‘Hateful Eight’ ‘Revenant’ and ‘Joy’
Holiday movie reviews
Afilm I admired, but didn’t especially like, “The Revenant” is a master class in craftsmanship, marrying the ethos of 1970s Hollywood, with its beaten-dog heroes forever roughed up by a brutal system, to the technological prowess of today’s digitally obsessed blockbusters. Too rarely are visual effects used in the service of harshness and grit rather than fantasy and silliness — to take us back to nature, and the past, rather than to realms fanciful, and the future.
“The Revenant” (someone who returns, as from the dead) is one rough day at the office for Leonardo DiCaprio. He turns the untamed West into his Calvary as Hugh Glass, a Rocky Mountains fur trapper on a group expedition in a dire 19th-century winter wilderness. All he wants is to go back with his son to his Indian wife, but things don’t work out that way. Glass finds himself in a grave, betrayed by a fellow trapper. Between the two men there is so much enmity that we could almost be talking about Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.
Deep into the film, I realized, hey, that’s Tom Hardy — champion changeling — as the bad guy. In the same moment it occurred to me that this is about the fifth Tom Hardy movie in which I couldn’t understand half of what Tom Hardy says. His respect for mastering accents is admirable, but how about going back to mastering speech? Not that he or anyone else has much of interest to say: The script tends to veer from banality (“This man is the only reason we’re still alive!”) to cliché (one Indian actually complains about how the white men have “stolen everything from us”).
So why do I want to see “The Revenant” again? It’s an experience, a moonshine blast of pure cinema, lushly designed, and evocatively photographed (by Emmanuel Lubezki, who wins the Oscar every year and will probably win it again). Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (the “Birdman” auteur who has yet to make a film I wholeheartedly enjoyed, although this one is easily my pick of the bunch) builds the picture around gory, frighteningly vivid set pieces such as an Indian raid and a bear mauling (not, rumors to the contrary, rape).
“The Revenant” succeeds in its quest, which is to overwhelm the senses, to transport us to a world as far removed from our experience as (the Lubezki-photographed) outer space in “Gravity.” It’s intoxicating, even as long stretches separate plot developments. “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and the impressionistic rambles of Terrence Malick films such as “Days of Heaven” come to mind.
Iñárritu isn’t really out to tell a great yarn — the story could fit on one sheet of paper, and not the legal-size kind. No, the point is to pose important questions like, “What’s it like to ride your horse off a cliff, plummet into a tree, then scoop out the insides of your mount and crawl in?” (Actually, that last part was pretty well settled in “The Empire Strikes Back,” but it’s harder to do when you don’t have a lightsaber.)
By the end, Iñárritu had done so little to establish an emotional core that I was utterly indifferent as to which man would prevail. The film doesn’t touch the heart, but its grip on the viscera is relentless.
Leonardo DiCaprio, channeling his inner Jon Snow, battles the elements — and Tom Hardy — in “The Revenant.”