{"id":5188,"date":"2016-01-18T08:29:28","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T13:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5188"},"modified":"2016-02-15T08:44:03","modified_gmt":"2016-02-15T13:44:03","slug":"the-revenant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5188","title":{"rendered":"The Revenant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Revenant\"Leonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his performance as Hugh Glass in The Revenant (trailer<\/a>), 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. \u201cThe elements sort of took over,\u201d DiCaprio told Wired<\/em> interviewer Robert Capps<\/a>. One must wonder, why did they undertake such a difficult and potentially perilous project?<\/p>\n

Perhaps they did it because younger audiences today haven\u2019t grown up knowing about the privations and violence inherent in the settlement of the West\u2014there was<\/em> life before Disneyland\u2014and need to have the blood and guts smacked in their face. In which case, the movie is a success. It\u2019s based in part on Michael Punke\u2019s novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge<\/em>, set in 1820s Montana and South Dakota along the Upper Missouri River.<\/p>\n

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\u2014with breathtaking views of the western United States (and Canada, Mexico, and Argentina)\u2014shot 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just that we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Director Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, 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 \u201cok, this is awful, but I can rise above it\u201d (or not). But while DiCaprio may well be capable of a meatier performance, the film doesn\u2019t ask it of him. We learn nothing by watching it except that having an angry mama-bear drooling over you is really<\/em> disgusting, but wait a sec, now she\u2019s going to fling you around like a rag doll again. And drool some more.<\/p>\n

For good reason, we don\u2019t like the Frenchies, or the single-minded Indians, or the dim Americans. Everywhere they appear, Lubezki\u2019s beautiful landscape is soon tainted by blood, usually human. Please. A little nuance. But, as Manohla Dargis<\/a> says in a New York Times<\/em> review, I\u00f1\u00e1rritu \u201cisn\u2019t given to subtlety.\u201d The word revenant means \u201cghost,\u201d and it was clear why the ghosts of Glass\u2019s murdered wife and son keep reappearing and where they will lead him. And I won\u2019t even mention the many, many instances in which the viewer Sees What\u2019s Coming a Mile Away.<\/p>\n

All this made me long to reread The Big Sky<\/em>, the 1947 novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner A.B. Guthrie, Jr. The novel was chosen as \u201cThe Best Novel of the American West\u201d by members of the Western Literature Association. As in The Revenant<\/em>, The Big Sky<\/em>\u2019s 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<\/em> is at least dramatically forgettable.<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 81%; audiences 87%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonardo 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Revenant - Too much gore, too little story - astonishingly beautiful setting & sound design","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,57,104],"tags":[459,73],"class_list":["post-5188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-movies","category-the-morgue","tag-leonardo-dicaprio","tag-nature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1lG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5190,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188\/revisions\/5190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}