Traveling far outside but seeing one thing

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2016)

The blueprint here is simple. A world that lies in wait and summons unexpected violence that wrecks lives - it can be an Indian ambush, a bear, or a greedy little man who will do anything for quick profit. A world of immense beauty, inscrutable in workings, that we try to subdue to our satisfaction.
DiCaprio as our ability to coexist and adapt to the land, the Fitzgerald character as that nature in man that only wants to please itself and to grab. It's not just a meaningless violence that visits them. We're made to note Indians out in search for a daughter that was stolen, a bear that was only protecting its young. Meaning, there's agency behind the random cruelty.
Other filmmakers, Malick for one, would be content to evoke different ways of framing the question posed by this world so that we would end up hopefully with a whole cloud of floating realities. (Malick no doubt knows that agency as what the Chinese call the Tao). Inarritu is plot- and action-driven and reflects in the gaps instead.
I mean this is a film where two hours in we still have shenanigans like DiCaprio crashing down from a cliff. It has a clear causality. One event precipitates the next. So when the Indians spare a pointless death in the end, it registers as plot contrivance instead of spiritual realization that severs the cycle of suffering. We ask, why would they spare him? Which is the wrong question.
This is just not a very astute work and it comes down to perhaps one thing; how the camera breathes life into the world. It is Malick inspired, most obvious in the dream scenes. But it rests on a poor understanding of him. Malick - like Tarkovsky before - frees eye from world, the eye that recalls and reflects from the world of events with its clear causality, so that the eye can float in and out of lives, entering events, memories, urges, anticipations in a seamless flow that encompasses a bigger whole.
Inarritu has no notion of this yet. Birdman showed that he might be coming around but no dice. This one frames events as action or dream; its idea of visual poetry is to embed characters in beautiful vistas and have that surround from the outside. It enters this one guy and we have revenge and regret. Oh there are a few continuous shots, an impressive one early; but it's just elaborately choreographed action. The shot ends with the Indian chief whispering a plot point to the camera about his stolen daughter.
No harm in seeing this one. But it would be even better if it propels you to study Malick beneath the soliloquy as a master of the floating eye. Further back it was Jancso and Tarkovsky. It's on discoveries of people like these - people who'd be deemed too abstract and would have gone jobless in Hollywood - that this one rests.
You'll know this if you track down a previous retelling of the same story in the Richard Harris film. The most notable difference between the two is that one uses the naturalistic camera of the western, this a more abstract one. But as commonplace in its use as the other was then.