The Revenant (2015)

2016 is shaping up to be the year of “Is it just me?” I’m closer to thirty now than I’ve ever been before, and I’m increasingly feeling out of touch with the critical community; I still love a good Marvel superhero flick, more inclined as I am to forgive/overlook their failings. Meanwhile, critical darlings are drifting past me in severely underwhelming fashion. I sniffed at Mad Max: Fury Road, which now has a Best Picture nomination to its name, and I couldn’t disagree more with those who said The Hateful Eight was the work of a mature Tarantino.

Now here I am at The Revenant, “Certified Fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes and lauded with Oscar nominations and Golden Globes victories aplenty. And again I’m asking the question that seems poised to be on my lips for the rest of the year – did we all see the same movie? For my money, The Revenant was more than a little boring, containing as it does a few viscerally composed memorable moments punctuated by long reels of punishment that border closer to cinematic sadism than awards bait.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in the role which will likely win him his first Oscar (about which, more later), stars as Hugh Glass, a frontiersman left for dead by his comrades (Tom Hardy and Will Poulter). Amid an unremitting landscape and every possible way to die in the wilderness, Glass stumbles, bleeds, and inches his way back to civilization – and his revenge.

I’m a bit of a newcomer when it comes to director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I thought Birdman was a masterpiece, brilliantly anchored by Michael Keaton’s commanding lead performance with a delightful ensemble cast backing him up. And after The Revenant, I was reminded just how good Birdman was, because The Revenant lacks most of what made Birdman so compelling. Instead of a snappy script with snappier performances and a directorial eye that knows to keep the film moving, The Revenant has one strong performance that plays out its one-note fairly quickly, while the supporting cast is given short shrift in favor of long – and I mean gruelingly long – wide takes of landscape, the likes of which perhaps more properly belonged in an ode to 70mm like The Hateful Eight.

“Belabored” is the word I’d use most for The Revenant. DiCaprio is bludgeoned by the weight of survival, and he does an adequate job portraying a man at the limits of his capacity to survive, but more than two and a half hours it’s excruciating only to a point, at which moment the viewer becomes dulled to the horror of the wilderness, moving instead in the “Well, what else did you expect? Of course [insert tragedy here] was bound to happen at this rate.” Ditto for the unforgiving landscape, which at first seems horrifyingly blank but soon becomes commonplace, painful to the retinas more than to the soul.

And speaking of souls, I sense that The Revenant is going for spiritual commentary in its dreamlike editing, but there is not the thickness of narrative needed to support such intuited depth. The motivations of all the protagonists are, frankly, still somewhat baffling, and the political climate of the time isn’t adequately fleshed out. All the time that could have been devoted to these plots is instead exhausted on calamity and bloodshed and struggling, leading the audience to feel that the point was more about punishment than any narrative arc. One must recognize that there is something much deeper in Hardy’s character than the film permits him to display, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to see more of Domhnall Gleeson’s Captain Henry, or perhaps that’s just a reflection of how much I liked his understated sneer of a villain in The Force Awakens.

There are things enjoyable in the film, predominantly the most violent bits in which the plot moves forward and the languorous quality of the film pays off. The bear scene, about which much ado has been made, is brutal in a technically sound way, and the final confrontation between DiCaprio and Hardy does justice to the relationship between the two characters. At the end of the day, The Revenant tries to overwhelm but ends up underwhelming. Though DiCaprio is good enough in the film, he’s not overpoweringly commanding, leading this reviewer to suspect that his Oscar win next month (which is all but assured – or so I predicted about Keaton in Birdman last year) will be more a lifetime achievement award than a recognition that this is as good as it got this year. The same happened to Denzel Washington for Training Day, which was good but not his career best (that honor goes to Malcolm X or John Q).

Or maybe I’m just out of the loop. But I can’t say that I’d put The Revenant on my Top 10 of 2015.

The Revenant is rated R for “strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity.” This thing is intense, as I’ve said, and Iñárritu is unapologetic in his depiction of blood. There’s a rape sequence in which nothing is shown, though in another scene a dead man is seen naked from a moderate distance.

Birdman (2014)

It’s no secret around here that superhero films are really my cup of tea, and I love a good bit of deconstruction as much as anyone.  And with the Oscar race nearing the starting line, I’m ready what the studios have left in the barrel for 2014 to see what they consider to have been the best saved for last.  Birdman is a combination of all three, familiar in some places but oddly unique in others – mostly mystifying but never anything less than riveting.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomas, a washed-up superhero actor who hung up his Birdman costume after three successful films twenty years ago.  In a bid for new relevance, Riggan is helming a Raymond Carver stage adaptation, a Broadway show with more obstacles before opening night – chief among them the interference of a thespian (Edward Norton) who takes himself far too seriously, the skepticism of his producer (Zach Galafianakis), and the backstage presence of his recently-rehabilitated daughter (Emma Stone).  All the while, Riggan seems to be haunted – or is that possessed? – by the voice of Birdman.

I’ll begin by echoing what nearly everyone has already said – the 87^th Oscar for Best Actor is really Michael Keaton’s to lose.  The apparent self-reflexivity of the role – Keaton left Batman after two films, amid creative differences and concerns of typecasting – had lured me to the theater, but it is by far the least interesting thing about the role, which says something about the staggering amount of depth Keaton brings to the part.  It’s weird that the last time I “saw” him was as Ken in Toy Story 3, a part which had already seemed so perfectly cast.

More interesting than the modest overlap between Riggan and Keaton’s career is the similar approaches to relevance.  Where Riggan wants to be admired once more, his whole arc in the film a bid to be taken seriously, there is no scent of that desperation in Keaton’s work.  Instead, any renewed relevance comes ipso facto from the fine performance.  Keaton, like the best comic actors, is able to walk the line between pathos and punchline; he can turn it on or off as needed but often finds more versatility in the gray areas.  Especially remarkable are the scenes where he and the other actors are rehearsing the play, the rapid-fire conversation toggling between the playscript and their own actor’s notes on the script.  These are brilliantly done, showcasing the number of levels on which Keaton can work, and they raise one of the film’s most significant themes – the blur between truth and performance.

I’ve always been aware of Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I’d never seen one of his movies before Birdman.  As it stands, this interrogation of performativity is absolutely fascinating, inviting comparisons with Black Swan, which similarly dealt with a performer’s questionable grasp on sanity at the key moment of her career.  Unlike Black Swan, though, Iñárritu has so many themes on his plate that the balanced attention he gives to all of them is a superpower in and of itself.  In the film’s two-hour runtime, Iñárritu tackles performance, love, respect, blockbusters, reinvention, social media, critique, and a handful of others.

This deft balance of the film does, however, leave me a bit perplexed in the sense that Birdman is such a full-bodied satire that I don’t fully know where we stand by the end of it.  Iñárritu is obviously not a fan of superhero blockbusters (Riggan complains that all the good actors are wearing capes), nor does he have any patience for the pretensions of the arthouse crowd (Norton’s technique-obsessed Mike Shiner, a spot-on caricature, is only real on stage).  Iñárritu dismisses lawyers, loathes anyone with a cell phone in front of their face (“Can’t you just have a real experience for once in your life?”), and isn’t too fond of art critics, either.  Birdman targets all of these to expose their absurdity, but the ground on which we’re left is a little shaky.

Many critics are falling over themselves to talk about the film’s apparent long-take filming, and while Iñárritu has clearly disciplined his cast to handle these scenes, I’m not too impressed by the overall longness of the takes because I’m certain there’s some digital fakery afoot.  It does, after a while, start to feel like a gimmick – Hitchcock did the same thing in Rope, and it called attention to itself there, too.  Fortunately, however, it’s not a gimmick that takes away from the film, just another neat thing Birdman does.  (Just setting the record straight – it was impressive when Hitchcock faced the challenge on film, but in a digital world, it’s nothing we didn’t see in Children of Men.)

I mentioned the film’s shotgun-style approach to satire, but I do think that ultimately what you make of the film depends entirely on its ending.  The “ambiguous final shot” is so pervasive these days that it’s almost to the point of a cliché, so I would be interested to know what others make of the film.  For me?  Without spoiling anything, I’m a subscriber to the “happy ending” interpretation, for all the science-fictional/superheroic implications that come with that.  Your destination may vary, but your mileage won’t – Birdman is a fabulous thought-provoking crowdpleaser.  I didn’t always know what to make of it, but it managed to feel compelling all the way through.

Birdman is rated R for “language throughout, some sexual content and brief violence.”  The film is littered with F-bombs and other adult language.  A man is seen nude from behind, and in another scene his costume reveals an (exaggerated) outline of his genitals.  There are about three bloody scenes (many involving fake blood for the stage) and a few hamfisted fistfights played for laughs.