The Suffocating Solemnity Of "The Revenant"
Humor is a crucial form of imagination, and the lack of it is a sign—but not proof—of a failure of imagination. There’s a kind of spiritual illumination, a holy state, that can get away without humor, that might even preclude it—and many artists who lack humor and imagination strive to conjure or to imitate that state, not because they’re actually endowed with a spiritual vision but to compensate for that lack. That’s how the spiritualism of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant,” the rugged adventure through frozen country of the grieving, angry, wounded guide and trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), plays. Its spirituality and attendant solemnity give the story and the movie an air of importance that would both justify and conceal its emptiness, that would convert its defects into virtues.
The framework of “The Revenant” is a taut, classic double chase. Glass, who was left for dead after being attacked by a bear, is chasing Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), the man who killed Glass’s son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). In turn, a group of Native Americans are seeking a woman, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o), who was kidnapped, and because Glass, travelling alone, is likely to be the nearest white person in their search, they are, in effect, chasing him (although he had nothing to do with her disappearance).
Glass was working with a company of trappers—who included Fitzgerald—when disaster, in the form of a raid by Native Americans, struck. A handful of surviving trappers depend on Glass to see them through to safety. When he’s wounded and nearing death, two devoted young members of the company stay beside him. But Fitzgerald, seeing that his survival—and his livelihood—is at risk, wants to kill Glass. Hawk dies defending his father, and Fitzgerald casts the moribund guide into a pit, expecting him to die there.
Glass was working with a company of trappers—who included Fitzgerald—when disaster, in the form of a raid by Native Americans, struck. A handful of surviving trappers depend on Glass to see them through to safety. When he’s wounded and nearing death, two devoted young members of the company stay beside him. But Fitzgerald, seeing that his survival—and his livelihood—is at risk, wants to kill Glass. Hawk dies defending his father, and Fitzgerald casts the moribund guide into a pit, expecting him to die there.
The pursuit is fraught with plot details that play an outsize role in the outcome of events. Glass was married to a Native American woman who was killed in a raid by soldiers (of indeterminate nationality). When he joins the company of trappers, as their guide, he brings their son, Hawk, with him and protects him against the trappers’ racist threats and provocations. Fitzgerald, for his part, signed on for a job, not for military service, and, in the predatory terms of his contract, he’s paid not for his time of service but for the pelts that he delivers, thus putting his pay into conflict with the effort to transport the wounded Glass.
Once on his own, Glass crosses paths with Native Americans—one man tosses him a buffalo liver, teaches him to spurn the way of revenge (saying that revenge belongs not to man but to God), and takes him along on horseback. When Glass risks dying from his festering wounds, this Native American also heals him with traditional methods, from which Glass arises a new man. Soon thereafter, Glass finds his preserver hanged by a band of French trappers—and finds Powaqa their captive and sex slave, and rescues her. I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that, when Glass catches up to Fitzgerald, he takes to heart his savior’s lesson on revenge and receives his earthly reward for his defense of Powaqa.
In short, Iñárritu’s sympathy for the indigenous people of the region and their struggle to survive American and French occupation veers toward an exaltation of them as magical exceptions, whose traditions endow them with special powers and transform them into the living embodiments of God’s will. With the best of intentions and with his eye on historic wrongs, Iñárritu lifts Native Americans into a realm apart, as people unlike others, whose very otherness is an unfortunate caricature. The director does this not from a lack of sympathy but a failure of imagination.
Though Glass married a Native American woman and speaks two Native American languages, relations between white newcomers and the indigenous people of the area remain undefined and merely symbolized. “The Revenant” isn’t only a movie of issues—of sociopolitical memes evoked by individual details of script and action—but a version of Western bingo that doesn’t so much consider or dramatize those ideas as check them off.
Yet one idea about the age of adventure in a mainly unspoiled landscape dominates the film throughout and determines its very mode of production: the cruel physical difficulties of mere survival. It isn’t enough for Iñárritu to depict them; he makes his cast (in particular, poor Leonardo DiCaprio), endure them. Just as critics are all too often inclined to review the budget or the reporting rather than the movie (as with the oblivious repudiations of “Heaven’s Gate” and “Ishtar”), the stories of the production of “The Revenant,” complete with the menace of frostbite and hypothermia and the revulsion of eating a raw fish and a raw bison liver, have been regarded as integral elements of the movie itself.
The program seems to have gone too far, and suddenly the agenda switched: Iñárritu took pains to emphasize that the bear that mauled Glass is a C.G.I. bear—though the attack sequence itself involved some elaborate stunts and rigging. (No bears were harmed in the making of this movie.) Of course the bear is fake; of course Glass’s bleeding wounds are the results of very persuasive makeup artistry—who would want or expect it to be otherwise? But, for that matter, I’d no more wish to see DiCaprio bleed as I’d care to see him freeze. Nonetheless, Iñárritu doesn’t hesitate to subject him to actual physical ordeals and to integrate them into the dramatic substance of the film.
The program seems to have gone too far, and suddenly the agenda switched: Iñárritu took pains to emphasize that the bear that mauled Glass is a C.G.I. bear—though the attack sequence itself involved some elaborate stunts and rigging. (No bears were harmed in the making of this movie.) Of course the bear is fake; of course Glass’s bleeding wounds are the results of very persuasive makeup artistry—who would want or expect it to be otherwise? But, for that matter, I’d no more wish to see DiCaprio bleed as I’d care to see him freeze. Nonetheless, Iñárritu doesn’t hesitate to subject him to actual physical ordeals and to integrate them into the dramatic substance of the film.
“The Revenant” is hardly the first movie in which actors suffer for their director’s art. The cast and crew of Erich von Stroheim’s mutilated masterwork “Greed” endured two months of shooting in Death Valley. Francis Ford Coppola’s shoot of “Apocalypse Now” was very hard on its participants. With these films, the rigors of production aren’t essential to the film, even if they’re inseparable from it—because Stroheim and Coppola have a sense of style.
That sense of style defies and overcomes any dichotomy between reality and artifice. Coppola accomplishes as much with the early-generation computer wizardry of “One from the Heart” as his did on location in “Apocalypse Now.” Stroheim was as detailed and observant a director working in front of the pasteboard castles of “Foolish Wives” as the desert of “Greed.” Jean-Luc Godard aroused strong emotions by applying real electric current to Michel Subor in “Le Petit Soldat”—and equally strong emotions putting actors in a studio-mounted fake car in “Pierrot le Fou.” But the vanity of Iñárritu’s style, its conspicuous striving after effect, achieves the opposite result—it dematerializes the production and disembodies the performances, calls attention not to the rigors of the shoot but to the extraordinary care and handling, the extraordinary industrial equipment, that went into maintaining the actors and their well-being in inhospitable conditions. Every shot of DiCaprio in icy water or on cold ground evoked the heaters and assistants grouped just behind the camera to keep him well and keep the shoot running.
A deeply felt and artistically accomplished spirituality is usually accompanied by an original sense of form—the practical repudiation of profane styles in favor of one that’s extremely purified or superbly adorned, or both. Here, too, Iñárritu makes a big show of his efforts, telling a very simple and straightforward story with a camera style (realized by the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) that plays like Terrence Malick Lite. Lubezki makes the camera twirl and gyrate (as he does for Malick), but for Malick the movement often is the action and runs the risk of obscuring the drama in favor of moods, tones, and ideas. By contrast, Iñárritu’s camera movements follow the action and subordinate it to a theatrical mode of performance (as in “Birdman”), with the actors delivering elaborately rehearsed scenes in choreographed stagings and extended continuity. Eschewing a fragmented montage, Iñárritu follows the action over extended stretches of time as if his doing so produced no mere photographic record of action but chunks of raw reality with their authenticity guaranteed intact.
Far from pursuing the boundary-less, quasi-metaphysical connections of Malick’s fluid images, Iñárritu uses Lubezki’s balletic camera work as a pictorial ornament to his bland theatrical stagings. Where Malick combines these wide-ranging and mysterious images in series of speculative associations conjuring cosmic spans, Iñárritu links his images with an uninspired dramatic continuity, decorating and punctuating them with postcard-like landscape views that impress without shocking, that offer mere virtuosic grandiosity in place of grandeur. There’s no more pictorial imagination in “The Revenant,” no more of a disjunctively free sense of visual experience, than there is narrative imagination (behavior that arises unmoored to the dictates of the plot) or psychological imagination (leaps of subjective experience that expand characters into people, beyond the determining bonds of dramatic necessity)—no more visual wit than there are flashes of humor.
I’ve been joking that “The Revenant” would have been no worse had it been shot in a studio, using a green screen to paint the landscapes in behind the actors—or if, in lieu of DiCaprio dragging his body through frozen terrain and dipping it in frigid rivers, the movie had been made on location with stunt men with DiCaprio’s face digitally applied, as was done with Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” But the joke is unfair—the movie would likely have actually turned out better had it been made that way, because the artifices of a studio production and its digital contrivances would have pushed Iñárritu outside his narrow aesthetic ideology regarding physical reality and spiritual redemption. Escaping the self-imposed limits of climatic and theatrical rigors alike might have sparked his imagination.
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