"The Revenant"

There is an expression in the French language that describes the act of showing off in a way that underlines, quite elegantly, the guilty party’s need to be seen and the implicit desire for approval that being gazed at entails. That expression is m’as-tu-vu; it means did you see me and there is perhaps no word in any other language known to man that better fits The Revenant, so succinctly does it sum up the narcissistic vanity that guides its aesthetic and narrative choices even as it notes the obvious effort put into carrying them out.

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.