THE REVENANT: A Dish Served Cold

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Mark L. Smith, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Leondardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Runtime: 156 mins.
2015

Iñárritu has done it again. Following hot on the heels of his Best Picture win with Birdman, he has crafted yet another arthouse film that has thrust its way into mainstream consciousness. The Revenant has garnered a ton of buzz, topped the box office, and snagged a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. However, and I promise you I'm not simply being contrarian when I say this: The Revenant is a narrative failure. It's a bad story told haphazardly, yet in the most stylistically impressive way imaginable. It's all the more disappointing because it was close to being so much better.

Let's ignore the buzz surrounding the movie for a while. All that business about how difficult it was to film, and how Leo DiCaprio almost got killed a dozen times over--that'll come up later. For now let's just look at the film. Much of the runtime follows a scout for a party of trappers named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). He gets into arguments with fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) about how best to get back to safety in the wake of a brutal Native American raid. Then he gets destroyed by a bear. Glass appears to be slowly dying, so team captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) elects three men to stay behind and take care of him: Glass's half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the young and goodhearted Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the aforementioned greedy bastard Fitzgerald. The raiding party could come back at any point, so Fitzgerald goes ahead and tries to kill Glass, then kills Hawk instead and hides the body so that he and Bridger can move on, leaving Glass in a shallow grave. But Fitzgerald underestimates Glass's ability to crawl long distances.


All that sounds spoilery, but it's all in the trailer, and anyway it provides the basic premise for what will be far more misery to come.

If you find The Revenant compelling, my first question for you is this: What is the movie about? Clearly revenge is the central motivator, but can you think of any other defining narrative characteristics? Glass's thirst for revenge is utterly basic: He killed my son, I will kill him. It's never complicated or explored, except in an extremely hackneyed final moment. It's never even discussed, since Glass spends 95% of the movie crawling around and grunting to nobody in particular. The closest we get to a dialogue about revenge is Glass scrawling, "FITZGERALD KILLED MY SON" on some rocks a couple times, which is an embarrassing cliche. Glass doesn't have an arc beyond the purely physical, which perhaps could have been interesting in a movie half this length, but Iñárritu drags it out to unreasonable proportions.

The issue isn't that I have a short attention span, or that prolonged miserabilism perturbs me. On the contrary I love slow stories, and I love dark stories of despair. Two of the movies in my Top Ten of 2015 list were structurally very similar to The Revenant: long, slow burn Westerns with desultory tones and bursts of hyperviolence. The difference is that The Hateful Eight and Bone Tomahawk are constantly innovating and surprising on a narrative level. Characters have relationships, dynamics change, themes are explored. Those two movies also have the benefit of some of the most crackling, intelligent dialogue of the year. The Revenant does none of this. It merely hits the same exact beats over and over again. Nature beats Leo. Leo beats Nature. Nature beats Leo. Leo beats Nature. How many times are we expected to watch Leo wake up after a long period of unconsciousness and still be interested?

I keep calling him Leo for a reason. For large portions of this movie, I didn't feel like I was watching a character. I felt like I was just watching Leonardo DiCaprio getting the living hell beat out of him. Glass's character is so paper-thin that you can't help but see right through it. That's part of why the filming circumstances were so heavily publicised: Even though from a performance craft perspective DiCaprio is doing nothing interesting at all, you can still be impressed because of his sheer physical commitment to Iñárritu's painful vision. It stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling like a carnival act. To be clear, I think DiCaprio is a tremendous actor who certainly deserves an Academy Award--but please oh please, not for this film. It's not even his fault. The script gives him absolutely nothing to work with. His only traits are grim determination, and that he is always hearing whispers about how strong he is.

Those whispers are in the Pawnee language and are apparently representing the memory of his wife, another shallow attempt at audience manipulation that never amounts to anything. Whenever Leo goes unconscious, he starts hearing these whispers and seeing visions of his wife floating over him. It's meant to feel Deep and Emotional, but half the time it comes off as comical.

One of my favorite aspects of The Revenant is the unintentional comedy. About halfway through the film I started thinking of it as a prolonged piece of slapstick, and it helped me get through the interminable runtime. I think the film is so accidentally funny because at a certain point of excess, it becomes a parody of itself. The bear attack, for example. You're watching Leo get mauled and ripped around and it's pretty unbearable, but the bear stops after a while. As it's walking around Leo shoots it in the face with his rifle and it gets this hilarious pissed off bear expression on its face before going at Leo for another couple minutes. Then they both tumble down a hill and the bear lands on top of him.

If my mirth is beginning to sound tasteless to you, keep in mind that the only difference between stomach-churning drama and hilarious comedy is tone. The exact same scripted sequence directed by two different people with different framing and scoring could come off as either disturbing or funny. Just look at how masters like the Coen's straddle that line. In this instance, Iñárritu fails at his hyperserious tone, and the excessiveness just becomes weird comic relief. Every new time Leo fell off a new cliff and got crumpled up again, I had to stifle laughter. When Leo scrawls that bit on the stone, I had to stifle laughter. When Leo and a Native American buddy start sticking their tongues out to catch snowflakes and giggling with each other--and then when the tongue-sticking and giggling continues to the next scene--and then when Leo goes from tongue-sticking one second to falling unconscious off his horse the next, I really had to stifle laughter. If I had laughed out loud it would have been disrespectful to the sanctity and purity of Iñárritu's vision.

For whatever reason--probably the excruciating runtime--the movie does not stick with Leo the whole time. It bounces around between him, Fitgerald, Henry and his men, and the Native American raiding party. The editing is awkward and there is no reason for these transitions because none of these other parties have stories to tell either. We just see them going where they're going. The movie especially has no idea what to do with the Indians. It seems to want to root us in their perspective so that we don't think the movie thinks that Native Americans are savages, but it also refuses to give them any sort of a perspective worth showing. Then there's a weird part at the end where Native Americans are supposed to represent God or some nonsense like that.

It's a very good thing the film keeps cutting to Fitzgerald, because Tom Hardy carries this film. His cartoonish bug-eyed trapper is a perfect pulpy villain, and Hardy somehow manages to singlehandedly inject some fun into this savage slough of a film. Fitzgerald is greedy, manipulative, uncouth, and gloriously mumbly. Hardy is one step away from twirling his moustache and rubbing his hands together when he gets a dastardly idea. He elevates this film by working against the self-serious current.

As a storyteller, Iñárritu has little to say. Maybe he knows this, and that is why he has perfected the craft of getting one up on critics with his annual boondoggles. After all, it is undeniable that his films are impressive on the surface. The Revenant is stunning on every conceivable technical level. The score is immersive mood music that I've been listening to while playing video games. The cinematography is flat out gorgeous. The long takes are cool, albeit a bit too flashy. The lighting is primal and eerie. The expertly crafted sound design does more than perhaps any other aspect to place the audience right in the middle of this harsh landscape. The editing is a bit rubbish, though it is hobbled by script issues. In summary, The Revenant is a masterful exercise in assembling a team of creative geniuses to bring your vision to life.

But... what is that vision, exactly? This, for me, is where it all falls to pieces. It's a shame too, because there is an incredible film to be made from the raw materials of The Revenant. An exploration of God and purpose in frontier life. I even enjoyed the first half hour of the movie, as it seemed to be setting up for just such a narrative. Unfortunately, Iñárritu is only interested in paying lip service to these ideas.

Sometimes movies come along where no particular aspect is that impressive--the acting is workmanlike, the visuals decent, the writing run of the mill--and yet everything congeals into an enjoyable experience. These movies are more than the sum of their parts. The Revenant, however, is the perfect example of a movie that amounts to far less than the sum of its parts. Art is more than an exercise in accumulating quantitative skill. A work of art needs a soul, the part of a story that is worth telling. Otherwise, you get The Revenant: all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

2 / 5  BLOBS