I’m going to throw this in off the top: I might not be the most objective reviewer of the work of Alejandro González Iñárritu. This is not, however, just because he said the following in an interview with Deadline about superhero films: “They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.”
While that statement certainly doesn’t help endear me to him, what bothers me most is the arrogance contained within it.
The more you study art (of any kind), the more it becomes apparent that many of the great artists weren’t necessarily great people. In fact, arrogance is kind of key to artistry — believing that you’re so brilliant that you deserve the right to tell a story. But even among great and important artists, arrogance must be earned.
Iñárritu, for me, simply hasn’t earned that arrogance. For someone so apparently concerned about the experience of being human in other films, he seems to be very unwilling to show this experience in his own films. He stands above the crowd of his audience and declares himself excessively through his films, creating works that are ploddingly literal, showy and demand that you applaud what he’s telling you without ever caring to make you feel.
“Cheer me,” he seems to say. “For I am the great Artist.”
Now, what the hell does my personal vendetta have to do with The Revenant?To put it simply, that same above-the-crowd arrogance that so infects Iñárritu’s work at every other step leaves his latest film feeling cold and inhuman, no matter how hauntingly beautiful it is.
The Revenant is based on the 2002 novel of the same name, which is inspired (mostly) on the life of tracker and frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). While on a hunting expedition, Glass is attacked by a bear and brought to the edge of death. He is left for dead by two men, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and ultimately, Fitzgerald kills Glass’ son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) to prevent his protests about leaving his father to die.
But you can’t keep Glass down, as he pulls himself out of the shallow grave that Fitzgerald and Bridger leave him in. And with nothing but revenge in his heart, he drags himself across the frozen mountain and desperately fights for survival so he can kill Fitzgerald for killing his son.
Obviously, this is one hell of a cinematic story. And certainly, Iñárritu and his script-writing co-conspirator Mark L. Smith take every advantage of the situations that they can use.
DiCaprio is forced to crawl across miles of snow, eat raw fish and sleep inside the carcass of a horse — apparently without an ounce of acting (the talk around the film is that he actually did all those things, and I believe it). The film does have a very admirable tactile nature to it; you never have any doubts that what you’re seeing on screen is happening (outside of some surprisingly shoddy CGI work with animals).
But I feel like much of that may be thanks to the real cinematic genius at work here, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. He seems to be unlike any other cinematographer working in the industry today, wedding near perfect dramatic lighting and long, gorgeous camera movements with a constant sense of experimentation. Despite having just come off his second Oscar win, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), (and likely moving into his third), it feels like every one of his films constantly tops the one before it.
For The Revenant, the challenge that Lubezki took on was filming the entire thing in natural lighting. And by gum, he did it. There’s not a trick here at all; it seems that everything was lit by the sun, the moon and the fires the characters carry. It’s a ridiculously impressive feat to pull off, and it adds to the real and raw sense of the world that this film inhabits. It’s more than deserving of an Oscar nomination, and I’d even argue it’s deserving of a win.
It’s an impressiveness that carries over to the performances. The overwhelming narrative of DiCaprio “deserving an Oscar” (despite him never truly having the best performance in any year) seems to have finally gotten to DiCaprio himself. He’s fighting for it by any means necessary, turning a raw, terrifying and huge performance, seemingly committing himself to an absolutely physical show that’s willing to push his body to the limits. If he’s ever going to get that Oscar, it’ll probably be for this.
And Hardy as Fitzgerald truly manages to elevate the role above the admittedly weak writing of his character. While it seems Fitzgerald is incapable of doing or saying anything that isn’t clearly rude at best and evil at worst, Hardy uses his body language and his wide eyed stare to give the character a few more layers — not many, but a few.
It’s the character of Fitzgerald that begins to speak to the biggest problem of this film. Often, a villain is indicative of what a film is about — what the film is scared of in humanity, or what it represents. And this film doesn’t know who the villain is.
To get more to the point, the film doesn’t know what it’s about. Or frankly, seem to care all that much what it’s about. Remember that arrogance I spoke about earlier? It rears its ugly head here in how removed Iñárritu is from the material. He’s above it, crafting this artistic masterwork of excess. Every vista is sweeping, every performance is huge and everything is gritty and brutal and uncomfortable. The film is so intent on showing itself that it never lets you in to talk.
At no point in watching The Revenant did I feel lost in its world. At no point did I empathize with the characters, outside of a few visceral reactions to some, well, viscera. At every point of the film, I was aware that I was watching the proceedings of a film on screen, and again, I never felt lost in the world that it so clearly wanted me to be lost in.
What this means is that at some point, when the technical excess and the insanity of the performance wears off, The Revenant is honestly simply boring.
It gives its audience no reason to care. The artistry can only last so long, as eventually one becomes used to the tricks and the trade. At that point, a cruel and ugly reality sets in: the film is just a whole bunch of purposeless actions happening and there’s not one damned reason to care.
The Revenant is gorgeous. The filmtook a lot of work and had a lot of time and effort put into its construction. But The Revenant has no reason to exist, beyond simply proving the fact that some great artist could do this. It’s a cold, inhuman and thin film with the flashiest and shiniest of exteriors.
GRADE: C
