Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Runtime: 156 minutes
So much for levity. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, fresh off an Oscar win for Best Director is back, and unlike Birdman, his new project is very, very serious. And yet, after the emotional and technical highwire act of Birdman, something seems to have shaken loose in the director's approach to darker material. The Revenant, despite its share of heavy going and brutal events, may mark a return to expected territory for Inarritu, but it does so in a way that suggests the director's approach to straight drama may finally be evolving. By turns plodding and powerful, this bleak anti-Western has enough going for it that it manages to overcome several gaping weaknesses.
Those weaknesses take some time to become apparent, as Inarritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith waste no time in plunging the viewer into an intense, visceral story. After a quick, Malick-esque opener, The Revenant kicks off with a stunning battle made all the more immersive by Emmanuel Lubezki's roving, deep-focus photography (it plays out like a Herzog movie on steroids). As in Birdman (albeit to a lesser degree), The Revenant is mostly comprised of lengthy, unbroken shots. And, perhaps to better effect here than in Inarritu's showbiz black comedy, the camera work feels more purposeful in terms of drawing one in to a different place and time.
Set in the first half of the 1800s, The Revenant's eventual plot concerns Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, playing a fictionalized version of a real frontiersman), a fur trapper with some of the worst luck imaginable. The opening confrontation with a Pawnee tribe sends Glass' expedition scrambling for a new route home, and it doesn't get much better from there. Though most in the crew (including characters played by Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter) respect Glass' knowledge of the local terrain, there is understandable division in how to proceed. Leading the opposition is John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), driven purely by a desire to get to a trading post ASAP and collect their earnings. Everything goes (further) south when Glass has an absolutely horrific encounter with a grizzly bear, which is - like most of the setpieces in the film - presented in an unflinching shot that represents a visual endurance test. Soon Glass, with no help from Fitzgerald, is left for dead, which of course he isn't.
It takes close to an hour for this first leg of the journey to transpire, though the constant sense of movement prevents the film from drowning in its own dour atmosphere. Inarritu's previous dramas have often been met with criticism for either being overbearingly heavy or obnoxiously contrived. With The Revenant, based in part on true events, at least now the director has found a story where his tendency towards self-important dramatics actually fits the material.
So much of The Revenant works so well that it's not until near the finale that one of the biggest issues with the script rears its head: DiCaprio's Glass is not a terribly well-formed character. While the film's other roles allow for (admittedly straightforward) characterization, Glass himself remains a bit vacant. The decision to shoot just about the entire film on location pays off in spades from a filmmaking standpoint, but this has somehow happened at the expense of the writing. Aside from grunting in pain, DiCaprio spends most of the movie doing stunts, rather than building a character. Physicality can a be powerful component of a performance, but when the entire role is built around strenuous activity, it's hard to feel even a passing intellectual connection or sense of empathy. DiCaprio does at least get one strong moment before the final showdown, but with so much time spent just watching him survive, it feels a bit thin in retrospect.
With Glass' characterization left out in the wilderness, the emotional core of the film resembles the frozen-over quality of the visuals. The other actors, at least, get to do something other than function as human rag dolls. Gleeson does some fine work as a co-leader of the expedition convinced that Glass is dead, while Will Poulter is excellent in his limited scenes as a crew member concealing the ugly truth. The film's emotional high points arise not from Glass' arc, but from interactions between other characters about Glass' fate. Hardy, trading in the scorched earth of Mad Max for the snow-covered American frontier, is a solid villain as well, even though much of his dialogue is difficult to decipher.
What The Revenant lacks in in-depth character development, it oddly makes up for with broad-strokes symbolism. Inarritu's hand can be a bit too heavy to create something truly transcedant, but he manages to extract some striking moments of poetry out of all of the chaos. Dreams and flashbacks play a key role in giving the film a broader historical context, and are often more informative than what takes place in the present. Glimpses of Glass' Native American wife, as well as the rampant decimation of Native tribes at the hands of white colonizers, do a compelling job of subverting the traditional cowboys-and-indians notion of classic Westerns.
Bridging the gap between dream and reality is a subplot centered on a group of Pawnee warriors going after a missing woman from their tribe. This narrative thread, a head-scratcher at first, ends up working in the film's favor as an inverted parallel of the central plot. Glass seeks revenge for being left for dead (as well as the murder of his mixed-race son) to try, now that he has nothing left to live for despite living in land taken by force by his fellow white explorers. The Pawnee tribe, meanwhile, is out to reclaim one of their own, taken by the same white explorers, so that they can do their best to stay united as their numbers dwindle as a result of the bloody path cut by "Manifest Destiny." Whether or not Glass gets revenge, he has the option of continuing to build a life for himself. The Pawnee, however, are faced with literal extinction. The film's final scene merges these two angles together for a disquieting end. It positions the The Revenant not as a heroic tribute to human endurance, but rather a bitter and mournful condemnation of the whitewashed, not to mention hideous, violence that formed modern America, and continues to poison its collective moral conscience to this day.
Is this slow-building symbolism enough to justify the lack of development for DiCaprio's role? Well...kind of. Actual investment in Glass as an individual would have only heightened the film's eventual message. Juxtaposing one man's suffering against the destruction of entire races is a smart idea, but it requires more than a noteworthy face to make such a conceit hit home beyond intellectual understanding. The Revenant does so much right, however, that the thinly sketched ideology is elevated above being merely serviceable. It's a oddball case of style emphasizing and fleshing out substance in ways the source can't quite grasp. It's in the periphery, not the central journey, where the The Revenant starts to thaw out and push beyond its immaculate surface.
Grade: B+
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Runtime: 119 minutes
Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has always displayed gifts as a storyteller and as a director of actors. His key weakness, largely due to collaborations with writer Guillermo Arriaga, is that he wants to stretch his vision over far too much. His 2006 drama Babel, though beautifully photographed and acted, was a manipulative and contrived mess. The intersecting stories felt like attempts at making something capital I important rather than authentically compelling. Even after parting ways with Arriaga, Inarritu fell into the same trap with 2010's Biutiful. Once again, strong visuals and powerful acting held back by an exasperating amount of plots and subplots.
Only four years later, however, Inarritu has finally shed his attempts at creating a sprawling game of narrative connect-the-dots. Working with three other credited writers, the director's latest, Birdman, finds him taking on a script actually worthy of his skills. Straightforward, lively, and devoid of narrative flab, Birdman is a bravura work of directing topped off with excellent performances (welcome back, Michael Keaton) and thrillingly ambitious photography.
With the globe-spanning finally laid by the wayside, Inarritu confines nearly all of Birdman in and around a prominent New York theater. It's there where, after a brief and cryptic opening, we meet aging star Riggan Thompson (Keaton), meditating in nothing but his underwear. Oh, and he's levitating about four feet off of the ground, or at least that's what his mind has him believe.
Riggan, as realized here, smartly incorporates Keaton's actual status as an actor, without going overboard with the parallels and references. In the late 80s and early 90s, Riggan was the star of the mega-successful Birdman superhero franchise. That is, until he declined to star in a fourth film, and promptly sent his career into a tailspin. Now, he sits in his dreary looking dressing room watching Robert Downey Jr. rake in obscene amounts of money in the wake of Hollywood's current superhero obsession.
The star dressing room for the Broadway stage is a dream for so many actors, including Riggan's costar Lesley (Naomi Watts). For the former lycra-clad superhero, however, it's much more; it's a chance to put it all out there for the world to see, and bring some credibility back to the faded glory of his name. From the moment that Riggan starts talking about his play - an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story - it's clear that his trip to the stage as writer, actor, and director is all that he has left in himself.
Despite the talented ensemble that fleshes out Birdman's insular world, and the strong moments they all have, one thing is clear: this is Keaton's movie, and it's going to live or die by what he delivers. He succeeds. I've started that short and simple so as to prevent myself from exploding with hyperbole. Electrifying is an easy word to throw around, but Keaton surely earns it. His casting (combined with the part's writing) gives him something to tap into, but it's more than that. In the two hours we spend with Riggan, Keaton captures all of his guilt, frustration, desperation, and rage with the precision of a tightrope walker.
The tightrope comparison applies not only to Keaton or his castmates, but Birdman as a complete entity. Filmed and edited to appear as if 95% of the movie occurs in an uninterrupted shot, Birdman's near-constant movement keeps the storytelling and performances consistently on edge. As it turns out, technical ambition works much better for Inarritu than narrative ambition.
But even though Inarritu has enlisted the great Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree of Life, Gravity), the camerawork is always kept in service of the story and, more importantly, the characters. With the camera turning and circling and prowling all over the place nonstop, the early sequences of Birdman are unusually buoyant. It captures the frazzled, hypersensitive state of Thompson's mind as he's met with everything from stage disaster's to a hilariously difficult new cast member (Edward Norton). Better yet, the impressive technique on display ends up actually being in service of the film's endgame, rather than a mere bit of cinephile fan service.
Birdman is, for all the flourishes, a story about the art of saving artistic face while reasserting one's cultural relevance in the increasingly over saturated world of modern celebrity. Riggan does his best to care for his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), but his best involves hiring her as an assistant. He gets to technically spend time with his daughter, but still get use out of her as he prepares to take the defibrillator to his reputation.
Everyone else is merely a means to an end, though that doesn't mean that Inarritu and his writers have left the other headliners without anything to work with. Norton is especially fun as a pompous stage veteran Mike, providing the perfect external antagonist to drive the film's first half. And he's not just a grotesque caricature of a jerk. His interactions with Riggan contain their own cruel grains of truth, even if they've been distorted by Mike's own pretension and ego. Watts, meanwhile, is nervy and vulnerable, and brings sincerity (or at least the illusion of sincerity) to Lesley, a woman on the verge of finally having her break as she's entering a stage in life where good parts start to vanish. And, as Riggan's former and current partners, Amy Ryan (ex-wife) and Andrea Riseborough (friend with benefits) each lend their own valuable contributions to Birdman's tale of ambition in the face of dashed hopes and dreams. Lindsay Duncan also leaves her mark as the formidable New York Times critic out for blood, and able to deflect each and every verbal blow Riggan throws her way.
All of the above performers have their time to shine, but none impresses quite like Emma Stone. Sam's status as a former addict is never belabored by the writing or directing, leaving Stone room to tap into her character's past while still be able to forge her own future. As good as everyone is here, Stone's interactions with Keaton are the ones I was left desperate for more of when the lights came up. Too often type cast as sassy, cutesy romantic leads, she slips into this damaged, no-bullshit psyche beautifully. Finally, with room to do something truly different, Stone takes charge, and comes closest to matching Keaton in commitment to every unpleasant little detail doled out by the script. Mike presents an artistic challenge, and the booming voice in Riggan's head is a psychological challenge, but only Sam is the real deal when it comes to affecting legitimate reflection in Riggan's life. Everything else, despite all the fuss about reviews and box office intake, is secondary, regardless of what Riggan tells himself.
There is a deep sadness at the core of Birdman, but Inarritu and his collaborators have kept the whole enterprise such a dynamic, spontaneous atmosphere that there's little room to get mired in existential woe. Lubezki's camera demands that, even in the most painful confession, Riggan - and therefore, the audience - keep moving forward. Accentuated by a soundtrack composed of rapturous classical pieces and Antonio Sanchez's drums-only score, and Birdman takes on the movements of a piece of experimental jazz. It's always going, always searching for whatever happens next, thrilling you with its next camera movement or powerful feat of acting, only to go somewhere totally different at a moment's notice. Under Inarritu's firm hand in the director's chair, that vivaciousness is under tight control, yet maintains the feeling of being executed off of the cuff.
Many filmmakers, even great ones, struggle with the balance of style and substance. Inarritu, unlike many of his similarly-afflicted contemporaries, has both of them down. Yet on the matter of substance, he's only succeeded in investigating the emotional core of his stories and characters. The methods of investigation are where the problems show up. After Biutiful's false start at new beginnings, Birdman delivers the great film that Inarritu has had in him ever since he debuted Amores Perros nearly 15 years ago. Birdman's eventual, visceral impact is the direct result of this long-delayed artistic growth. Inarritu has spent his career swinging for the fences and tossing off foul balls. The difference, due to his newfound narrative focus, is that this time he's finally able to get the bat and the ball to connect at the sweet spot.
Grade: A
