Just a
year after Birdman’s
Oscar gave Academy voters the temporary illusion of rewarding innovative and
challenging works of art, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest bag of
shock-and-awe tricks stands ready to deliver again: Actorly navel-gazing and
pop culture satire are replaced by fashionable against-all-odds survivalism
sprinkled with a pinch of self-flattering plastic antiracism; the apparently
successful resurrection of Michael Keaton’s career makes way for the pre-guaranteed
consecration of Leonardo DiCaprio’s bi-decadal hunt for an Oscar. Calculated
though these thematic and casting choices may be, The Revenant did at the very least have the potential to entertain
as consistently as Birdman. Unfortunately, this time the machinery behind
the magic trick has proved too cumbersome for Iñárritu to handle.
Given
the historical and geographical setting of Hugh Glass’s real-life 200-mile trek
across the South Dakotan wilderness after surviving a bear attack, it isn’t
surprising that Iñárritu and co-screenwriter Mark L. Smith would want to use
his story as a case study of the Old West pioneer myth, its philosophical base
assumptions and the political realities behind it. Left for dead by his fellow
white frontiersmen, aided by friendly Native tribespeople, hiding from hostile
Arikara (referred to in the film as Ree)
and besieged by climactic conditions unmeant to support human life, Glass’s
successful journey is an account of many, contradictory things: the triumph of
human will over nature, the lengths men will go to for their own
self-preservation, the lifesaving virtues of cross-ethnic empathy, the
perennial opposition and redefinition of “civilization” and “savagery”, the
motivating power of anger, the spiritual emptiness of revenge…
Iñárritu’s
naturalistic approach – exemplified by his decision to shoot in natural light –
and the screenplay’s addition of a fictional half-Pawnee son and dead Pawnee
wife both suggest a tentative reach for these ideas; re-teaming with Birdman’s Oscar-winning cinematographer
Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu multiplies that film’s long takes times hundred with
the clear intent to transpose his coworker’s splendid capture of otherness,
discovery and alienation in The New World
into a pitiless Herzogian tale of human hubris and self-destruction. It soon
becomes apparent, however, that these choices are little more than artistic
conceits, more illustrative of Iñárritu’s demiurgic ego than they are of a
solidly structured vision. He draws on his director of photography’s experience
with Terrence Malick to give Glass’s journey spiritual meaning but retains only
the shallowest outlines of his work, and they’re a particularly poor fit for his
ostentatious, powder-to-the-eyes filmmaking style. This is especially evident
in the laughably ham-fisted flashback and dream sequences, which mainly consist
of Glass’s fictional dead Pawnee wife whispering pseudo-inspiring metaphors and
– in an embarrassing display of self-bastardization on Lubezki’s part – floating
amongst the trees like Jessica Chastain in The
Tree Of Life.
In
Malick’s films, the actors are like dancers whose bodies are seized, fragmented
and juxtaposed to create a single harmonious movement. Knowingly or not, they
surrender themselves to the camera, float in a space-time construct governed by
emotion rather than physics. In his quest to film continuous action and englobe
his characters’ grueling physical experiences in their totality, Iñárritu
drowns the actors’ performances in empty displays of virtuosity instead of
using his skill to call attention to anything they might be expressing. Like in
21 Grams and Babel, Iñárritu seems more interested in his actors’ outwards
expressions of pain and their physical efforts to express or overcome it than he
is in their state of mind. Emotionally disconnected
from a camera that constantly pans from his face to whichever act of violence
he’s busy enduring, escaping or committing, DiCaprio’s magnificent performance
drifts somewhere between the director and the audience like a cinematic Jack
O’Lantern.
It’s a
tragic but not altogether surprising irony that Iñárritu should only partially
succeed in capturing Glass’s ordeal despite doing everything in his power to make
the audience feel every second of it; rain, blood, snot and flesh all get
hurled at the camera lens like an impetuous child desperately calling for your
attention. Perhaps inspired by similar instances of camera abuse in Saving Private Ryan and Children Of Men (another film shot by Emmanuel Lubezki), Iñárritu forgets the
careful timing and sparsity that gave these moments their visceral impact and treats
them instead as tokens of “gritty realism”. In one of the film’s more effective
flourishes, the camera closes in on Glass’s face as he cradles his dead son in
the snow and fogs up the camera lens with his breath. The mist gently spreads
across the frame and envelops the characters like a cocoon, temporarily erasing
the outside world. As a quasi-abstract visualization of parental grief, the
image is moving and memorable. Unfortunately, the effect’s reoccurrence in more
mundane situations only further demonstrates Iñárritu’s apparent lack of
control or understanding of his own prowess.
More’s
the pity, as scenes in which he does
manage to bring his ideas, style and methods into unity offer tantalizing
glimpses of a genuinely immersive film. The highpoint of such scenes is the much-discussed
bear attack scene, which is filmed in one long continuous shot that connects to
the audience through careful yet inconspicuously-staged beats. Because Iñárritu
is momentarily refraining from his distracting fascination with the purely corporal
aspect of the experience as well as his infatuation with the act of filming it,
he is able to bring his audience perilously close to the life-or-death struggle
without overshadowing it.
Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s emancipation from Guillermo Arriaga’s infuriating
connect-the-dots life lessons has had the downside of revealing his lack of
truly consistent, personal vision: Other than protagonists slowly graduating
towards physical or spiritual death (or
in Hugh Glass’s case, stubbornly resisting death only to arrive at an emotional
dead end), the only thing that binds Biutiful,
Birdman and The Revenant together is their director’s unfettered need to
impress privileged left-of-center audiences with stylistic and political
swagger. This is usually accomplished by writing the protagonist as the crystallizing
emblem of whichever political or cultural topic Iñárritu wishes to use as a
backdrop: The exploitation of illegal migrant workers with Biutiful’s Uxbal, the superhero genre’s conquest of Western
imagination with Birdman’s Riggan
Thomson and the plunder of Native American life and land with The Revenant’s Hugh Glass.
Unlike
the first two examples, which at least tackled the issues with some degree of
sincerity, The Revenant’s artificial pro-Indian narrative is gradually exposed as
little more than self-congratulatory window dressing. Aside from Glass’s
mixed-race son, there are exactly three Native American characters with
speaking roles. One is a lone Pawnee tribesman who offers Glass food, shelter
and a pearl of wisdom on the futility of revenge before getting tragically killed
by racist French trappers; the other two are a landless Pawnee chief whose search
for his kidnapped daughter constitutes a mostly-disposable C-plot, and the
daughter herself, who exists solely to be raped by the French before Glass
rescues her and gives her the means to enact revenge upon her rapist, all in
the span of roughly ten minutes, without any further characterization. Devoid
of any real substance or dimension, these characters amount to little more than
foils, helpers and motivators for the white protagonist.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s mostly silent, quietly explosive performance has gotten all the lion’s share of media attention, but the acting is admirable across the board. Domnhall Gleeson plays expedition leader Andrew Henry with grizzled authority viewers used to his humble, audience-surrogate performances in Frank or About Time will no doubt find surprising. Fluctuating between subdued predation and grotesque monstrosity, Tom Hardy makes an effective villain out of Glass’s nemesis John Fitzgerald, although his performance may suffer by the comparisons it invites to his more multilayered work in The Drop and Lawless. As reluctant partner-in-crime Jim Bridger, Will Poulter counters Hardy’s ogre-like countenance with deft sensitivity.
There is
some enjoyment, even admiration to derive from the heavy artillery The Revenant deploys for its audience’s
viewing pleasure, and the relentless zeal with which Iñárritu strives to make
every effort plain to see. As tiresome as they can get, the epic tracking shots
of Glass’s suffering achieve a kind of artfulness if one regards them less as
attempts to restitute one man’s lived experience and more as a chronicle of the
extremities actor and director are willing to go to for their art.
M’as-tu-vu. An expression that couldn’t fit this kind of
filmmaking better if it had been created specifically to describe it; a
question that one can almost hear behind DiCaprio’s exhausted eyes as he slowly
turns his gaze towards the camera for the film’s closing shot: Did you see me?
Well, we
did. But you didn’t need to try so hard for us to do so.
