The Revenant
Robleh Wais
March 7, 2016
Well, I want to give this picture a mild approval rating, but sadly, moviegoers, I cannot. Let us look at its best aspect first. I was impressed by its even-handed portrayal of the conflict between white American settlers and Indigenous peoples in the early 1800s.
In the opening scene, Indigenous warriors raid a group of animal-skin hunters. The violence is raw and shocking, and a viewer can imagine it as an authentic picture of what might have happened during this period in American history. The film does not paint either side as merciful or heroic. As the story unfolds, however, the audience gradually recognizes that the Indigenous people are presented as the victims of virulent aggression by white settlers.
The Indigenous peoples are divided and at war with one another, while the white men are vicious and determined to subjugate them as they advance into their lands. This is historically credible. Through dialogue, we learn that the Indigenous fighters are avenging an earlier raid and the kidnapping of a leader’s daughter by invading settlers. A Native leader appears as a counterpoint to Glass, the pelt hunter. Both men will lose close relatives.
The film also has breathtaking cinematography. Viewers gain a powerful sense of the American landscape more than a century ago, and some of the scenes are truly epic. Even so, this does little to save the film from failing for me.
Then there is Glass—Leonardo DiCaprio, hereafter called DiCap—the father of a half-Native son and a guide for the hunting party. He appears to have saved the group from danger before and possesses extensive knowledge of the region. A romantic backstory involving his Native wife, the mother of his son, is told through repeated flashbacks and voice-overs in an Indigenous language. His son accompanies the expedition but is barely tolerated by its racist members.
Again, though, there is the miracle of Glass: the bad-ass, indefatigable, resurgent, unbeatable DiCap. The pundits called Bill Clinton the Comeback Kid; they should have met DiCap. He even surpasses Matt Damon in The Martian.
Although the film is framed by the frontier conflict between invading white men and Indigenous people struggling for survival, the story gradually descends into a point-of-view tale of revenge. That point of view belongs to DiCap. He has the misfortune to be mauled by a grizzly bear while foraging in the wilderness and is soon left behind through the machinations of his antagonist.
From that moment on, we see the world largely through DiCap’s perspective: his incredible effort to survive alone in a hostile environment in the depths of winter. And survive he does—through nearly every mishap, blunder, storm, and pursuit imaginable. There is even a spectacular fall from a height that should have killed him. I almost forgot the icy river rapids, which he somehow survives untouched, despite having been unable to walk only a few scenes earlier.
After another unbelievable fall, he cuts open his dead horse and sleeps inside it to survive a winter storm. We have already seen this sequence in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. What was it with films in 2015 featuring indestructible white men who could defy nature or even outer space?
The film attempts to mix mysticism, symbolism, and poetic fragments from Indigenous mythology in order to give the story philosophical weight, but it fails miserably. At heart, it is merely a shallow tale of revenge: he did me wrong, and I am going to get him for it. Thematically, that is about all it amounts to, and it deserves no more consideration from me.
The Hateful Eight
Tarantino gives us another blood-and-gore film, as we should expect. Like Django Unchained, it is saturated with bitter racial hatred between Black and white people and contains an almost unbearable use of a vicious racial epithet. After Tarantino’s previous period drama, however, this should not surprise us.
The language was not offensive to me in the context of the film, although one white patron at the screening I attended appeared disgusted and left about halfway through. Tarantino would probably argue that the language is intended to be authentic to the period, and in that respect he would be right. Racial hatred still festers in this country. Yet the film is much more interesting for its plot structure and thematic development than for the racial hatred it contains.
The Hateful Eight is a whodunit detective story, with Samuel L. Jackson functioning as the investigating sleuth. Jackson carries the film, hands down. His persona dominates throughout, but the remaining actors are perfect counterparts and are therefore just as important to the story.
All the living characters are scoundrels: devious, consumed by enmity, and not what they seem. Tarantino reinforces this theme through the film’s twisted temporal structure. We are given a story set two days in the future and then taken backward in time to understand the later denouement.
This technique is not unique. Many films begin in the present or future and then return to the past. This film, however, does something slightly different. It begins in the future, proceeds to a certain point, stops, returns to events twenty-four hours earlier, and then resumes at the exact point where the future narrative paused.
Commencement of the film → pause near the end → restart twenty-four hours earlier → return to the paused moment → proceed to the conclusion
This is quite interesting. The film loops back on itself to explain what happened before the pause, then jumps forward again to complete the story. I do not recall seeing this exact structure before.
I will not provide a full narrative description, as I normally might. It is better to leave viewers to discover the story. I can, however, describe the characters, mood, and plot development without revealing too much.
Almost nobody in the film is good, except for the innocents slaughtered at Minnie’s Haberdashery. Even Minnie herself harbors racial prejudice. Nearly everyone burns with hatred for another person’s race, ethnicity, or background. This simmering hatred gives the film both its title and its character.
Yet strange things happen as the story unfolds. Mutual enemies become allies, as Samuel L. Jackson’s character and the would-be sheriff do. There is a theatrical reversal of fortune, followed by another reversal. A slow detective story develops almost like an old-fashioned horror film, in which the true villain must be discovered through a process of elimination orchestrated by Jackson’s character. And, as noted above, there is the backward-looping temporal twist.
The intrigue comes from the growing puzzle that must be solved. Once this becomes the central plotline, the characters’ mutual racism becomes secondary, even unimportant to the viewer. At one point, the racist viewpoint becomes almost comical as Jackson’s character delivers a deductive speech. I will not spoil it by revealing the content.
All in all, The Hateful Eight was worthy of an Academy Award nomination, yet it did not receive one. It is a film to which viewers will certainly respond, though perhaps not in the way they expect. That is the genius of Tarantino’s artistry as a director: he does not give the audience what it expects.
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