Movie Review: "The Revenant"

The Revenant (2015)

R

4.5 Stars out of 5

Director                                Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu

Writer                                   Mark Smith, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (s'play); Michael Punke (book)
Cinematography                 Emmanuel Lubezki
Music                                    Carsten Nicolai, Ryuichi Sakamoto

Leonardo DiCaprio             Hugh Glass
Tom Hardy                          John Fitzgerald
Domhnall Gleeson             Captain Andrew Henry
Will Poulter                         Jim Bridger
Forrest Goodluck               Hawk
Arthur Redcloud                Hikuc

 

A person could watch Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” just to enjoy his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki’s vision of the Rocky Mountains in winter. Lubezki’s eye and hand produce such a work of cinematic art it is simply awe-inspiring. Alternatively, one could watch this film for the writers’ visions (Iñárritu and Mark Smith): a man’s war of survival against the elements and that man’s single-minded purpose in staying alive long enough to wreck his vengeance on his enemy. Yet another viewer might want to seize the opportunity to watch an outstanding actor, Leonardo DiCaprio at the top of his game; watch him portray the man just alluded to in the writers’ visions as he struggles to stay alive; or as this character states, “as long as you can grab a breath, you fight”. All of these are compelling reasons to watch this movie. Taken together, these different means of appreciating “The Revenant” combine in my mind to produce a convincing example of why anyone would be driven to consider Iñárritu as one of the best directors at work today.

It is my opinion that Iñárritu has produced a movie that has deep parallels with Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 movie, “Gravity”. Both use Lubezki as their cinematographer, and the two movies are mesmerizing in similar ways: “Gravity” opens with Sandra Bulloch flying through space in a dizzying spin following a collision with space debris, while “The Revenant starts with an attack of Ariakara warriors on a group of white trappers. Both movies employ state of the art camera work that takes the audience straight into the middle of the action. However as good and as similar as the cinematography is in both films, it is the screenplays that make me think of the parallels more than anything else. While both films require expert physical acting by the two leading stars, it is the trip to “salvation” that both take that is the most definitive of their resemblance. Bulloch’s character will race from one life-threatening situation to another, while DiCaprio’s will do exactly the same. One might be in space, the other in the mountains, but there is a strong likeness of dramatic tension and relief; each movie will do it yet one more time, again and again. One big difference is their final destination: Bulloch’s character is “saved”, not necessarily so with DiCaprio’s.

Just as the title suggests, “The Revenant” tells the story of one who returns from the dead: in this case, the story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) in 1823 North America after a bear attack. Glass had travelled up the Missouri River under the command of Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) with a group of roughly 50 men. They were there to trap beaver and to return the pelts for their payoff. As they broke camp, all the while packing their beaver pelts, they are beset by a tribe of the Ariakara. Most of the white men were killed; those few that survived included Henry, Glass, his half-Pawnee son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), and about 10 others. Amongst the other survivors was young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and a particularly evil-tempered John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).

The group flees the Ariakara on their boat but only for a short distance down the river. Glass quickly advised that they must abandon the boat for a hike across the mountains to their ultimate refuge, Fort Kiowa. It is on this journey that Glass while out hunting will find himself between two grizzly cubs and their mother. The ensuing scene as the mother bear seeks to "protect" her cubs is one of the most riveting and technically perfect scenes of special effects I have ever seen. It may haunt your dreams for some time to come. Glass will survive but only just. Unable to carry him to Fort Kiowa, Captain Henry offers to pay any volunteer willing to stay with Glass $300. Fitzgerald, Hawk and Bridger agree to stand watch over Glass and then to bury him when he dies. Fitzgerald’s betrayal of this duty as well as his duty to Hawk and Bridger will bring on the story’s major arc.

 

After leaving Glass for dead, Fitzgerald makes his way back to Fort Kiowa with a tall tale quite at odds with reality. Meanwhile, Glass has recovered enough to begin an arduous journey back from where he was left; his personal journey back from the dead. His desire to return is fueled with passion; he wants justice against Fitzgerald for his crimes against Glass and the others, and he will overcome every obstacle nature or man may put in front of him. Nothing is going to stop Glass; like the unchanging mountains that surround him, his will is equally fixed, absolutely adamantine in its lack of changeability.

Glass will first crawl as his body is too broken to support its own weight. He will gain some strength, painfully gain his feet, and begin to walk in time.  After several days of this near death hike, he will meet a sympathetic Pawnee who will provide some much needed outside, though still largely indifferent help. It is at this point that the movie stumbles a bit. Up to the point where Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud), the helpful Pawnee comes onto the scene, it is Glass alone against the world; now he has help. This deviation of one man alone against nature is not my primary complaint. Instead, it is the introduction of fantasy story elements that show up at this point in the story. They are dressed up as fever-induced delusions, and perhaps they could have happened; but they are a big change in the story’s tone and story-telling method.

In the first reel, “The Revenant” is a film based in reality; a hard reality of life on the frontier battling the elements, Native-Americans and the wildlife. In these early parts of the movie, Iñárritu spins his story in a manner where all three, the elements, Native-Americans and wildlife all seem more like forces of nature. There is no particular animus in any of them towards Glass or his companions. It simply snows in winter, a mother bear protects her cubs, or a group of Indians attack white men. There seems to be little or no personal passion in these acts; they simply are. The bear and the Indians might be thought to be driven by passions, and yet in the early parts of this movie they really do not seem to have such. The Indian attacks with his bow and arrow, the white man falls, and the Indian moves to the next victim. No emotion, it’s just a simple act, like falling from a cliff. Gravity and the cliff mean you no particular ill will; you die nevertheless.

The stumble in the movie occurs as Glass’ reserves, as vast as they must be, start to wane. He hallucinates about his dead loved ones: one will hug him, another hover above him in the air. These scenes are emotional and they carry impact for Glass and the viewer: one scene in an abandoned church is especially heart-rending. As good as these scenes might be in a different movie, they feel very much out of place in a movie as grounded in hard reality as most of “The Revenant” is. If Iñárritu truly wanted to create a cinematic vision of the unfeeling nature of death when it comes in whatever form it might come in, it is a mistake to switch from such a hard vision of life to one based on a hallucinatory view of life.

Iñárritu will turn back to reality in the final reel of “The Revenant” as Glass seeks his long delayed justice for the wrongs committed by Fitzgerald. The movie will end with a close up on DiCaprio’s face that will, like the bear attack live in my mind for a considerable length of time. The look on DiCaprio’s face says so much about what he has gone through and hints at what may become of him. By this point in his character’s life, he has gained some measure of vengeance but has lost virtually everything else. In this cinematic world, one must wonder “what does Glass have left to live for”? And if that is true for Glass, one could surely imagine, this is one of Iñárritu’s core themes in “The Revenant”: finding the will to put one foot in front of the other, or to quote Glass once again: “You breathe…keep breathing”. This is what I believe is Iñárritu’s actual desire for this movie’s effect on his audience.

DiCaprio’s acting is absolutely the best of the year: his 2016 Oscar for Best Actor was not a “gimme” for his years of unrewarded excellence; years that largely began in 2004 with the “The Aviator”, 2006 with “Blood Diamond” and “The Departed”, and continues up through this movie with too many more to list. He earned the award long before “The Revenant” and could have been given it for either of the 2006 films. That being said, he more than earned it with his bravura performance in “The Revenant”. And I must say, as much as I regard DiCaprio’s acting, I have on multiple occasions derided Tom Hardy’s; not this time. Hardy’s performance as the evil Fitzgerald is quite noteworthy and is part of why this movie is as good as it is.

Great acting, great cinematography, an excellent score and a brilliant script that works with concepts as deep as “the will to live when all feels lost” make this movie one for the ages. It is a violent movie at times, there is no way to soft peddle that concept. However, “The Revenant” like a few other works of art that use violence (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “Blood Meridian”), makes violence a powerful story tool, almost a movie character; an essential character to properly tell this story of survival, of love, of vengeance. This story is worth knowing and Iñárritu’s vision of the story is one worth experiencing. Even if you abhor movies with violence, consider seeing this film. It is a movie that brings so much to the screen, it simply must be seen.

 

Movie Review: "Brooklyn"

Brooklyn (2015)

PG-13

5 Stars out of 5

Director                                John Crowley

Writer                                   Nick Hornby (screenplay); Colm Tóibín's (book)

Cinematography                  Yves Belanger

Saoirse Ronan                      Eilis Lacey

Emory Cohen                      Tony Fiorello

Maeve McGrath                  Mary (friend)

Fiona Glascott                     Rose Lacey

Jane Brennan                       Mary Lacey (mother)

Jessica Pare                          Miss Fortini

Jim Broadbent                      Father Flood

Domhnall Gleeson              Jim Farrell

Julie Walters                        Mrs. Kehoe

Brid Brennan                       Miss Kelly

There is a kind of European movie that stands in stark contrast to almost every American movie. This European genre includes good writing, good acting, and themes focused on the human experience. To be sure, there are many American movies with these elements, too. The difference is the manner in which this “genre”, this European film type tells its story (at least in my mind), and this is with kindness. To simplify this special quality into a single word is far too inadequate a way of looking at the point I am trying to make. Perhaps an analogy would work better. Let’s use that staple from Hollywood, the road trip. In most well-made American movies (and we can certainly use Ridley Scott’s “Thelma and Louise”, 1991 to illustrate what I am trying to say) there is the three part sequence to the story: describe the back-story, build some dramatic tension/conflict, and then resolve the tension via some climatic scene. It is the path the American film will inevitably take, that aspect that makes it stand apart from the European film, the American will almost certainly introduce violence. Consider for example, Thelma and Louise’s final wave good-bye as they sail over the cliff, not to mention the gun-play that led them there. Now consider the 2015 Irish-Canadian film “Brooklyn”: a young woman comes to America from Ireland to find her way in life. It is a simple, sensitively told tale. It too has tension, a villain, conflict, and a climax. What it utterly lacks is violence. The story can be related to and enjoyed by anyone, even Americans - even though, not one bullet was fired.

“Brooklyn” begins in 1950’s Ireland with the introduction of a young woman working in a store, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan). She works with several other young women for an older woman, Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan). We quickly learn Miss Kelly is a very mean-spirited creature and all of her young workers live in fear of her. If there is any lingering doubt in the viewer’s mind as to who is this film’s villain (if it truly has one), Miss Kelly will work hard to help you identify her. Eilis lives with her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and widowed mother, Mary Lacey (Jane Brennan). Rose loves Eilis deeply and wants more for Eilis than their little town of Enniscorthy can provide. Rose will arrange with the help of an Irish priest in America, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent) to get Eilis out of the boy-friendless/Miss Kelly rut, fate has placed her in. Rose’s generosity will be for the films’ first third, a good example of “good deeds reaping a kind of punishment” (to paraphrase the saying somewhat).

Eilis will wave good–bye to her mother and sister from aboard a steamship bound for America and her future. She will gain a new friend and useful advice on the ship, but her seasickness on-board will foreshadow another type of sickness that she will soon experience in America. She will have her physical needs all prepared for her via the thoughtful intervention of Father Flood. Eilis will live with an understanding if somewhat demanding landlady (Mrs. Kehoe; Julie Waters) and with several other young women of Eilis’ age in a boarding house in Brooklyn. She will get a job at an up-scale department store and work for an experienced woman who also will care for Eilis’ emotional and physical needs (Mrs. Fortini – Jessica Pare). But Eilis is not happy. It is not immediately clear if Eilis is having troubles dealing with the culture shock of New York City vis-à-vis Enniscorthy, or if her rambunctious fellow boarders are intimidating her, or if she simply misses and fears she will never see again her sister Rose (tellingly, her sense of loss relative to her mother is somewhat more subdued).

Again with some helpful intervention from those around Eilis, people that care for her and worry about her worsening emotions, she is put into a situation where she meets a young Italian-American, Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), Like almost all of her American experiences, Eilis has little to fall back on in terms of understanding Tony; fortunately for Eilis, she doesn’t need any more understanding than simple human kindness. The match is made, it matures, it crosses a threshold, and then the movie’s conflict is brought in: there has been a tragedy back home in Ireland. Eilis feels strong pressures to return home, at least temporarily. The conflict is that now Eilis has a new home, new friends, a boyfriend, the new life for which she left Ireland for America; and back home, she remembers all too well the reasons why she left in the first place. Even though Ireland was her home, there were too many “Miss Kelly’s” and too few “Tony’s”.

Eilis will eventually return to Ireland and to the aftermath of the sad event that drew her back. This time, though, the town will seemingly rise up as one (barring one individual) to apparently try to convince her to remain this time. She will get a new, professional level job that she is particularly good at, she will get a new boyfriend, Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson) who is clearly a good man, she will be reunited with her former best friend, Mary (Maeve McGrath), and she will feel unrelenting pressure from her mother to stay in Ireland. Everything will move into alignment to keep her in Enniscorthy; everything but Eilis’ conscience. Ironically, it will be through the self-righteous involvement of the movie’s villain, Miss Kelly, and her new attempts to hurt someone, that will finally show Eilis the path she must take in life.

I have written the above summary in a pretty obtuse manner by not detailing the tragedy that draws Eilis back to Ireland or the details of Eilis’ mother’s motivations. The details are emotional, compelling and key plot points. Besides these undisclosed aspects of the plot, it is sufficient to say that Eilis makes several decisions in her young life that are largely understandable (even if not all of them are honorable or sensible). Her actions have created the dramatic tension in this movie. She freely made some choices that were hers to make: move to America, fall in love with Tony, return to Ireland, become involved with Jim. These were her choices. Her mother’s attempts to draw Eilis back and to keep her were her choices; they too were understandable, if not all honorable. The meanness and bitterness of Miss Kelly were her choices in life, though in one case, there was something decent that actually came out of her spite – it helped Eilis open her eyes to her situation.

With respect to the movie arc as a whole, the conflict in the movie is real and compelling, it is understandable by anyone. The pain of departure at the Irish port as Eilis bids her sister farewell is there for all in the audience to feel and think about. We all watch the little steps in Eilis’ maturation, we might wonder what each of us would do, and likely we all want the best for her as she moves through life; a simple story, beautifully told. “Brooklyn” is most notably told by Saorise Ronan’s remarkable skill of portraying Eilis.  Director John Crowley brings the camera close in on Ronan’s face, often framed by some significant scene in the background. The background will help to convey the time or mood at some point in the movie, but in fact, it will be Ronan’s lovely, expressive eyes and mouth that will be the true conveyors of mood. The direction, camera work and writing are all significantly good in “Brooklyn”, but it is on Ronan’s vulnerable shoulders that this movie truly rests.

Writer Nick Hornby has decided to use a kind of symmetry in his story telling. Such symmetry creates a point of view about life in general. On Eilis’s trip across the Atlantic, she is befriended by a travel-experienced Irishwoman. Eilis will have her own opportunity to help someone in a similar manner. Tony will pick up Eilis from night-school each evening, even though he must leave work to do so – it is sweet, and it helps illustrate his love and devotion to Eilis. But there will come a time in the movie when Eilis picks him up from work (the camera view of her waiting is framed by the Brooklyn Bridge) – both the framing and her actions work together to support the idea of her devotion to Tony and to Brooklyn. These examples of life repeating itself for Eilis all have her as the one taking the action previously done by others on her behalf. It will help establish her growth, but it also helps to make the bigger point that life, simple and beautiful can come around in each person’s life and can do so in a manner that is at the very least dramatic to the individual. And quite frankly, can be thought to be dramatic to any one as an example of how life is truly lived: people love and care for one another or maybe (as with the Miss Kelly’s of the world) don’t; but all of this goes on without car chases, shoot-outs or false examples of human drama.

This movie is a treat for your heart and your mind. There was one flaw: I found the character of Tony’s little brother way too Hollywood stereotypical of the precocious (but sweet) young brother. This character seems to me to be a rare example of poor writing in this movie (the actor was fine and largely stole each of his scenes). However, that poor character choice aside, this movie is a gem and easily earned its various Oscar nominations (Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay) – it is the unusual example of where I am in complete agreement with the academy on all choices.