The Revenant (2016)

The Revenant (2016)

A Great Bad Movie

Once I take this view I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves

-Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty

A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory… The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence….” 

― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

The first twenty minutes of Alejandro Inarritu’s “The Revenant” shows a brilliant filmmaker producing a magical confrontation. The art form requires an army general’s ability to coordinate vast teams of technicians and performers. This director is commander-in-chief of a violent choreographed battle that seamlessly meshes actors, animals, camerawork, special effects, costume design…. The primal dualism of the film, brutal modernity vs. prelapsarian majesty, is painted with a master’s hand. Ironically when the dust settles, the artistic troubles arise. A wonderful meditation of mankind’s plundering of Eden morphs into a exquisitely rendered, albeit soulless, revenge western. This is a metaphoric, as well as literal, tragedy. The director's original sin was seeing embellishment as the path for better drama. He needed more faith in the foundation story.

Hugh Glass, the real-life 19th century frontiersman, who was attacked by a bear and abandoned by his compatriots, embodied the ambiguous forces of America's “Manifest Destiny”. He owed his life to friendly Native peoples who bandaged him after the mauling. Decades later, however, he was murdered by native Americans while hunting on their land. This is not revealed in the film. Although not pertinent to "The Revenant’s" storyline, this knowledge might have given a more nuanced view of the Glass tale. Inarritu, however, felt the need for boldly delineated motives in order to heighten the action. Ironically it had the opposite effect. Desperate people in impossible situations are better dramatic foils than finely rendered players locked in a predictable drama. Glass’ real-life comrades committed the sin of manslaughter- abandonment, not cold blooded murder. The latter SEEMS more dramatic but fake monsters fail to compete with real men in morally vague circumstances. Consider Inarritu's embellishments. The make-believe Fitzgerald murders Glass' beloved son in front of Glass after failing to kill him. This fiction APPEARS to heighten the tension by legitimizing Glass’ revenge-quest. The invented, mixed race, son, also narratively embodies of the impossibility of peace between the native and european. The historical Glass is more opaque. There are no reports of children, although he may have married a Native American. He tracked down those who left him to die, but chose not to resort to lethal violence. The reasons behind abandoning retribution are complicated. Once again the director eschews nuance for clear narrative falsely believing the audience would be confused and bored by actual events. 

In real life Glass was genuinely forgiving of one of the pair who wronged him but not the ringleader, Fitzgerald. Glass reportedly would have killed him but never took action due to fear of prosecution. His nemesis had joined the US Army, giving him privileged status. Fitzgerald's murder would lead to Glass facing capital charges. Glass and Fitzgerald were pragmatists, rather than angels or demons. In real life their surroundings, not the people themselves, were bifurcated into heaven and hell. Their lack of agency in this dualistic world is the real drama. These men lived in a Mad Max world of clashing civilizations. This is an apocalyptic story set in a pristine setting. They acted under the laws of the... forest.  Leaving someone who is gravely ill to die of exposure might be viewed as de rigueur, rather than criminal. The real life Glass did not participate in a comic book conception of frontier justice. Inarritu embraces it. It's unfortunate the director failed to dramatically explore the link between the real men's logical choices. Instead the film basks in the popular misconceptions of the Wild West.

The film Fitzgerald wears a metaphorical black hat. He is the embodiment of mendacity. He brings to mind the biblical verse about the coming of Ishmael: And he shall be a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren. The fiction Fitzgerald re-tells a dystopian creation myth passed down by his father. The old man was starving in the wilderness and faced God, who took the form of an overweight squirrel. The father shot the animal and devoured him. Fitzgerald, in addition to sharing Daddy’s wisdom, also relates a childhood encounter with Native Americans. He was scalped and left him for dead. There are many moments where he runs his hands across the mass of scare that replaced his hair. No need to wonder why the make-believe Fitzgerald lacked empathy for the mythical white-hatted Glass. Inarritu sketches the bad guy with precision, but in the end he shares the emotional of the terrifying bear.  Glass encounters ursula minors with predictable results. Ursula major, momma bear, is a “special effects” tour de force. The hyper-realism combined with the unpredictable movements of the beast make for a adrenaline filled few minutes. Unfortunately the pyrotechnics stir the spleen, rather than the heart.  Film Fitzgerald conveys the identical emotional resonance. He fails to haunt the audience and emotionally fades into horizon with the closing credits.  The movie aboriginal people, however, are more boldly drawn. Thankfully the film ignores the classic trope “cowboys and Indians” trope. There are distinct rival groups of Native Americans with their internecine struggles. The United States and French Canadian factions, whose brutality towards each other equals their boundless hatred of the native peoples, are ringmasters of the horror show. The film casts the European descendants as villains. It cleverly chooses NOT to objectify Native Peoples by painting them as angelic primitives. "The Revenant" shows conflict and brutality amongst sophisticated first nation peoples. They are in competition for resources and territory.  The Western contribution was the metamorphosis of tribal friction into industrial scale ecocide and genocide.  The central storyline, Glass’ phoenix-like rise fueled by revenge, trivializes, rather than epitomizes, a parable of destruction. The fault of the film lies in embracing clarity rather than poetry. This movie is at its best when it breathes-in the eternal beauty of the place. It is difficult to convey the primal Eden-like setting. It is a world of piercingly clear rivers that cut between virgin forests and soaring, white capped mountains. God’s majestic creatures, moose salmon elk deer bear beavers, share paradise with warring tribes of men, who never miss an opportunity to sow devastation and horror. That real world contrast, rather than manufactured slights, should have driven the narrative. 

There is sequence in “The Revenant” when our protagonist befriends a fellow refugee. Glass is nursed to health by a native who has lost his tribe to a massacre and is in search of allies.   There is a whimsical moment when the two fierce men bond in the rugged winter landscape. They stick their tongues out, to catch the virgin snowfall. This stylistically is joined by other moments of repose such as Glass rummaging through the ruins of a Spanish colonial church. This hints at what might have been if not hamstrung by a rigid narrative. There is a laborious quality to Glass resuming his quest. The film breaths in quiet reflection which is quashed by the march for justice. 

Leonardo DiCaprio was the wrong choice to play Glass. There is a quality to his work that, despite dogged professionalism, never rises to the sublime. (with the exception of his childhood role of in the film “Gilbert Grape”).  The talk in the press is that “The Revenant” will finally give DiCaprio his coveted statuette. That would be appropriate. It will affirm a solid career as a very capable leading man. This film, however, required a unquantifiable magic that would channel the holiness of the Old West's terroir. DiCaprio is merely flawless. His compatriot, Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, is also a consummate professional. It is a more memorable performance than DiCaprio’s Glass. To be fair it requires less range. DiCaprio is a protective father, a loving spouse, a capable frontiersman, a trusted companion, a man on the verge of death, a man in recovery…. Fitzgerald is a sociopathic one-note song. The film builds to the final Glass vs Fitzgerald battle. Sadly there was nothing at stake that went beyond the merely personal.  Inarritu’s addition of a Native American band of warriors was another failed attempt to give the struggle a larger meaning. They are also on a revenge quest in search of the Chief’s daughter. Rather than giving dimension to an epic tale, it drags the audience further into the vortex never-ending grievances that spur private wars. In the finale, the blood splattered smallness was overshadowed by the majesty of the setting. The real life avalanche filmed in the background during the denouement, had more dramatic truth than the hand to hand combat. 

“The Revenant” is actually two films that never mesh: A meditation on the birth of a nation awkwardly mixed with a tale that begins, “once upon a time in the west…..”. Unlike “Birdman” Inarritu is unable to bend the story to match his poetic oeuvre. The heartfelt artistic flourishes, such as the opening and sundry moments of repose, clashed with the need to fill the narrative. Every sublime landscape seemed to metaphorically end with an assistant director yelling, “Okay now we need to get back to the main event”. The problem is the director is more at home with Terrence Malick’s dreaminess, rather than Sergio Leone’s storytelling. This film gives us the inverse. The audience is herded into the OK Coral for the shoot-out when they would have felt more at home riding into the sunset.  One imagines passing the bands of desperadoes and dispossessed, of all races, taking refuge behind the trees of life and knowledge. Instead the audience is presented two professional actors battle in a set-piece. There are hints that Inarritu could have delivered the former; the opening raid on the fur traders, those landscape shots, the quiet wandering moments... Mankind's epic struggle is displayed in its sylvan glory. The movie versions of Glass and Fitzgerald obscure the view. The audience is straightjacketed into loving Glass and loathing Fitzgerald. Read the history. How does this square with Glass NOT killing Fitzgerald? Do we hate the Native Americans for murdering our hero? Is it important to know THE TRUTH.

Inarritu’s “Birdman” was actually named, “Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance”. To quote the Birdman character, “People, they love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit”. Unfortunately the director does not have the luxury of ignorance. He knows the Birdman is wrong. It is ironic that “The Revenant” ignores the major theme of Inarritu's last film. Strangely missing obvious lessons is the unifying characteristic of ALL the humans who are fated with roaming the wilderness of the Old West. No one considers the lilies. DiCaprio sticking his tongue out to catch the snow; that’s worth more than an Oscar. In fact, it might even get you one. Truth is dramatic. Let's hope Innaritu regains his faith in it. 

New World (2005)

American New World

   
In 1973 Terrence Malick established himself as a great American auteur by writing and directing Badlands – a stunning portrait of a great American invention – the serial killer. In retrospect Mr. Malick, unlike his contemporaries of that era - Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola – never delivered the likes of an ET or Star Wars or a Godfather. In fact he not only failed to deliver a blockbuster – he failed to deliver. Since his stunning debut he has directed three features: Day of Heaven, Thin Red Line and now The New World. Three features in three decades is not what our Puritan work ethic dictates as a “respectable” output. But perhaps Malick, in the tradition of the Founding Fathers, Thoreau, the Western pioneers… is following his manifest destiny.

Let others have a career; Mr. Malick has been strolling  through American history – taking in the scenery and drawing his own conclusions.  He’s spent half his time in the Heartland (Badlands, Days of Heaven) wresting with desperate lost souls – dying in all the innocent beauty east of Eden. He pondered about our Great War (WW II) and drew a portrait of ambiguous soldiers wrestling with themselves as much as the Japanese. The odd thing is that all these films inhabit the American mythology while tearing at its seams. Badlands is a nightmarish foreshadowing of Lucas’ American Graffiti. Days of Heaven might be viewed as Thomas Hart Benton’s Guerinca. The Thin Red Line show’s Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation in their hour of darkness or maybe Speilberg’s soldiers having an existential crisis on their mission to save Private Ryan.

Malick has decided to begin at the beginning. The tale of Pocahontas and Capt. Smith is the bedrock of the American experience. Most Anthologies of American Literature begin with Capt. Smith’s tales about the “New World”. Interest in the story has reached beyond academics with the Walt Disney Company producing an animated feature, Pocahontas, within the last decade. Recently William T. Vollman has dedicated a entire volume of his seven part History of America to Smith’s founding of Jamestown. The element of this story that pulls together academics and patrons of popular culture is the relationship between the swashbuckling Smith and the young Native American princess. That such a relationship existed at the moment of America’s conception vaults the historical into the realm of the mythic.  Hollywood couldn’t have given the country a better script of its beginnings.

The “real” Capt. Smith lived through war, starvation, emprisonment, enemy-capture, enslavement… One wonders however, if he would have survived the 21st century American debate about what constitutes fact and fiction in a memoir. The following is the portrait Capt. Smith paints of himself in “The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles”:

“by his own example, good words, and fair promises, set some to mow, others to bind thatch, some to build houses, others to thatch them, himself always bearing the greatest task for his own share, so that in short time he provided most of them lodgings, neglecting any for himself.”

One can feel the other residents of Jamestown flocking to their blogs to refute the wise Captain in the early stages of his book tour. Malick is unconcerned. The director is smart enough to know better but the Smith-myth is central; not the actual history.  Malick paints a very realistic portrait of the new Americans despite the fact that the valiant Captain might have taken the same liberties as the author of “A Million Little Pieces”.  But in the end isn’t Capt. Smith the great great grandfather of James Frey and Oprah?

Ambition is the driving force in Jamestown.  This group will stop at nothing to get ahead. The internecine struggles over rank and authority will be hideously familiar to any modern American office worker.  Its not that our distant cousins over in Europe wouldn’t be petty and awful – its just that our fore-fathers were, for lack of a better term, the bottom of the barrel. These were in the words of Ross Perot – the people working the third shift at the Dairy Queen. In such an enviroment manners and a sense of civility are signs of weakness.  This was a group that certainly knew the word “Roanoke” – the nearby colony that two decades earlier disappeared with the 90 men, 17 woman and 9 children never to be heard from again. Yet they willingly made the choice to go on this voyage. One senses that their lives in England were less then a bed of roses. The Lords of the manor and the Captains of industry knew better. Capt. Newport, played by a very blue-blooded Christopher Plummer, was on the first boat back home while Jamestown was being established. Given what followed he certainly made the right choice. The new colonists resort to eating their leather belts to stay alive. Maybe Smith was right to implore everyone to stop wasting time digging for gold.

Malick’s harsh portrayal of this world of Joe Shmoes and John Smiths certainly undercuts the primness with which we revere the Founding Father’s fathers. These people weren’t blue blood or even blue collar – they were red-neck through and through. Capt. Smith, however, is a stand-out. He is aware that he is on a journey to, in the great American tradition, re-invent himself. He is our first Bruce Springsteen – a sexy poet repulsed by the grimness of his culture and surroundings but accepting the fact that he is a character in Jungleland. One can hear Capt. Smith rollicking on some boulevard serenading a modern-day Pocahontas with the promise of a new life if she’d just stop listening to her Chief. We can also see the young maiden crying in the back seat of the beat-up Camareo asking the driver “who are you?”.

There is a disturbing asymmetry to The New World.  The young Americans are drawn with precision yet the Native Americans remain elusive. Malick no doubt did his homework and the costuming and set designs are outstanding.  The backdrop is authentic – but not the people. The “naturals” are more akin to fairies in an expensive production of A Mid Summer Nights Dream than actual aboriginal people. The initial reaction to Smith is certainly genuine – they want to kill him. Unfortunately for them they make a series of very bad choices. They spare his life and then adopt him as a tribesman and let him frolick with the Chief’s favorite daughter – the prettiest girl in the tribe. The implausibility of the situation is secondary to the super-human genuineness of the natives. Pocahontas and her father seem implausiblely plausible – people make bad choices and pay the price – but the other Natives and their society appear other-worldly. As the good-captain says “they are without jealousy or malice”. Certainly after months of living with the Jamestown crowd “the naturals” – a successful traditional society living in sync with their surroundings – would appear to be super-human. There is a palatable sense of horror when Smith returns to the world of the violent, mean-spirited, petty, desperate gold-diggers. It would have been interesting to Malick had found a way to paint the Powtans as real – but where would he find a source? These poor people were annihilated. The lack of a record left Malick with all the trappings of the Potans without the Potwans themselves. The father-chief and Pochat are plot devices to further the narrative of Jamestown.  John Smith’s world is grimly real whereas the Potwans “are the stuff that dreams are made of”. In this case Capt. Smith is the dreamer.

The New World takes an extended journey to the old world in the second half of the film. The plot takes on a Shakespearian edge: the princess goes to meet the King and Queen of England and is re-united with her lover. They come to there senses and she then returns to her true love. The comedy turns tragic, however, when the Princess suddenly dies. The banality of the narrative is beside the point. Shakespeare’s forte was language not story. By the same logic assessing Malick’s in terms of the plot-driven narrative is to be deaf to the visual feast. There is a small sequence where the Native American escorting Pocahontas walks amongst the trees in the formal gardens at one of the English palaces. In a sense this small scene of this traditionally dressed native wandering around the formal hedges and rigid tree-lines is a metaphor for the entire film. This exquisite tableaux is a tile in a cross cultural mosaic painting the birth of America. It’s not about “story” or “romance” but the romance of the myth of our founding. Malick, with his usual flair for excellent acting, photography and craft, has given us another one of his American visions. We are a brutal, savage people who touched a pre-lapsarian (in our view) world and beat it down to our level. There is always something tragic/heroic in our quest despite our venal actions. Badlands was successful inspite of the loathsome protagonist. The audience is drawn to the killer in Days of Heaven even though he schemed against an innocent man. The soldiers in The Thin Red Line are are too raw & bloodthristy to be the usual World War II heroes… and yet there is a hallow of innocence surrounding these warriors.

Malick is, at heart, a Texan. This part of the country tends to root for the guys in black hats. Malick has a soft-spot for Cain. Abel was a favored son we are a nation of Cain’s. We the hard-luck second sons busting our asses to do good and seem pretty. We loathe introspection in direct proportion to our love of THE LAW. Rules are made up of isolated facts that create abstractions so we can live with ourselves. On the surface this is a film about a group of marauders who invade and pillage and for good measure trumpet the daughter of the rival king in front of their own. These victims trusted the invaders and were repaid with annihilation. Pocas constant refrain to Capt. Smith is “Who are you?”. The Captain might not know the answer, but he knows enough to know that it isn’t pretty. Malick knows that in Smith’s ambivalence and quest to rise above his station lies the heart of the American experience. We are desperate castaways striving to be better. We’ll kill our brother to get there but what choice do we have? The meek shall inherit the earth – but by that time – who cares? We live in the here and now. We live in a world of conquerors and by God we’ll conquer. We’re not refined as our European cousins. We’re not saintly as our Native American brothers. We’re Americans – ugly, guilty but at the same time mesmerizing and innocent.

The Tree of Life (2011)

The Land of Nod

Let’s go back to the cosmic origins of Terrence Malick-the- filmmaker. In the beginning the young Malick gave us the masterpieces Badlands and Days of Heaven. These films were poetic allegories about the American experience. They achieved a resonance much larger than their thread-bare narratives would suggest and touched us in a manner that approaches the sublime: a fugitive and the young girl playing house in the forest in Badlands; a locust-fire in the wheat fields in Day of Heaven. In his first feature, Badlands, one senses the young director choosing the salacious Starkweather murders as a way of establishing broad appeal. A topic such as that would guarantee acclaim beyond the low earth orbit of film critics and art houses. His second feature, Days of Heaven, is less approachable but the sheer force of artistry dazzles us within the strict confines of the story, which is a retelling of Genesis. It is far more substantive a work to be merely a show-piece – but make no mistake – Malick wanted to impress… and he did.

But Malick’s penchant for favoring poetry over plot seemed to be gaining momentum. The Thin Red Line and The New World, his next two films, are visually arresting but seem rooted in a murky private language. They fail to reach the lushness of Days of Heaven and lack the narrative pull of Badlands. The Tree of Life brings this unfortunate movement to its apex. Not surprisingly the story, such as it is, is based on autobiography. It is as if the director has fallen so far inside himself that life-long personal demons take over the filmmaking.

One can view many over-arching themes in Malick’s work: youthful innocence searching for the garden, fraternal strife, the ever-present goddess (usually a strawberry blond)…. The Tree of Life brings us back to the genesis of Malick himself: an emotionally devastating childhood in post WWII Texas. There are few societies that reward introspective sensitive young people. The Lone Star State certainly follows this trend. Everything is big in Texas – including the clash between warm human emotions and hard driving relentless individualism. The Malick family had a casualty in the struggle: the suicide of the second son. The echo of Malick’s brother’s gun shot to the head over 50 years ago seems to be still echoing in the director’s head. Pain of this kind is cannot be quantified… but the artist has a duty to try. One would think a film about this paradigm of tragedy would be the chef d’ouerves of a visionary filmmaker of the caliber of Terrance Malick. Ironically the effort to illustrate universe- shattering pain diminished the force of the work.

Malick is at his best with an exquisitely crafted simple story with classic types: the sensitive loving mother, the brutal oppressive father, the beloved Christ-like brother. The moments, in Tree of Life, of the children interacting with the angelic mother and hard-bitten father rank with the best of his work. It is enough. The director, on the other hand, felt the need to embellish this heart-breaking story with poetic commentary and National Geographic slideshows of “creation.” It is almost as if the director was insecure about the beautiful simplicity. There is a sense that the audience would fail to feel the gravitas of the single most painful event in Malick’s life. One can hear the director shouting at his audience through classical chorus’ and flashy maudlin images – sunsets, butterflies, sunflowers, sand and surf -- including the touchstone of all cinematic clichés: flying seagulls. I suspect Malick doesn’t own or watch television. If he did he would have known that all his visual pandering had been co-opted by mainstream TV advertising 30 years ago. The closing sequence, the emotional peak of the film, was supposed to feature a transcendent display of all the characters in a heavenly afterlife. Unfortunately for Malick, modern audiences equate this sort of thing with Verizon super-bowl ads. The saddest aspect of this work is the magic of the pitch-perfect montages of family life. The genius of his spare exposition and seemingly simple moments hint at what this film might have been.

The denouement features the father figure reflecting on his own failure to recognize the treasure in his life: his sons. Brad Pitt, who appears as a fierce red-neck from a Robert Frank photo, quietly speaks to the fact that despite the blow of losing his house – he has his family. It is especially poignant as this hard-luck would-be artist fell into the trap of listening to Dale Carnegie rather than Brahms. But one doesn’t expect someone living the dark side of the American dream to have the insight to see the real road to the pursuit of happiness. As he says to his oldest son “I was hard on you and I’m not proud of it”. This “hardness” was rooted in a dogged hope of shaping everyone around him to the same sad hopeless vision. The father wanted everyone in his family to feel the desperation of his quest. His verbal barrages were designed to shape his family so they would understand the true meaning of success. The insidious nature of his father’s cruelty was blindness rooted in isolation. The man was hurting and stopped being able to see those near and dear. Such arrogance cost the father his son. I believe the same thing may have cost Malick his audience.