Bear good

I pity any film up against The Revenant at this year’s big awards. Not because I personally think it is an unassailable piece of filmmaking – although, incidentally, I do think that – but because it has that prevailing wind behind it already, the one that saw films as diversely deserving and undeserving as Shakespeare In Love, Gravity, Terms Of Endearment, The Artist, Amadeus, Kramer Vs Kramer, Gandhi, On The Waterfront, From Here To Eternity, West Side Story and Ben-Hur win big, and across the board, leaving all comers in their jet-propelled wake. As I always state for the record at awards season time: I prefer to be surprised on Oscar night (and Bafta night, and Golden Globes night), but a consensus can sometimes build, whether it’s within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association or the British or American Academies. If The Revenant does what I expect it to (and what it has already done at the Globes, with the big three in the Drama category all nabbed: Picture, Director, Actor), then its nearest rivals may find themselves heading for the exit, pursued by a bear.

I don’t often do this, but I have seen The Revenant twice. I saw it twice in the space of four days. I was so enraptured by its broad canvas, its artistic vision, its sodden tactility, its elemental power, and its on-the-hoof, let’s-eat-the-snow-right-here acting, I had to return to see how it felt when I knew what was coming. I have to tell you, foreknowledge is no witherer of its strange, ugly-beautiful magic. The only hope for the other big nominees is in the female categories, as the women in The Revenant do not get very much to do, it has to be said.

Put away the Bechdel test. It meets the first criterion: it must have at least two women in it. But not the second two: the women must talk to each other, about something besides a man. The film’s principal cast list contains two women: Grace Dove, who plays Leonardo Di Caprio’s deceased Pawnee wife, and Melaw Nakehnk’o, who plays Powaqa, the kidnapped daughter of an Arikara (“Ree”) tribal chief. The first is seen only in wordless flashback, where she is shot dead by a British soldier; the second is glimpsed being dragged off to be raped by a French trapper, then rescued by Leo, but empowered to exact her own poetic revenge on her abuser. You might applaud that outcome, but it takes Powaqa being enslaved and sexually assaulted for it to happen.

I make no claims for the feminism of either the fictional or fictionalised 19th century menfolk in this western. Will Poulter and to an extent Domnhall Gleason play male characters with a moral compass, but by and large the American and English protagonists are a bunch of cavemen in furs with muskets and Bowie knives. Tom Hardy essays another venal baddie to add to Alfie in Peaky Blinders and both Krays in Legend; he is Leo’s nemesis, and very much a loner, out for himself, with no crumpled photograph of a sweetheart in his man bag. This is a rough, tough world of hunting, shooting, fishing, whoring and breaking things (in which sense: how very like our own Conservative cabinet). There is a fine tradition of independent and able women in westerns, but they tend to be subjugated in what is a deeply patriarchal world.

The Revenant makes no retrofitted liberal concessions to modern thinking, and in a way, why should it? These are violent men, raping the land and natural resources of indigenous people for profit. From this testosterone-stinking malaise, Leo’s Hugh Glass is as close as a Guardian reader as you could hope for: a principled man who married a Pawnee and had a “half-breed” son with her, risking disenfranchisement and worse for sleeping with the enemy. But his Pawnee empathy gives him a spirituality – and a drive to survive – that his peers perhaps do not possess. Their mistreatment of him forces him to live for revenge. The world of The Revenant brutalises even the most open-hearted. It’s like a war movie that’s really an anti-war movie; it can only be such by showing that war is hell.

Aware of all of this, I was surprised at the vehemently negative response of trustworthy Observer writer Carole Cadwalladr. In a piece at the weekend, she unleashed these sentiments (having seen The Revenant before Christmas). Kicking off with objectively fair images of what’s in the film (“Ritualised brutality. Vengeful blood lust. Vicious savagery justified by medieval notions of retribution”), she then moves to undermine what is a serious film by calling it “the hottest blockbuster of the season … and yours for around £10-£15 this weekend at your local multiplex”. I assume she knows that not all films at your local multiplex are romantic comedies or Pixar animations. She quotes male critics (alright, too many national newspaper critics are male), who have praised the film’s “revenge, retribution and primal violence” and “unthinking, aggressive masculinity.” However, I don’t see this as a binary issue of male versus female, violent versus non-violent, blockbuster versus arthouse.

She does: “I’ll summarise the plot for you: man seeks revenge, man gets revenge. That’s it, basically, for two and a half hours, though there is a brief reprieve when you get to see Leonardo DiCaprio being mauled by a grizzly bear.” She counts the women onscreen, as I have done, but she misses out the silent squaw in a ruined encampment whom Will Poulter’s character feeds and leave alone, daring not to alert his aggressive “partner” Hardy to her presence. (She does not speak either, but the Native Americans we see seem to be men of few words and many thoughts.)

“The woman is not actually raped, of course,” Cadwalladr faux-complains. “She’s faux raped. Because this is what we call acting. And because The Revenant is what we call entertainment.” Who is calling The Revenant “entertainment”? It’s a fair question. It’s not the first noun I’d reach for. It’s an experience, maybe even an endurance, but was I “entertained”? By the spectacle, the scope and the thrill of the escape, certainly. But it’s tough going, this film. It’s not like a fairground ride, with sanitised ups and downs, it’s a slog. A wet, dirty, infected, sore, painful, blood-stained and spit-flecked assault course for the senses. It’s not boring, but it’s not a showbiz spectacular and there are few jokes or dance routines. To call it “entertainment” – as I rather suspect people in marketing aren’t even calling it – is to make a spurious point.

I like Carole Cadwalladr’s writing, but she freeforms after this, saying that we “choose to pay to watch women being pretend raped rather than watching women being actually raped for free.” I’m not sure that’s a conscious choice for me. “Even the ending is ambiguous, and leaves many questions unanswered and issues unresolved. Nobody rides off into the sunset,” she correctly observes (in the Observer), thus undercutting her own sneer that The Revenant is “entertainment.” Oh dear. She speaks, disapprovingly, of a “well-oiled publicity machine of the type that fuels an Academy Awards clean sweep”, as if The Revenant isn’t entitled to pitch for recognition by its industry peers. Some Academy members may be disengaged enough to be “bought” by studio enticements, but most of these old, white men will only vote for a film because they liked it, now matter how old, white and male they statistically are. Many of them will still have freewill.

She mocks how “gruelling” the shoot is known to have been, and how “authentically” the actors “suffered”, belittling even that aspect with the aside, “They got a bit cold, apparently.” (Hey, either they suffered or they didn’t. If they didn’t, then the acting is even better.) The cinematography is “gorgeous,” she concedes, but, in conclusion, “the whole thing is meaningless. A vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle. The Revenant is pain porn.”

Putting a word before “porn” is a cheap trick. I should know, I’ve done it on numerous occasions. Certainly there is power in seeing pain acted if it’s done well, and it is done well. But is it pornographic? Leo’s mauled by a grizzly and bears the weeping scars, but this is clever makeup, aided by clever acting. (“Porn,” in the true sense, is sort of not acting, isn’t it? Otherwise customers would demand their money back.)  By the time she compares the artificial, acted violence with real violence, as seen in Isis videos, I was as lost as Glass. That Isis “lift” the techniques of Hollywood to make their nihilistic, barbaric point is not the fault of Hollywood. More people get killed in Gone With The Wind than in The Revenant. When she concludes that Isis “has seen what we want, what we thrill to, and given it to us,” she seems to want to make viewers of fiction feel in some way culpable for Islamic State. “The Revenant isn’t responsible for this,” she then points out, going back into the ring one more time to call a film she didn’t like “tedious” and “emotionally vacant.”

I found it to be otherwise. I would not argue that it’s a violent, masculine, macho film with little space for the input of women. But it is possible to watch it, with its sexual assault and brutal feuding, and not “enjoy” it in the way Carole Cadwalladr implies that we all do. (Unless she just means all men. It’s still inaccurate, if so.)

“Don’t pay £10-£15,” is her entreaty. Do, if you want to see an amazing piece of high-impact, naturally-lit, visually poetic cinema, is mine. And then you will have your own opinion.

 

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Trail mix

This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and I’ve just seen it for the second time in two weeks: Meek’s Cutoff, a quiet, low-energy, minimalist Western from indie director Kelly Reichardt. Although set in 1845, it could have been made in 1975, such is the unshowy, realistic, grainy, mumbly modus operandi. Not much happens. But what does happen is pregnant with symbolism and myth, and the dialogue – by Reichardt’s constant collaborator Jon Raymond – is so carefully chosen in a film with huge chunks of wordlessness and recorded in such a natural way that you need to see it twice to really get your ears round it. (Not that I’m recommending you pay to see a film twice. When I was hosting Back Row on Radio 4, I fairly light-heartedly suggested people should see Mulholland Drive twice because it’s so difficult to understand on first viewing, and a listener complained to Feedback, accusing me of being in the pay of the film company! What a twat.)

I haven’t seen Reichardt’s previous two films, so I’m coming to her style cold, but I love it. This is my kind of film. Such an inspired idea to break down the whole history and mythology of the Old West to the tale of three families in three wagons who’ve broken away from the Oregon Trail to take a short-cut – or cutoff – at the behest of their grizzly guide Meek (Bruce Greenwood – John F Kennedy in Thirteen Days). They are lost. Early on, we see one of the husbands (Paul Dano), carving the word “LOST” into some tree bark. Their despair builds as the story progresses, and the arrival of an Indian (Ron Rondeaux) adds further tension, when Meek would have him killed, while the others, most vocally the wise old widower Solomon (Will Patton), think he will help them find water. The Indian – no more than a “heathen” and a “savage” to the unreconstructed mountain man Meek – is in touch with the landscape, and he too scratches something into the rocks, albeit something more pictorial and possibly more meaningful than a single word like “LOST.” (Ironically the paranoid pioneers later worry that the Indian is leaving “signals” with his drawings; what was Dano’s character doing but leaving a “signal”?) Oh, and yes, the Biblical imagery is clear – Solomon isn’t called that for nothing, although the Promised Land looks increasingly unattainable in this exodus by God-fearing folk.

It’s not new to see American pioneers come face to face with a native soul – the occupier thrown together with the occupied; civilisation meets pre-civilisation – but Meek’s Cutoff spends so much time carefully and precisely setting the scene, describing the landscape and dropping us right into the dust and drudgery of everyday life on the road (one of the wives complains that the women are “working like niggers” at one point, laying wide open the inherent hypocrisy of the white man’s racism), the moments of familiarity from previous Westerns are few and far between. This is a slow piece. It moves at the same arduously gradual pace of the wagons themselves, the constantly squeaking wheel of one announcing their progress throughout, and it is this empathy with the characters’ plight, forced upon us through sheer attention to detail, that makes the film. You can feel the dust, smell the sweat, and eventually start to wilt from the hours each day they spend trudging through the desert. (I had a bottle of water with me; I nearly drank it all.)

One oddity. The film is shot in “Academy ratio”, ie. 1.375:1 – which is almost square and was the industry standard before the Widescreen boom in the 1950s. This seems self-defeating when the Oregon landscape is such an integral part of the film. I don’t know why Reichardt chose it. Maybe somebody out there knows? Meek’s Cutoff still looks stunning – there are a couple of very slow dissolves that are pure artistry – and you forget about the ratio after a while, but I couldn’t help feel I was missing something out in those wide open spaces.

It was a particularly fine choice to see at the Curzon again this afternoon in order to avoid the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Wedding. There were a few other republicans in there, and only one of them used his phone, once, to read a text, whose alert (luckily muffled by being inside his rucksack) actually came at about the worst time it could have done in terms of onscreen tension. Well done, that man.