MOVIES
BY RICK LEVIN
LEONARDO DICAPRIO LOOKS FOR
HIS OSCAR IN THE REVENANT
THE UNBEARABLE
LIGHTNESS OF
IÑÁRRITU
The Revenant is an overlong action
flick in search of an abiding allegory
M
exico-born director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu
is custom-built for Hollywood. Like Hollywood,
Iñárritu is neither as deep nor as heavy as he
believes himself to be, and he regularly mistakes
size and scale for epic seriousness. Since he
burst onto the scene in 2000 with Amores Perros, and up to
his Oscar turn last year with Birdman, Iñárritu has been
making a practice of philosophizing with a hammer, turning
supposedly heavy spiritual and existential themes (21
Grams, Babel) into sophomore courses in reductive
obviousness and false epiphanies.
Unlike Clint Eastwood, who is a serious director
disguised as a blockbuster director, Iñárritu remains a pig
in a poke: an action man tarted up like an artist manqué, or
a lead-off hitter who’s argued his way into batting cleanup.
The funny thing is that if Iñárritu leaned more heavily on
his true talents — visual splendor, narrative drive,
choreographed mayhem and pulling strong performances
from brand-name actors — he’d likely achieve the heft and
breadth to which he so desperately aspires. He’s constantly
reaching for Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, when
he’s got Eastwood and Spielberg in his back pocket.
Iñárritu’s latest film, The Revenant, is a case in point.
Iñárritu takes this simple and rather bland revenge tale and
dolls it up like a treatise on retribution and forgiveness,
stretching a small lump of putty into a two-and-a-half-hour
string of circumstances that drags and dangles and tangles
all over the place. The movie opens with a ferocious bang,
as the native Arikara ambush a fur-trapping party working
the Louisiana Purchase; visually and tactically, the scene
rivals the gut-punching oomph of the D-Day landing in
Saving Private Ryan.
But from here, the core story — of a good guy
(Leonardo DiCaprio) rising from near-death to hunt down
the bad guy (Tom Hardy, stunning as always) who wrecked
his life — gets mired in unsubtle philosophical moments
that are as insulting to endure as they are beautiful to
behold, such as the moment when DiCaprio happens upon
the bunk majesty of a stampeding herd of CGI-generated
buffalo.
The Revenant isn’t a bad movie; strip away the
fabricated flab of its moral gravitas and you’ve got a pretty
good action flick. Unfortunately, it is neither intended nor
edited nor packaged as an action flick, and that’s the
problem. To pick out the prize, you’ve got to gulp down a
gutful of the kind of weakly liberal moral excelsior that the
Oscar crowd swills by the bucket — the wish-fulfillment
fable that survival equals moral rectitude, that the primitive
past has a pure heart and that capitalism is redeemed by its
own nostalgia for what it so willfully destroyed. (Regal
Cinemas, Cinemark 17)
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Times For 01/15 - 01/16 © 2016
JANUARY 14, 2016 • EUGENEWEEKLY.COM
01-14-16 movies.indd 1
1/13/16 9:57 AM