Glorious but VERY grizzly!
It’s a bear who deserves the Oscar in Leo’s gory epic
an elemental story of Man vs Nature, and for that matter Nature vs Nature.
There’s a strong mystical quality, too. A revenant is something that comes back, such as a ghost, and Glass repeatedly visualises his dead Native American wife. He is also, of course, something of a revenant himself, returning almost from the dead.
None of this is particularly easy viewing, but the paradox is that it’s such a dazzling film to look at. To a considerable extent that’s down to Inarritu’s cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, who did fantastic work on Birdman, and before that on Gravity (both of which he won Oscars for), but has this time excelled even himself.
I can’t think of many films which showcase the Great American Outdoors more spectacularly, which is ironic, partly because much of it was filmed in Canada and Argentina, but mostly because, however seductive the landscapes might be, they won’t make you want to take a hike any time soon.
Except to the cinema, that is. The Revenant is almost as gruelling to watch as by all accounts it was to make, but by heavens, it’s worth the discomfort.
Room is a film of two halves, which makes it hard to review as a whole without giving away a pivotal plot development. So look away now if you want to enjoy a terrific thriller, containing two of the best performances you’ll see all year, without any spoilers.
It is written by Emma Donoghue as an adaptation of her own 2010 bestseller, which I confess I haven’t read, but I’m pretty sure she’s done her novel full justice. At the start, all we know about Joy (Brie Larson) and her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), is that their entire lives unfold in what at first looks like a cramped apartment, but turns out to be a garden shed.
Bit by bit, we understand why. Seven years earlier, aged 17, Joy was kidnapped by a man who has imprisoned her ever since, visiting daily to bring basic provisions and to rape her. She refers to him as ‘Old Nick’, whether deliberately evoking the devil is never clear. Doubtless because we are reminded of similarly ghastly, reallife cases such as that of Josef Fritzl, her predicament seems all too real. Jack, of course, is Old Nick’s son.
But even within her living nightmare, she is determined to protect him, and to give him the most normal upbringing she can. She reads him Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. She dreams up games.
Inside her terrible constraints, she is an adoring mother raising a bright little boy, yet one who thinks the world beyond ‘Room’ is purely imaginary.
He calls it ‘Room’, without the definite article, as other children might refer to a favourite cuddly toy as Ted. It is his whole world and has a comforting persona of its own. None of this is an ordeal for Jack. It is all he knows. But Joy’s feelings about ‘Room’ are ambivalent. It is where she has experienced the deep and sustaining pleasures of motherhood, but also her prison. She is determined to escape.
EVENTUALLY, in a heart-thumpingly tense scene, Jack helps her to do so. Not knowing the book, I had expected the film to build to a climax of whether or not they would get out. But the second half chronicles their lives afterwards, back in the bosom of her family but also the glare of publicity.
Director Lenny Abrahamson might have laboured the irony of their post-imprisonment existence being full of practical and emotional complications, whereas ‘Room’ at least enveloped them in a kind of simplicity.
But instead he handles this great narrative leap with huge sensitivity, helped immeasurably by Donoghue’s excellent script but above all by Larson and young Tremblay, who are both astoundingly good, the latter almost preternaturally so. Following her Golden Globe success, Larson carries one of the film’s four Oscar nominations. But if she’s in the running, he should have been, too.