Those who live in Glass houses

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2016)

The Bear Necessities. The Passion of the Leo. Or, (my personal favourite), Quaaludes: The Movie. I knew something was amiss when I caught myself drumming up doofus monikers for Alejandro González Iñárritu's gruelling frontier follow-up to his Oscar-winning Birdman, rather than being immersed in its sweeping, blistering journey. On paper, everything was in place for a rugged masterpiece. So, watching The Revenant, why was my disrespectful mind still fumbling for pic-in-ic basket puns instead of being mesmerized by poor "Heyyyyy Lee-o"?
Arguably, in the face of the unrepentant agony on screen, my mind overcompensated with silliness. It's a decent point. Sadly, 'point' is another word that consistently elbowed its way into my brain - as in, "what's the?". Like Werner Herzog's similarly Sissyphissean Fitzcarraldo, Iñárritu subjects his cast and crew to comparable suffering to the story's characters to feel the weight of real adversity. But Fitzcarraldo was governed by a gleaming beacon of a core idea meditating on the sacrifices warranted for art. The Revenant anchors itself on wilful doubt. And, like its craggy, icy terrain, it's hard to find solid footing therein.
The Revenant is not a poor film. In fact, it teeters so close to masterpiece that its slew of creative decisions standing in the way make it all the more frustrating for having opened the the conversation of grandeur, rather than simply settling for pulpy survival epic. As a sensorial experience, Iñárritu's work here is astonishing, almost unprecedented. Indeed, there's an argument to be made for Canada being the most worthwhile 'Best Actor' candidate here, as, on several levels, it's nature that's really the star of the show. Superstar-cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's famous use of only natural lighting is astonishingly evocative. A sumptuous barrage of whirling snow squalls and rivers serenely dribbling amidst sprawling tree trunks, Lubezki delivers - hyperbole-free - some of the most exquisitely expressive wildlife panoramas ever captured on film here. Pair the stunning visuals with Ryûichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto's sparse, agonizingly moving musical score, and we're reminded that 'take your breath away' is more than an expression.
But Iñárritu loves his dichotomies, and with such beauty inevitably comes suffering. And here's where the 'but' comes in. Iñárritu strives for rugged verisimilitude at all costs - dialogue is naturalistic, muddy, and almost nonexistent; performances are beleaguered yet unshowy, each actor ground down to the nub, exposing the shards of truth therein. However, the execution is uneasily disjunctive with Iñárritu's natural flamboyance as a filmmaker. Fishing for connective tissue, Iñárritu sprinkles in inane, surrealistic dream sequences/flashbacks of Glass' ethereal First Nations wife. This sort of preening pretentiousness fit the smarmy absurdity of Birdman perfectly, but it's cloying and distracting here, and the pacing lurches as consequence.
As such, many of the film's livelier sequences - a visually jaw-dropping assault on the frontiersmen by a First Nations tribe, fraught with kinetically swooshing bloodshed, is the most memorable - juxtapose their grit and hyper-violence with balletic cameras and concussive sound editing. This tension lends the scene a curiously detached, almost adolescent playfulness, which sabotages its visceral integrity. Several scenes of Glass' ruthless survival tactics play for unintended laughs - I dare you to watch him disembowel a horse and sleep in its carcass without the word 'Tauntaun' gallivanting through your mind. The same goes for the film's definitive setpiece: Glass' grisly mauling by bear. The duelling tensions of ferocious realism and ostentatious showiness never quite click, leaving the viewer in sensory overload between DiCaprio's squeals of pain and the noxiously claustrophobic camera-work and (thankfully) CGI bear. I should have felt ill from the scene's graphic intimacy. Instead, my brain incessantly chanted "BEAR FIGHT", a-la Anchorman, as I waited for the noise to end.
This brings us to DiCaprio. He's a stupendous actor, investing 300% in agonizing, method torment here. In fact, the shoot is so tangibly harsh, it's hard to distinguish DiCaprio's acting from simply reacting to the abominable circumstances he is thrust into. Sadly, Iñárritu's insistence on broad characterization - Glass as a force of nature - does DiCaprio no favours. We are given no character backstory, almost no dialogue, no character arc, and virtually no means of personal connection to Glass apart from his affective suffering, and DiCaprio's star appeal. While The Martian continually fought to build character and connection throughout solitude, DiCaprio's work increasingly feels less like a performance and more an episode of Man vs. Wild (and even Grylls peppers humour and humanity throughout) - an entirely physical journey of abject asking audiences to spend two and a half hours with a man they know virtually nothing of apart from his grunts and winces. It's a tragic waste.
Tom Hardy and Domhnall Gleeson do their best to amend this opacity. They're superbly, furiously emotive, both tenaciously craving moral order amidst the madness of the woods. It's a shame Iñárritu doesn't focus more on their relationship than Glass. It's more of a shame that marble-mouthed Hardy's speech (a SPEECH! So many words! I missed them so!) - "God is a squirrel, and I ate that motherf*cking squirrel"?! - is so indecipherable; the film could ravenously use more of its delicious deliriousness.
Most disappointing is, stirring visual poetry aside, how thematically empty The Revenant's antiquated, macho parable of survival and vengeance feels. Flourishes fish for mythology- subverting subtext - a far more interesting subplot involving a First Nations band searching for an abducted girl, and the slippery politics of bartering with French Canadian trappers - but are unceremoniously jettisoned for more long takes of Glass groaning. Gorgeous or not, it's hard not to call Iñárritu's bluff, and assume he set out in the woods to find meaning in the suffering of Hugh Glass, only to conclude, panting in the snow, as robbed of closure as his hero. But, like Glass, Iñárritu finds as much beauty in his journey as irresolution in his destination. And that is comforting in itself.
-7/10