After how much I dug Birdman last year, I was definitely
looking forward to seeing more work from director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
So, in prep for this release, I checked out his other filmography… and noticed
something disconcerting. While I undoubtedly consider Birdman to be the best
film he’s done to date, it’s also the most unlike everything else he’s made so
far. Iñárritu’s usual method of story-telling is with numerous interweaving
character arcs, some of them seemingly completely disconnected from each other,
to convey a specific theme. Birdman, by contrast, is so linear that it is shot
and edited to look like a single continuous take (for the most part) and
focuses mainly on a single character. It’s kind of like claiming to be a fan of
Darren Aronofsky, but saying your favourite film of his is The Wrestler; it isn’t
exactly the best representation of the man’s work as a whole. With this new
information, I began to anticipate today’s release more shakily than I was
expecting to. However, indicative of standard oeuvre or not, I will give this
film the benefit of the doubt regardless; I’m not going to just badmouth a Leo
DiCaprio film purely based on principle.
The plot: Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), after a vicious
attack from a bear, is torn up and immobilized. The rest of his hunting party
try to carry him along with them but John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) thinks that he
is doing nothing but holding them back. After being left in his care while the
rest of the hunters go on ahead, Fitzgerald kills Glass’ son Hawk (Forrest
Goodluck) and buries Glass in a grave alive. When Glass regains consciousness,
he sets out into the snow-encrusted wilderness to make it back to civilisation
and get retribution for what Fitzgerald did to him.
For the record, this film isn’t exactly what the trailers
have made it out to be. What they depict is a more revenge-oriented story,
whereas in the film proper that ends up taking a small portion of the overall
film. Instead, what ends up taking place for the majority of the film is a
depiction of Hugh Glass just trying to survive in the winter landscape.
DiCaprio gets, rather unfortunately, remembered most as the best actor to never
win Best Actor. I’d argue that that shows just irrelevant the Oscars ultimately
are, but that’s just me. Instead, DiCaprio should be remembered as the best
actor who never breaks character. No
matter what goes on, from a drink glass breaking in his hand and cutting him to
a co-star pulling a gun on him unrehearsed in the middle of a scene, DiCaprio
stays in the moment. He is the king of cinematic kayfabe. This might be the
best example of that in terms of an overall film; with minimal dialogue, he
gets across the absolute trial of an experience it would be to traverse that
terrain in the condition he’s in. This is also helped by the unnerving effects
work, which reach the levels of too close for comfort when it comes to the
makeup for the numerous wounds Glass and the other characters receive. I’d
usually be giggling at all the gasping coming from the rest of the audience at
these scenes, if it weren’t for the fact that I was soon joining them.
Emmanuelle Lubezki… you know, every time a new film comes
out featuring this man’s gorgeous cinematography, I keep wanting to go back and
give The Tree Of Life another chance. The man’s sense of open space gives rise
to amazing scenery shots as well as outstanding depictions of isolation; after
how linear Birdman was, it’d be easy to forget that that film was playing very
much against his strengths as well as
Iñárritu’s. However, more so than his masterful framing, what really ends up
impressing here is his approach to the fight scenes, particularly when it comes
to the larger gun fights. The dynamic pans here show that working on Birdman
definitely rubbed off on him, as his grand sweeping movements end up capturing
a lot of energy in a single shot. Doing action scenes in long shots isn’t easy;
you could accidentally show the actors waiting for their cues like in The Last
Airbender. Here, by vast contrast, it makes the impact of every gun shot, arrow
fire and tomahawk slice hit even harder because it is all happening in real
time. In fact, this film is so visual that I almost question if the dialogue
was even necessary. It mostly devolves into frontier gibberish when it is used,
primarily by Tom Hardy as Fitzgerald, and the grandeur of what is captured on
camera starts to override whatever details are spoken before too long. Not that
I’m complaining, though; rather than just being pretty pictures, the visuals
are at least being used to further the story.
For as much as I’ve gone on about how Iñárritu has changed
his style of storytelling since Birdman, he has still kept consistent with his
subject matter to a certain degree. Every one of his films, to varying extents,
have dealt with the worth of human life; how heavy that 21 grams actually feels
to different people for different reasons. Considering his familiarity with the
topic, making a film set in the harsh West is the most natural progression he
could make as a filmmaker. What fuels Glass as a character is his need to
survive in spite of what Fitzgerald has done to him, as well as getting restitution
for his son. Now, with this framework, it would’ve been dead simple to make
Glass out as the out-and-out good guy and Fitzgerald as the out-and-out bad
guy. What changes this is how the conditions of both of their travels are
shown. Even for an able-bodied person going alone, it is a perilous voyage to
make through the wilderness. Add to that an injured hunter who can’t actively
move on his own, and all of a sudden that voyage becomes even harder to make.
As much as we see the admittedly selfish motives of Fitzgerald as evil, the
weather and adversaries he and the other hunters face mean that sympathy isn’t
exactly a luxury that they can afford; if they want to survive, that is. So
here, in keeping with the question of how much a life is worth, it brings up
how much one’s own life is worth in
comparison to someone else’s when both could so easily be lost.
Something that has become increasingly prevalent in
post-Leone Westerns is a more sympathetic tone taken when it comes to the
Native Americans. This film follows in that tradition, only it looks at their
attitudes towards the frontiersmen on a more universal level. Specifically, the
idea of theft as it applies to everyone on various levels. A running sub-plot
alongside Glass’ survival is a group of Arikara natives, who are hunting down
two men who kidnapped the chief’s daughter. They trade with travelling French
soldiers for weapons and horses, all so that they can retrieve what has been
taken from them. And yes, they mention theft of land as well in a few
exchanges. This ends up mingling with the ‘worth of life’ aspect and looks into
how Glass had something precious stolen from him… that he can never get back.
All in all, this is an impressive visual experience. The
cinematography is absolutely stunning, the action scenes are amazingly staged
and executed, the acting is very intense, particularly from DiCaprio being
pushed to his breaking point and while the writing isn’t so strong in terms of
dialogue, its treatment of the seemingly ruthless attitudes of the western
frontier fits with just unrelenting the brutality on screen can get. Definitely
not a film for the faint of heart but still a film I whole-heartedly recommend. I’d probably rank this as Iñárritu’s second best effort to date, just behind
Birdman, and I definitely like that he’s kept on with this new approach he’s
taken of late.
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