THE REVENANT: The Film Babble Blog Review

THE REVENANT

(Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015)

There are a couple of things that people are talking about pertaining to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s sixth film, the follow-up to his brilliant, Academy Award-winning BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE), releasing today in the Triangle.

First, the notion that Leonardo DiCaprio will likely win a Best Actor Academy Award for his powerfully pained performance as the pelt hunting, Indian killing, bear fighting, death defying 19th-century American frontiersman Hugh Glass.

Second, there’s the bear itself – an incredibly convincing CGI creation of a ginormous grizzly that attacks, mauls, and severely injures DiCaprio’s Glass. The scary scene in which this happens has some folks even crying “rape!,” but while it does look like the character is getting violated, it’s a female bear who’s protecting her cubs.

A friend joked, “I bet the bear will win the Oscar!”

But beyond the bullet points of the Leo buzz and the bear lies an epic, uncompromising tale of survival that has just earned a prominent slot on my soon to be posted top 10 films of 2015.

DiCaprio dominates as the title character (the title, THE REVENANT, means a person who has returned as if from the dead), but on the sidelines we’ve got a gruff, angry Tom Hardy as Glass's biggest adversary besides the bear (he's the guy who decides to leave Glass’ ailing ass behind after all), Domhnall Gleeson (EX MACHINA, BROOKLYN, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS - yep, he's been getting around lately) as the hunting party leader, Captain Andrew Henry; Will Poulter as the young mountain man Jim Bridger, and, even younger, Forrest Goodluck as Glass’ half-Native American son, Hawk.

That last bit, about Glass’s son, is fictional as the real life fur trapper/explorer didn’t have a son or the wife that we see getting killed in his tortured flashbacks throughout the film, but when a film is this riveting and driven, I’m not complaining about such embellishments.

Set in treacherous, snowy Montana and South Dakota in the early 1820s, this adaptation of Michael Punke’s “The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge” follows the infamous hunting expedition led by Gleeson’s Captain Henry into the uncharted post-Louisiana Purchase territory.

In the film’s stunningly shot opening sequence, the hunters and trappers get ambushed by a tribe of Arikara Indians, and the survivors along with what they could save of their pelts, escape on a boat down river. Glass voices that, to avoid further attacks, they should ditch the boat and continue on foot – a plan that Fitzgerald doesn’t favor.

This is where the bear comes in. While deep in the woods away from the others, Glass comes across the mother grizzly and her cubs and gets the mother of all maulings.

Afterwards, the crew carries him on a makeshift stretcher, but Fitzgerald, as always voicing displeasure, wants to kill or abandon him so they can complete the damn mission and get the hell home. In a struggle over Glass, Fitzgerald kills Hawk.

So Glass finds himself literally left for dead, but despite the dangerous odds he crawls, climbs, and swims through hundreds of miles of wilderness to exact revenge on Fitzgerald. 

While it doesn’t have the single take illusion that BIRDMAN beautifully built up (and that Emmanuel Lubezki won an Oscar for), THE REVENANT does traffic in sweeping unbroken tracking shots with the same mastery. Returning cinematographer Lubezki’s camera glides through the scenery intoxicatingly, beginning many scenes at ground level and ending them trailing off into the campfire smoke in the sky.

This gets us immersed in the open spaces, making us feel like we’re right there with DiCaprio in his suffering, wounded state. The man definitely deserves to get the gold for his no holds barred commitment to the character. The guy’s patented boyish charm is nowhere to be found here; what we’ve got here in his portrayal of Glass is a weathered 41-year old who’s been through hell and back and looks it.

Hardy, who along with Gleeson has been working a lot this last year, may get a nomination for this as well. Between this and his work in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD and LEGEND, it feels like Academy voters will surely take notice.

THE REVENANT may be more grueling than a good time for some moviegoers, but I found it to be more rewarding than punishing. It’s a towering testament to the emotional and physical strength that one finds in themselves when bracing the overwhelming wild of the American west.

When it comes to lengthy, brutal Westerns set in icy terrain this season, maybe this is the one that should’ve been shot in 70mm.



Postscript: Check out this post by by friends at Movies Like Movies: 6 Movies Like THE REVENANT – Brutal Survival Action.


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The Chillingly Brilliant EX MACHINA Out This Week on Blu Ray/DVD

EX MACHINA

(Dir. Alex Garland, 2015)

It’s time to take a break from all the summer sequels and highly hyped blockbuster wannabes clogging up the multiplexes, and take note that one of the best films of the year, Alex Garland’s sleek, dark sci-fi thriller EX MACHINA drops this week on Blu ray and DVD. Despite critical acclaim, it quietly came and went in theaters early this year, but I bet it’ll build its deserved audience quickly on home video.

Domhnall Gleeson (HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PARTS I & II, ABOUT TIME, FRANK) plays Caleb Smith, a programmer at the Google-esque internet search engine giant Bluebook, who wins first prize in a companywide lottery. This entitles Caleb to a week’s stay at the home of the company’s reclusive CEO, located on his vast mountain estate (location never specified, but filmed in Norway).

In another solidly intense performance, Oscar Isaac (head shaved, but sporting a bushy beard) portrays the CEO, Nathan Bateman, who tells Caleb in their first meeting that his impressive compound of glass, stone, and shiny surfaces isn’t a house, it’s a research facility. After he gets him to sign a non disclosure form, Nathan reveals to Caleb that he’s built an android with Artificial Intelligence and that he wants Caleb to be the human component in the Turing Test - “when a human interacts with a computer, and if the human doesn’t know they’re interacting with a computer – the test is passed.”

Caleb is introduced to the AI, Ava (Alicia Vikander), who via CGI has parts that are transparent, and their sessions begin. Caleb speaks to Ava through a glass wall of an observation room, and, of course, develops an attraction to her. Nathan monitors their conversations on surveillance cameras, but during a power outage (something that happens often, Nathan explains) Ava warns Caleb that “Nathan is not your friend.”

There are other red flags that Nathan, who’s constantly boozing it up, is a modernized version of the classic mad scientist character –he’s hacked into the cell phones of billions, the contest was a smokescreen for this experiment, there is footage of other AI models desperately (and destructively) trying to escape , and he may have programmed Ava to flirt with Caleb.

There is only one other cast member - Kyoko, a Japanese housemaid (Sonoya Mizuno) who speaks no English but definitely has some dance moves as we see when a yet again drunken Nathan tries to get a party going with she and Caleb.

The directorial debut of screenwriter Alex Garland (28 DAYS LATER, NEVER LET ME GO, and DREDD) EX MACHINA is sharply constructed – there’s not a misplaced line, shot, or story beat and Geoff Barrow and Glenn Salisbury’s eerie electronic score effectively connects it all together.

Gleeson’s role is similar to his part in FRANK – a smart ambitious guy who gets way in over his head trying to be a part of something grand – but his acting is more focused here. His nervous exchanges, playing off of Isaac’s rich genius cockiness, give the film its humanity. However it’s the kind of humanity that may seal our race’s doom. 

It's easy to see why Gleeson's Caleb would fall for Vikander's alluring Ava, even when he's trying to keep in mind that she's a machine, albeit sentient. Vikander tops off the trio of terrific performances, and makes the viewer go through their own personal take on the Turing Test as well.

It builds brilliantly from an intriguing think piece into a thriller, that’s both psychological and technological, with an ending that floored me then stuck around to haunt me for days. This is cerebral film making of the highest order – Stanley Kubrick, who Isaac says in one of the bonus features that he patterned his character after, would’ve loved it.



Special Features: The 5-Part Featurette “Through the Looking Glass: Creating EX MACHINA,” 8 Behind-the-Scenes vignettes, and SXSW Q & A with cast and crew that's intermittently interesting if you've got an hour to kill.



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Blu Ray/DVD Review: Michael Fassbender Under The Mask As FRANK

Out today on Blu ray and DVD:

FRANK

(Dir. Lenny Abrahamson, 2014)

For a movie about a front man for an underground indie rock band who wears a large papier-mâché head at all times, Lenny Abrahamson’s fourth feature FRANK is actually pretty grounded.

Michael Fassbender plays the title role loosely based on British singer/comedian Chris Sievey, who wore a similar fake head for his stage character, Frank Sidebottom.

Now, I won’t say whether or not the film’s Frank ever takes off the head, but I will venture that this wouldn’t be Mindy Kaling’s favorite Fassbender movie.

The real protagonist of the piece is Domhnall Gleeson as a somewhat awkward aspiring songwriter/keyboardist who joins “the Soronprfbs,” the unpronounceable name of Frank’s avant garde band project. Gleeson was recruited by the band’s manager (Scoot McNairy) after the previous keyboard player attempted suicide by drowning, so he may have bitten off more than he can chew.

Especially when Gleeson finds himself travelling with the band, that includes a deliciously surly Maggie Gyllenhaal on theremin, to a cabin out in the Irish countryside to record a album – a process that may take years. When Gleeson asks about the head, McNairy tells him that he’s “just gonna have to go with this.”

The experimental quintet, which also consists of Autolux/Jack White drummer Carla Azar, and French actor François Civil, spends their days finding inspiration in odd ways, designing new instruments out of household items, and adhering to a “strict regime of physical exercise” while Gleeson documents their activity via Twitter and YouTube videos.

This, of course, like in so many films from THE ROCKER to CHEF, leads to the band becoming an internet sensation and garnering an invite to play South By Southwest. Sure, the social media marketing angle may be in danger of becoming a cliché, but it still works well enough here.

Unfortunately it loses some of its steam in the aftermath of their disastrous appearance at the popular music festival in Austin, Texas, in which Fassbender’s Frank goes missing, but the film’s thematic arc about whether mental illness can equate creative genius brings itself back home satisfyingly.

It’s weird to say that this may be the Fassbender role that appeals to me the most, you know, because he’s wearing that weird big head with the creepy painted-on fake face. Yet when he, speaking in a sharp American accent, states his facial expressions (“flattered grin, followed by a bashful half smile”), and performs his music, which sounds like a mixture of Daniel Johnston and Magnetic Fields, with a bit of the Flaming Lips thrown in, his surprisingly punchy presence is something I can relate to more than, well, SHAME for one. 

Gleeson, best known for playing Bill Weasley in the last couple of Harry Potter movies, isn’t as strong as Fassbender or Gyllenhaal, but is a likable enough bloke who does a decent job carrying us through the thread of the film. McNairy also puts in good work, but, you know, when Frank's around, everybody else just fade into the background.

FRANK was written by Peter Straughan and Jon Ronson, who had played keyboards with the film’s main inspiration (the aforementioned Chris Sievey, who you can see in this 1985 clip doing his thing), and it’s a much stronger collaboration than their previous work, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS.

I was surprised by several things about FRANK. Surprised by Fassbender’s performance, surprised by how thoughtful and thought-out its screenplay is, surprised by its likably catchy soundtrack, and, most of all, surprised that it’s become one of my favorite films of 2014.

Special Features: Feature commentary with Lenny Abrahamson, Domhnall Gleeson and composer Stephen Rennicks (composer), Feature commentary with writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan, Behind the Scenes featurette, Sound promo. Deleted scenes, and theatrical trailer.

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