Like a boyfriend who’s cheated one too many times, Hollywood recently spent a lot of time on its knees swearing that it’s changed now. Thanks to films like the Tom Cruise-endangeringMission Impossible: Rogue Nation or the heavily-practicalStar Wars: The Force Awakens, it seems that Hollywood will cease pretending that the lesson of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland was that huge 3D almost-solely-CGI spectacles are what the people want.
Instead, it’s going to get back to real filmmaking. Real, old-school filmmaking where artists go out in the world and film real shit blowin’ up and real actors doing real things.
No film has taken more advantage of this movement than the latest effort from the world’s most successful film student, Alejandro G. Inarritu, with his work on The Revenant. The film seems to be trying to ride to the Oscars on a campaign that hinges on the fact that everything you see in the film actually happened, minus the presence of a few animals.
That means DiCaprio really slept inside a dead horse and really ate a bison liver and really crawled endlessly over snow. That means the entire crew really put themselves in a lot of danger in a harsh, unforgiving environment to fight for sometimes as little as 90 minutes a day during which they were able to film.
Now, this isn’t necessarily anything new. Risk to the cast and crew go back to the earliest days of film, from the second we could put a camera in a dangerous spot, or do incredibly dangerous things like the massive flood for a 1928 film of Noah’s Ark that drowned three extras and injured numerous more that led to the implementation of major stunt safety regulations.
And since we watched Buster Keaton do incredibly dangerous hairpin stunts through our fingers in Sherlock Jr., knowing that he really was about to get hit or crushed by any number of things, there’s been contributions made to film by a real sense of danger.
But what The Revenant has done is make it foreground and make it all entirely too important to the fabric and perception of the film itself. The Revenant turned the reality of the image it is creating into the central concern, and therefore leads us to ask two simple questions:
Does the reality of the film actually matter? And therefore, does the film actually find authenticity?
Which really becomes one question, because the answer is no.
The question of authenticity in film is a difficult one because we often don’t think about it in the terms that we should. We think about authenticity in film as performative, that authenticity comes from reality. When things happen that have a physicality that we can understand visually, a film feels real.
Authenticity in film, however, should be understood artistically. It is about emotional or story truth. While the film’s construction may be artificial, it is about what the constructions pull from the story they are trying to tell. It means that it doesn’t matter whether they’re eating a slab of raw bison liver or a massive mass of red gelatin. Rather, it’s what we understand from that action that reveals something about the characters on display, or, to borrow a phrase from the director, about “the experience of being human.”
What does this reality-based approach reveal about the film The Revenant or the experience of being human? The answer, unfortunately, is very little. The film hits over and over again the point that this experience was horrible, but that’s it. His need for survival becomes clear, and again, the reality of this film does nothing to drive that home.
Moreover, there is no effect on the film itself. The Revenant doesn’t reach a new truth, or pull a new achievement from its actors because they’re going through this. Physicality is not uncommon and a film like this says nothing that countless others have not said with greater grace. There is nothing higher, nothing more to aspire to. It’s been said that this film is about everything from the triumph of the human spirit to the need to protect the lands of the First Nations to a simple exploration of what can be done with a film to the temporary pain of the process of filming becoming something greater.
It’s that last one that I’m most inclined to believe. Despite the claimed immersiveness, The Revenant often feels like a puppet show, where the strings of an artist are constantly seen dangling just out of view. But that’s not authenticity, because there’s no emotional truth in that. Not in the text of the film. It’s a process that does not serve a final product, creating a film with a sadistic production to make a film that appears to be nothing more than the vanity project of two men.
And that’s the problem. The two men receiving the most recognition so far, DiCaprio and Inarritu, are the ones who likely were the safest, asking the crew and the rest of the cast to put themselves out on the limb that the two would never truly be on with them. It’s a bad lesson, and it reinforces an ideal of an artist that should not exist. Bending to the will of a “great man” should not be what we do on film sets.
Most of all, authenticity is your reason to care. True authenticity is what pulls you inside of a film. Look at Carol. It’s a film that revels and makes clear at every step its artificial construction, an immaculate and guided hand. Yet that construction reveals emotional truth time and time again. It finds something to say and it finds something within its story through its constructions. It is artificial, but the artificiality is what finds authenticity.
That’s not something that’s in The Revenant. And over the next few weeks, you’re going to hear a lot about The Revenant and how authentic it was, what the great men who made this film had to go through. Don’t believe it for a second. The Revenant is a phony film, masking itself in the guise of a real one, because it had nothing to say.
Demand real authenticity from your films. Demand that your films have something to say. If you want to find something real in film, look for it in your reaction, your thoughts, not just what’s on screen.
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