19th Century Frame for 21st Century Mysticism

Rating: 7/10 (17 January 2016)

The Revenant, Alejandro Inarritu's epic story of survival and revenge based somewhat loosely on the story of early 19th Century trappers in the American West, brings the awe- inspiring beauty and spirit-crushing physical hardship of that elemental time and place to the screen with visceral power and visual grace. By using the outline of real events surrounding trapper Hugh Glass and demanding the most of himself and his production crew - as well as by sparing no expense (creating controlled avalanches, for instance) - Inarritu has forcefully stamped the daunting and morally complex reality of 19th Century frontier existence onto the minds of 21st Century viewers. These motivations and their creative expressions are effective and mostly honorable, if sometimes overwrought and in a practical sense, unbelievable.
The problems with this film, however, are significant, and they mostly have to do with Inarritu's inability to get out of his own way. He constantly imposes his vision of a lost human oneness with nature, and with the superior moral and spiritual sensibilities of native or indigenous peoples of times and places that are not tainted by Western European and American capitalistic greed and depravity - and he does this while still trying to keep the the spark of the survivalist and revenge-oriented narrative fresh. It does not, in the end, all quite work.
The message of mammon's corruption of the raw, pristine, and yes, virtuous is not a new one, much as it is countered by Inarritu's own budget busting to provide such an impression and by the natural instinct to improve upon the challenging conditions faced by the trappers and natives that the film conveys. Moreover, the effort taken in this lengthy visual endurance contest to maintain the mystical and anti-Enlightenment vision while supporting the desire to ever-so-tangibly enforce the difficulty of survival and the driving energy of revenge becomes, sadly, dull and somewhat contrived. Inarritu is also striving to use all the techniques of cinema he has gathered from Herzog, Malick, Ozu, Ford and Eastwood (among perhaps many others) to convey his point, with endless landscape cuts, shots of swaying trees (whose trunks are strong...), beautiful low-light and even night-time images (in what is a ridiculous scene near the end), and agonizing close-ups that often result in the breath of the subject on the lens of the camera (I have Leo's face memorized). But Inarritu does not stop there: to further impose the native spirituality and perspective that we are to believe that Hugh Glass has embraced, we see images of bones piled high, back-lit scenes from the halcyon days of Glass's companionship with a Native American wife and times of restful bonding with his son. It is all just too much for the narrative to carry, beautiful as the images are, taut as the concept of survival is presented. The movie loses momentum and impact about halfway through. I found myself waiting for the plot-driven denouement, understanding pretty fully by then the theme Inarritu was trying to convey.
Another aspect of this film is disturbing, and is related to Inarritu's heavy-handed nature. He creates at least one character within the central plot to further his thematic point and to increase the force of the revenge motif. He is not true to the actual outcome of the story, for which he can be forgiven since he never actually states that he is providing a film based on fact. And he moves the settings from their true location of the Glass saga, in sections of what is now northwestern and central South Dakota in the US, to Canada, and even Argentina. The flat and visually static great plains was apparently not a good enough place to increase the survivalist drama for Inarritu, nor to allow for endless upward shots of the swaying trees. However, shooting in such a location might have given a brief economic benefit to that poor area of the United States, perhaps providing a few temporary jobs to Native Americans from local tribes. And working in the true location might also have added some authenticity to the nature of the survivalist struggle and paid a respectful tribute to the the specific indigenous peoples that populate the story (Pawnee and Arikara) and inspired the mystical ethics and spirituality to which Inarritu wants us to believe he finds affinity.