Tag Archives: Leonardo DiCaprio

Weekend Movie Pick: One Battle After Another

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Even if this movie weren’t considered darn good, and it is, it’s almost worth it to see a filmmaker—in this case Paul Thomas Anderson—try to shoehorn a Thomas Pynchon novel into a couple of hours. He’s tried before. You need only recall Anderson’s 2014 messy and occasionally hilarious film, Inherent Vice, to award Anderson extra points for tackling the writer again.

This time it works. Partly by stripping out a lot, but there’s enough left to keep viewers’ minds buzzing. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a one-time anarchist/revolutionary and Sean Penn as a far-right army colonel determined to bring him down. Not because Col. Lockjaw is a law-and-order man. Oh, no. His reasons are much more personal. (One very-Pynchon touch is the outlandish names.)

In his revolutionary days, Bob was partnered with Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), who ends up in witness protection, and they had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) who is now seventeen. She lives with Bob in a remote community where he spends his days getting high. He’s been chased so relentlessly by the authorities that he and his friends have developed a sharp sense of paranoia, and when the warning signs come, Bob heeds them. At least as well as he can in his addled state. The plot has been updated from the book (feds chasing drug dealers) to today (feds chasing immigrants), and doesn’t suffer for it.

What so impresses me about DiCaprio’s work is that he’s able to set aside vanity and just be the character, rough edges and all. So many actors (male and female) persist in preening for the camera. They may be delivering the lines, but you can almost see them thinking, “How do I look? How do I look?” DiCaprio lets all that go. And Sean Penn? Creepy, creepy. Plus Benicio del Toro as a guy who knows how to get things done.

Surprisingly (it is Pynchon, after all), the story is pretty easy to follow, and while there’s some violence, Anderson doesn’t follow the Hollywood rule of maximum-to-the-ridiculous fire-power. Some of the strongest scenes are the quietist. It’s a story about people on the fringes, and many kinds of unraveling (security) blankets are out there. I won’t give away any of the plot. See it, and decide for yourself.

Nice music choices too, though I’ll never hear the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” the same way again. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 95%; audiences 85%.

The Revenant

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RevenantLeonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his performance as Hugh Glass in The Revenant (trailer), and the movie is nominated for a dozen Oscars. If these awards were for fortitude alone, the accolades would be well-deserved, as cast and crew have spoken at length about the physical hardships they faced in filming this movie. “The elements sort of took over,” DiCaprio told Wired interviewer Robert Capps. One must wonder, why did they undertake such a difficult and potentially perilous project?

Perhaps they did it because younger audiences today haven’t grown up knowing about the privations and violence inherent in the settlement of the West—there was life before Disneyland—and need to have the blood and guts smacked in their face. In which case, the movie is a success. It’s based in part on Michael Punke’s novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, set in 1820s Montana and South Dakota along the Upper Missouri River.

If they want to give cinematography awards to Emmanuel Lubezki for this film, I will be standing in the front row cheering. It is a beautiful film—with breathtaking views of the western United States (and Canada, Mexico, and Argentina)—shot with a deep depth of field worthy of a Sierra Club coffee table book. Snow-melt rivers, star-spangled nights, forests that pull you into the sky.

It’s just that we’re shown unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unspeakable violence, then astounding beauty, then unsp. . . .you get the rhythm. In fact the violence was always so gruesome that it became (I hate to say this, since human and animal lives were purportedly involved) borrring. The beauty that followed it began to feel like heavy-handed ironic commentary, losing any capacity to soothe. The sound design and music are emotionally apt and compelling, I thought (score by Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who wrote the script with Mark L. Smith, did not conceive of Hugh Glass as anything more than a character bent on revenge. Glass pursues this hollow quest for pretty much two hours and thirty-six minutes. What I like to see in a character is some growth, some change, some “ok, this is awful, but I can rise above it” (or not). But while DiCaprio may well be capable of a meatier performance, the film doesn’t ask it of him. We learn nothing by watching it except that having an angry mama-bear drooling over you is really disgusting, but wait a sec, now she’s going to fling you around like a rag doll again. And drool some more.

For good reason, we don’t like the Frenchies, or the single-minded Indians, or the dim Americans. Everywhere they appear, Lubezki’s beautiful landscape is soon tainted by blood, usually human. Please. A little nuance. But, as Manohla Dargis says in a New York Times review, Iñárritu “isn’t given to subtlety.” The word revenant means “ghost,” and it was clear why the ghosts of Glass’s murdered wife and son keep reappearing and where they will lead him. And I won’t even mention the many, many instances in which the viewer Sees What’s Coming a Mile Away.

All this made me long to reread The Big Sky, the 1947 novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner A.B. Guthrie, Jr. The novel was chosen as “The Best Novel of the American West” by members of the Western Literature Association. As in The Revenant, The Big Sky’s characters travel the Missouri River, live as trappers and guides, and face the vicissitudes of weather and the native population. Yet their struggles will stay with you always, while, I fear, The Revenant is at least dramatically forgettable.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 81%; audiences 87%.