M artin L uther K ing J r .
January 13, 2016
Page 37
2016 special edition
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Harrowing film ‘The Revenant’ broadens truths
First Nations
people portrayed
with dignity
d arleen o rtega
The critical reaction to the
work of Mexican director Ale-
jandro González Iñárritu chron-
ically illustrates how dominant
culture bias affects what stories
are told and valued on film. His
most heralded work is “Bird-
man,” which won him the Oscar
for best director last year and is
about a successful white Hol-
lywood actor facing an identity
crisis (and happens to be my least
favorite of his films). Iñárritu is
an inventive and original director,
but his vision tends to be praised
in relation to how closely it hews
to Hollywood values -- for things
like cleverness and ambitious
technical feats (like the contin-
uous shot in “Birdman”) -- and
criticized for ways it deviates
(like the spiritual elements in
“Biutiful,” which were viewed as
incoherent by many U.S. critics,
but which made that film, for me,
Iñárritu’s best work to date).
The same problem is already
evident in the critical reaction to
“The Revenant,” Iñárritu’s latest
film. It’s inspired by the legendary
true story of Hugh Glass (Leonar-
do DiCaprio), a frontiersman who
in the 1820s was mauled by a bear
and left for dead, yet survived and
traipsed perhaps 200 miles alone
to reach the men who had left him
behind.
The film has been praised for
its ambitious and intensely real-
istic approach to telling a story
that involves harrowing physical
risk and extremely harsh condi-
tions, yet it has been criticized for
having a “threadbare” story (The
Playlist) and for “blowing it” with
its inclusion of mystical and spir-
itual elements (New York Times).
Even in describing the story, many
critics give short shrift to or even
omit any mention of its First Na-
tions characters and elements,
though they are central to the main
character’s motivation and to the
way this story is told.
So once again I feel compelled
to give Iñárritu his due where oth-
ers haven’t. He has indeed crafted
an ambitious, vivid, and visceral
depiction of life in the Old West
that plows new ground in terms of
its realism and stark beauty. The
cast and crew endured subzero
Leonardo DiCaprio
and Grace Dove in
The Revenant.
by
Photo Courtesy
o Pinionated
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d arleen
o rtega
by
temperatures for months, filming
in natural light under unusually
harsh conditions and capturing
like never before physical de-
mands that we can scarcely imag-
ine today. And you will never see
anything like Glass’s bone-crush-
ing encounter with the mama griz-
zly bear, filmed in one long take;
Iñárritu has captured the unendur-
able better than anyone ever imag-
ined was possible.
But the best things about this
film involve the care with which
Iñárritu has imparted a vision of
a world that Europeans (ancestors
to most of us) destroyed. Never
has the original way of life of First
Nations people been portrayed
with such specificity and dignity
-- the clothes they wore, the hous-
es they built, the languages that
have all but disappeared. By film-
ing in the wildest and most remote
settings and duplicating so scru-
pulously the details of life during
those times, the film captures the
ingenuity it took to build civili-
zations that were destroyed in the
name of -- well, civilized society
and Manifest Destiny.
Little is known about the real
Glass, and there is no historical
record of his family circumstanc-
es. But Iñárritu and his co-writer
Mark L. Smith took the guts of
the known story and added real
sense to it, giving Glass a mar-
riage to a Pawnee woman and a
son to whom he is devoted. This
is more intelligent than the critical
response would suggest; how else
20 th C entury f ox
might a white trapper have ac-
quired the skills to traverse hun-
dreds of miles alone while griev-
ously injured except by spending
years immersed in a culture that
had equipped its people over cen-
turies to survive conditions now
so unimaginable? Many of the
early white settlers were involved
with First Nations women, and
the history books don’t necessar-
ily account for those who made
actual families with those women
and learned their languages and
loved their brown offspring. The
filmmakers’ decisions to ground
this heroically resourceful white
protagonist in an indigenous cul-
ture, to equip him with cross-cul-
tural perception and intelligence,
and to identify him with Pawnee
family members and spirituality
makes for a more interesting and
believable story, and certainly
one that we haven’t had much
opportunity to see in American
movies.
Those story elements also
equip Glass with the motivation
to make the inconceivably ardu-
ous journey at the heart of this
film. His will to keep breathing,
and moving, and surviving is not
fueled by a mere desire for re-
venge for being left for dead (as
many critics suggest), but rather
by love for his son, by a deter-
mined quest for justice, and by
a survival instinct implanted by
a heart connection with his wife
that continues beyond her death.
For some cultures, including in-
digenous cultures, such a con-
nection beyond death is vital to
making sense of the world. The
fact that Hollywood neither un-
derstands nor respects such con-
nections does not render them
“spectral banalities” (Variety).
I’m happy that the praise he
C ontinued on P age 40