
mauled by a bear (in a sequence so extended it played like comedy to me) and
ends up on the precipice of death. When Fitzgerald kills Glass’ son and leaves
the guide for dead Bridger becomes an unwitting accomplice. Together Bridger and
Fitzgerald make their way through the wilderness back to base and Bridger is
haunted not just by the violence Fitzgerald has committed but by the violence
committed against the natives. Poulter is great, and he and Hardy make a
terrific team, bouncing off each other in tension and fear.
But The Revenant isn’t their story, and so the film keeps going back to the
solitary journey of Hugh Glass through breathtaking scenery shot in natural
light. Along that journey Iñárritu sprinkles visions and dreams - a mountain of
buffalo skulls, flashbacks to atrocities against Indians, floating dead wives -
that add up to very little. Each sequence is wonderful, but their on-the-nose
metaphorical meaning blunts any impact. Ham-handed, thy name is Iñárritu.
For most of the film’s running time I was satisfied with it as a muscular
survival tale. Iñárritu, who co-wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, leaves out
much of the pretentious pontificating that made Birdman so suffocating… until
the end. There’s a sequence at the end that tries to tie up the themes of the
piece in a sequence that is laughable, that plays into the noble savage
stereotype in a huge way and that requires DiCaprio to speak aloud the moral
lesson of the movie. Iñárritu couldn’t trust us to connect the dots! He was
worried his flashy genius might blind us, I guess.
It is frustrating that a filmmaker as technically gifted as Iñárritu is this
hollow.. His collaborations with Lubezki have been visually phenomenal, and
Iñárritu knows how to tell a story and he has an attention to detail that is
impressive. But he uses these gifts in the service of movies that exist only to
reflect glory back onto himself. In his endless scramble to make movies that are
capital "I" Important he keeps forgetting to make movies that are honest, or
emotionally vulnerable, or that contain any truth. The Revenant is so prettily
constructed that it’s painful to admit how ridiculous it actually is, and how
empty it feels to watch a gruff, pseudo-mystical Western consisting of two
actors method-style grunting their way toward an inevitable showdown in the
snow.
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