I’m one of a rapidly shrinking camp that still thinks that BIRDMAN deserved to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards last year. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu is an iconoclast out to shake things up in Hollywood by being stylistically bold and making life very difficult for himself, his cast and his crew. I can’t dismiss the amount of work put into THE REVENANT, the commitment to reality to the extent that the cast fought very real hypothermia to come to terms with their characters’ struggles. What I can do is admit that for me, it didn’t quite work as a film.
Life was tough for early Nineteenth Century fur trappers. Living in the wilderness and battling the elements for months on end, their lives were unforgiving and a near-constant test of their endurance. In 1823 while leading a potentially lucrative expedition, experienced trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) found himself on the business end of a bear, and soon found himself abandoned by his party and fighting for his life. The film follows this struggle for survival and Glass’s drive to get his revenge on the man who betrayed him (Tom Hardy).
I am so sick of the “Noble Savage” representation of Native Americans. It’s slightly less offensive than the faceless barbarians portrayed in early Westerns, but it’s still incredibly patronising. Glass as our protagonist being a friend of the native and more in touch with nature than his associates are also tired conventions. Of course our hero is at one with nature, bending it but never breaking it. His spirit animal is probably an eagle.
Iñárritu’s direction, like with Birdman is showy and full of ambitious long-takes. Here I found this hugely irritating. The action scenes are nail-biting and gruesome, the life-saving bushcraft techniques explored fascinating, the human struggle very real. But did we need the camera to constantly float in mid-shot to one side of characters like a non-corporeal documentarian? It’s impressive to see the camera tracking through a battlefield rapidly switching focus as combatants are offed, but it’s not immersive and just brings you out of the story too much elsewhere.
The fantastical elements of the story and Glass’s tragic family history I found a little forced and unconvincing. I don’t get what the dream sequences were supposed to mean, and the real Glass didn’t have children. For this story the writers have decided this already remarkable man needed a deceased native American wife and mixed race son (Forrest Goodluck) to give him something to shoot for that isn’t carrying a valuable pelt on its back. Tom Hardy’s Fitzgerald almost comments directly on this when he admits fur trapping and getting paid for it encompasses his whole life.
Fitzgerald is meant to be a boo-hiss villain throughout, but considering the nightmarish extreme survival situation the characters find themselves in, I found myself agreeing 100% with his view that they should shoot Glass to put him out of his misery and be on their way. There is no room for a gentle touch in such a harsh environment, and you definitely would leave a man behind if it meant the difference between life and death for everyone else. It’s almost as though the writers realised halfway through that we had no rational reason to hate Fitzgerald, that he was the character that made the most sense, so they made him commit cartoonish atrocities to make him more despicable.
The much talked about bear attack scene looks a little out of place. It’s well done, but the effects still look slightly off compared to definitively real surrounding film. At first Glass quite wisely plays dead after his first tussle with tooth and claw, but he then proceeds to shoot the thing as it wanders back to its cubs, causing it to come back and finish the job! Think it through, Mr One-with-Nature.
Probably the most interesting thing about the film is its sound design. The first and last thing we hear over a black screen is Hugh Glass’s laboured breathing. The sounds of nature throughout the film are heightened to the point of discomfort – all to emphasise how unforgiving the natural world can be.
Should Leo win his Oscar? Probably. He should have already won one for THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, but the Academy doesn’t like endorsing people playing horrible, if fascinating, human beings. He grew his hair, he spent months in the cold and his performance has a genuine intensity. Should The Revenant win anything else? Probably not, as it works better as an experiment than as a story. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 
“Alas…he won’t be joining us for the rest of his life” (RIP Alan Rickman)
January 2016 will go down as a cruel time for the arts. Just days after transcendent musician David Bowie passed away at 69 from cancer, character actor extraordinaire Alan Rickman has died at the same age from the same dreadful disease.
Comfortable on the stage or screen, in front or behind the camera, Rickman was versatile and wickedly talented. He made his feature film debut in DIE HARD and completely stole the show from Bruce Willis by portraying one of the all-time great movie villains. Despite being a pretty off-the-cuff performance (he was cast days before filming), Rickman as self-styled terrorist leader Hans Gruber was a pleasingly simple villain – charismatic, tailored, claiming to be fighting for a greater cause but in fact just in it for the money.
Rickman continued to play villains in Hollywood with ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES as a campy and wisecracking Sheriff of Nottingham who shared more than a little DNA with Rowan Atkinson in BLACKADDER II (leather, earring, codpiece, sneer) and a perverted Judge Turpin in SWEENEY TODD for over a decade later.
Rickman didn’t – despite his (inaccurate) scary public perception – just play villains. He had a leading man’s presence, distinctive looks and deep, drawling voice allowed him to show a different side as shy and tender Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and again as Emma Thompson’s midlife crisis-suffering husband in LOVE ACTUALLY and he even indulged in a bit of knowing self-deprecation in stardom parody GALAXY QUEST.
No-one’s careers are without blemishes (voicing the Caterpillar in Tim Burton’s lumbering ALICE IN WONDERLAND and agreeing to appear in the risable GAMBIT remake sans clothing spring to mind) but Rickman always seemed to put his all into whatever he tried his hand at.
Rickman will be synonymous with different roles depending on your age and your interests. For me, a 90s child, he will always be Severus Snape, the most interesting, entertaining and contradictory character in the HARRY POTTER franchise. Rickman’s unique cadence and upright physicality were easily mocked, but perfect for portraying the dark heart of JK Rowling’s wizarding saga.
For all the high points in his varied career, the thing that really made Alan Rickman special was that he never seemed to look down on any project or anybody he was asked to work with. Fantasy or real-world, drama or comedy, family oriented or decidedly more adult, he brought great characters to life with passion and has left an indelible impression on generations. SSP