[Discussion] A.G. Inarritu's "The Revenant"

There's very little Malick in this film. Like most of Inarritu's work, it is intensely nihilistic. In Malick, finding a new world brings out every conceivable human emotion in the characters. This was just a revenge narrative. I'm not denying that any of the elements you list were there: I'm just saying that isn't enough for a film. There wasn't enough content in "The Revenant." Lubezki essentially failed: apart from a few shots taken directly from The New World (I refer to the battle scene especially), there wasn't anything particularly interesting. Lubezki's use of natural light did not lend itself to the locations where he ended up shooting. It was too dark and magic hour shooting became difficult, so the whole thing has this washed out tone that does not feel current or interesting. See films like the New World or Butch Cassidy and they're bursting with color, you kind of have to rein it in if anything. None of the awe or majesty that defined the West were present in this film: it's just a bleak expanse populated by jaded savages. Comparing it to the New World, it's not even a contest. It's possible that Malick is needed to edit Lubezki.

So you have a bunch of trappers, Frenchmen, and Indians out in the West, as we all know that there were, once. For some reason the film seems to constantly want to remind us of the diversity of the West, but it doesn't really come across that way: it's a multi-ethnic congregation of boring, illiterate assholes, regardless of nation. So much for diversity. This actually doesn't have any grounding in the reality of 1820's America, which recognized the epic, sublime nature of the frontier and romanticized it. (One reason the Americans ended up winning the West was that they were the most enthusiastic about being there: when they killed Indians, it was with great conviction and relish--essentially it was a very interesting period with heightened emotions, and the film missed that. This isn't a problem per se, but in lieu of a sense of history, I would have liked to see more than Leonardo Di Caprio playing a vengeful snow plough.)

So I sympathize with those who say it was an attempt at Art with a capital A. But that's not the problem, that's a given with Inarritu. It's the populist impulse that he employs to sort of check something that could be boringly bleak: Inarritu has a lot of trouble making the audience care about the characters, because I think he is essentially misanthropic: it sort of worked in Amorres Perros. But the characters of the son and the wife didn't add anything to the story, they were cheap pawns in the game, sacrificed because, having no spoken dialogue, Leo Di Caprio is not a naturally sympathetic character. This is similar to the death of a child in 21 Grams and his unforgivably lazy. I don't know how producers let Inarritu get away with things like that. It's a level of audience manipulation so amateur it will never achieve its desired effect, and certainly didn't here, I think anyone can agree with that.

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