Review: The Handmaiden (2016)

The Handmaiden, the latest thriller from Korean director Park Chan-wook, is a remarkable film that may not be for everyone, but is well worth seeing if you can withstand some graphic sexuality.

For those unfamiliar with Park's earlier films like Oldboy (2003), the non-Park film The Handmaiden most closely resembles is Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak. Both are Gothic thrillers centered on an outsider entering the home of some perverted weirdos. However, whereas del Toro's film, though beautifully constructed and visually sumptuous, is relatively straightforward narrative-wise -- most viewers will see the ending coming a mile away -- The Handmaiden is full of delicious, shocking twists and turns. It's like Crimson Peak filtered through the multiple perspectives of Kurosawa's Rashomon and infused with the narrative urgency and edgy sexuality of the Wachowski's Bound.

Yet even these comparisons do not capture the exact tone and visual aesthetic of The Handmaiden. Park is a world-class auteur with a sensibility all his own. I admit that Oldboy is the only other Park film I've seen (sorry, Thirst and Stoker!) yet I can truly say it is unlike any other movie I know. Park's Handmaiden is similarly unique, a really terrific thriller, a visually brilliant cinematic adventure, and a searing love story all at once.

The story begins with Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), the titular handmaiden, who arrives at the sprawling, picturesque, yet forebodingly creepy estate of Uncle Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woong). 

I really cannot say more without revealing spoilers, which I do not wish to do. Suffice to say that none of the principal characters is quite what they appear to be at first. The method by and pace at which Park gradually reveals layers of the truth is indeed Rashomon-like in its brilliance and elegance. Each new revelation changes not only what we know of the unfolding plot but also what we know -- and more importantly, how we feel -- about the characters and their relationships to each other.

The Handmaiden is propelled by the intensity of its eroticism as well as its brilliant reveals and plot twists. It is like a vastly more nuanced and interesting version of what Gone Girl more clunkily attempts. As The Atlantic's David Sims notes,

more than anything, The Handmaiden is just pure cinema, a dizzying, disturbing fable of love and betrayal that piles on luxurious imagery, while never losing track of its story’s human core.

Yes indeed. I was frankly amazed at The Handmaiden's ability to provide so many chills, thrills, and horrors while preserving the beautiful, touching romance that lies at its center. In this sense it is superior to the aesthetically masterful yet less emotionally gripping Crimson Peak, a film I champion and love a lot.

Like most thrillers, The Handmaiden is about surveillance -- about watching, spying, and (correctly and incorrectly) perceiving. This is a motif that Park and his cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon convey especially well. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Park is particularly adept at placing and moving the camera in such a way as to reveal just enough to keep the viewer on the hook. Like many of Hitchcock's works (e.g., Rear Window, Psycho), The Handmaiden is a "puzzle film" in which what we see is frequently misleading because it is only one character's subjective take on events.*

The Handmaiden's most wonderful scene, which really sums up everything I love about this movie, takes place under a certain tree that figures heavily in the plot. It is a darkly comic scene in which two characters reveal deep inner truths to one another while caught in a strangely precarious and life-threatening situation. I would almost recommend that folks see the film just for this remarkable, touching, hilarious sequence alone.

Again, The Handmaiden will not appeal to everyone, focused as it is on explicit sexuality, some of which leans toward the perverted and unusual. To take just one example, one early scene depicts the most erotic use of a thimble I have ever seen. And Uncle Kouzuki's interests -- and the various ordeals to which he subjects Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) -- are quite disturbing to say the least. There is also some third-act violence that, while restrained next to that seen in Oldboy, may be too explicit for some viewers.

Nevertheless, The Handmaiden is a fine Gothic thriller that Leah Greenblatt accurately describes as "a historical romance that is to Merchant Ivory what Molotov cocktails are to tea cozies." Well said. Despite its sexual edginess that may place it outside the tastes of some viewers, I agree with Greenblatt's conclusion that The Handmaiden constitutes "the most twisty, audacious, and wildly sexy 145 minutes of cinema this year." Highly recommended.

Kim Tae-ri as Sook-Hee in Park Chan-wook's gripping Gothic thriller The Handmaiden.

UPDATE 12/17/2016: Since posting this review earlier today some folks have correctly pointed out that it doesn't acknowledge The Handmaiden's status as an adaptation of Sarah Waters' Gothic novel Fingersmith (2002). This is true -- I didn't discuss it because I am unfamiliar with the book, but I agree that I should have at least mentioned its existence. Plus I have it from reliable authorities that the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of that source novel, with a few incidents condensed and fewer characters made the central focus. I am also told that that amazing, erotic thimble scene I mention comes from the original novel.

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* The connection between Hitchcock and Park is made explicit in Stoker (2013), a thriller that borrows plot elements and character names from Hitch's Shadow of a Doubt (1943). A.O. Scott describes Stoker as depicting "a world of lurid, saturated colors; languorous camera movements; temporal displacements; and jagged shards of sound." This reminds me of The Handmaiden actually. And while Scott expresses mild disappointment with Stoker's third act, I still plan to see it due to its references to the Hitchcock film and on the basis of my friend AJ's positive recommendation. As Peter Travers puts it,

Some will find it too much. Screw them. Park's goal is to bust form, not conform to it. Take Stoker for what it is: a thriller of savage beauty.

Sounds good to me! I am also reminded of fellow Korean Bong Joon-ho's delightfully twisty Mother in this context.

Review: Chimes at Midnight (1966)

Jeanne Moreau and Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight (aka Falstaff). 

I was very fortunate to get to see Orson Welles' late-career masterpiece Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff) at the Dryden Theater on Saturday July 9th. This great film has been hard to see in the United States until this recently restored version started touring select cities this year. Like many of the films Welles made post-1947, copyright issues and distribution problems have kept Chimes from ever getting a Region 1 (North American) DVD release. My hope is that this recently restored Janus Films version will change that.

Critical consensus places Chimes at Midnight high in the running for one of Welles' best films -- it's considered a top-tier Welles entry alongside his debut Citizen Kane (1941), his brutally truncated follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and his brilliant film noir Touch of Evil (1958).* Calling Chimes "the story that [Welles] had to tell," Simon Callow writes that

Nothing stirred him, moved him or grieved him more, and he strove, over more than thirty years, to find the perfect form in which to tell that story, a form that could encompass both the personal and the universal. The circumstances in which he filmed were almost perversely difficult and yet for once everything, or nearly everything, worked in his favour. Heart and mind, form and content, casting and location, technology and manpower -- all meshed perfectly.** 

I agree with this assessment. Along with Kane and Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight is the Welles film that feels most complete, the most consistent and harmonious. Okay, sure, his Macbeth (1948) and The Trial (1962) are also quite consistent and unified, yet maybe not quite so impactful or heartfelt as Chimes is for me.

Despite its visual brilliance, Welles' Macbeth in particular reveals its low budget and difficult production circumstances in ways that, at times, feel claustrophobic and limiting -- for example, its over-use of vertiginous low-angle shots and extremely high-contrast lighting to make its single set feel more varied and cinematic.

Chimes, by contrast, benefits from its limited locations: the lively pub where Falstaff dwells, the barren halls of King Henry IV, the muddy battlefield, the woods where Hal tricks Falstaff. Chimes' world is only a degree or two more physically expansive than Macbeth's, but it makes all the difference. The world of Chimes is, like all of Welles' film-worlds, exaggerated and hyper-real, yet it is one of the most organic and lived-in film-worlds Welles has ever brought to the screen.

In sum, Chimes at Midnight is the most holistically satisfying and emotionally resonant Orson Welles film I've seen.

Furthermore, Falstaff is the role Welles was truly destined to play. Even more so than Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil or even Carol Reed's The Third Man, Chimes at Midnight shows off the pathos and power of Welles the actor. It is one of the few performances of Welles' in which I really believe the whole time that I am watching a character live his life onscreen, rather than watching Welles winkingly portray a character onscreen.† Falstaff is probably my favorite Welles performance, tied with The Third Man's Harry Lime and besting Charles Foster Kane and even (personal fave) Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil.

While the entire cast of Chimes (including Welles) is superb, Shakespearian stalwart John Gielgud is a complete standout here. He essentially steals every scene he is in, which is appropriate given that he plays the King. He is also one of the few characters in the film who delivers his Shakespearian dialogue in a measured, formal way -- this allows his speeches to really land, because the viewer can comprehend and take in everything he says. Callow says that "Gielgud inhabits the part with a seething inner energy, extraordinary emotional intensity and a flawless command of the King's volatility; it was -- of all people -- Lee Strasberg who said that when he saw Gielgud acting, he heard Shakespeare think" (One Man Band p. 384).

The brilliant John Gielgud as King Henry IV. 

Perhaps it goes without saying that one should have at least a passing interest in Shakespeare to really enjoy and absorb what makes Chimes at Midnight so great. Welles and most of his cast, Gielgud excepted, tend to speak their lines quickly and naturalistically, so some of the intricacies of the language can be hard to catch, especially on a first viewing. Yet that hardly matters. As with much Shakespeare, one can let the words wash over oneself and simply enjoy the rhythm and the poetry of the lines, deriving the meaning from the context, which isn't hard to do.

Chimes' real draw is its brilliant shooting and blocking and use of settings, perhaps particularly in its knockout battle sequence, which must be seen to be believed. This is Welles in top form, and no small detail goes unnoticed. In Chimes -- a film Welles completed to his satisfaction -- each shot lends something important and resonant to the whole.

The steam cloud emitting from this man's helmet is one of the best visual gags 

in Chimes at Midnight. 

Callow concludes that the process of filming Chimes brought out the very best in Welles, justifying his inspired, seat-of-the-pants directorial methods. As Callow writes,

This is what Welles adored: the gallant, the democratic, the all-in-it together, the romantic way, which he had tried to create in the theatre (with sometimes inspired results) and hoped to be able to bring to film-making, a medium which, because of the large sums of money involved, almost immediately lost its playfulness, its innocence. The idea of innocence is at the heart of Chimes at Midnight, and innocence is what Welles was trying to restore to the process of making movies. For that to happen, everyone had to go along with it, willingly endorsing his assumption of the role of the crazy captain of a mad enterprise. (One Man Band p, 389) 

This is precisely what happened on the set of Chimes: nearly everyone, by all accounts, embraced the process, putting Welles at ease and turning the finished film into something vibrant, alive, and special.

With his strong musical instinct, Welles rearranges the [original Shakespeare] text into an endlessly varying pattern of ensembles, arias, duets, trios and quartets, which form a through-composed whole. It is also quintessentially filmic, never still, ever-moving, breathing, changing direction. (One Man Band p. 384)

Indeed. If you have an interest in (or at least a tolerance of) Shakespeare and/or any interest at all in Orson Welles, you simply must see Chimes at Midnight.

Bonus Afterthought: The very day after I saw Chimes at the Dryden, my girlfriend and I headed north to the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario to see Breath of Kings, a six-hour, two-part theatrical adaptation of four Shakespeare history plays: Richard II, Part One of Henry IV, Part Two of Henry IV, and Henry V. These are the same plays that form the basis for Welles' Chimes, so it was quite a head trip to see two very different versions of similar source material in the space of twenty four hours. The two halves of Breath of Kings -- which we saw in one day, with supper in between -- were really superb.

Seeing these plays abridged and smooshed all together in this form made me realize what an imperialist dickhead Shakespeare's Henry V is. It also lent credence to Callow's claim that

Henry IV is, line for line and scene for scene, is one of the greatest of Shakepearian roles, but it is rarely attempted by a great actor because the King disappears from the play for long sections of the action; this is to be regretted (p. 384)

As performed by lead actor (and Breath of Kings script adapter) Graham Abbey, the Stratford Festival production lives up to Callow's expectation of greatness. In Breath of Kings, the initially heroic, subsequently conflicted, and ultimately morose Henry IV is much more interesting and complex than the brave, wide-eyed Henry V. Maybe, as Welles' film seems to argue, Hal is only interesting when he's slumming it with Falstaff.

In the end, seeing these two so similar yet so different versions of the Henry IV plays was an enormous treat and was very interesting. My memory of Chimes was quite fresh as I watched similar scenes played in front of me on the Stratford stage.†† Comparisons arose. For example, I liked Welles's version of the eulogizing of Falstaff much better than the play's, but I liked Breath of Kings' physicalizing of King Henry IV's wounds -- Chimes' Gielgud seems physically frail but Breath of Kings' Graham Abbey used double-canes and, by the end, could barely walk. He crawls painfully to his litter and is carried offstage to die. Great stuff!

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* I have a hard time watching Ambersons -- it is a film in which, for me, the "could have beens" haunt the extant text too much. Oddly, I don't have that problem with the similarly butchered The Lady From Shanghai (1947), whose original soundtrack was replaced with a schmaltzy love theme over Welles' objections and whose climactic funhouse sequence was severely shortened by the studio. Maybe it's because it is a film noir that the weird shifts in tone and extremely repetitious love theme work okay for me in this case.
** Callow, One Man Band (Jonathan Cape, 2015) p. 379.
† There is, of course, much ribald winking and tomfoolery in Chimes, attributable to Falstaff and friends. But none of it feels like Welles peeking through and commenting on the character while he's playing him. In Chimes, for once, he just is the character he's playing.
†† For aficionados, Breath of Kings was performed in the round, a new innovation this year at the Stratford Festival's Tom Patterson Theater.

Review: Escape from New York (1981)

John Carpenter's Escape From New York is one of the most tonally sophisticated, visually iconic, and outright enjoyable dystopian action movies of the 1980s.

During the '80s I was a big-time action movie fan, watching stuff like the Rambo movies (1982, 1985, 1988), the Mad Max movies (1979, 1981, 1985), The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Raw Deal (1986), Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), Die Hard (1988), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Aliens (1986), and Escape 2000 (aka Turkey Shoot, 1982).* To this day I love 1980s-vintage dystopian, near-futuristic action movies, especially low-budget ones like The Road Warrior, Escape From New York, and The Terminator.

Escape From New York lies at the heart of John Carpenter's amazing directorial hot streak stretching from 1976's Assault on Precinct 13 to 1986's Big Trouble in Little China or maybe even 1988's They Live. By general consensus, Carpenter's weakest film of this remarkably fertile period is Escape's immediate predecessor, The Fog (1980) -- a film I personally love and robustly defend. In any case, Escape From New York is a standout Carpenter film from a period when "dark dystopian action film" was a prevalent, competitive genre.

Carpenter has a genius for working within the constraints of a low budget -- in Escape's case, a supposed $6 million. I've written before about how much I love low-budget cinema. I like to see what inventive filmmakers can do on a shoestring. Escape from New York deploys many low-budget cheats, such using radar screen images and atmospheric cockpit footage to help "sell" its model work in the Gulf Fire landing sequence. Yet each time I watch Escape I am reminded of how evocative and rich its film-world feels even though you can "see through" many of the special effects. The low-budget feel of the film perfectly matches and conveys the rag-tag nature of the near-future society it depicts.

Keith Phipps writes that "John Carpenter's Escape From New York took Taxi Driver's urban hellscape and projected it onto a cartoonishly savage future." I concur: Escape From New York haunts me in lasting ways, with its dirty urban setting and grim, moody tone. It also entertains me with its cartoony action-movie touches, like the lamps on the hood of the Duke's car and its rather quotable dialogue.

Yet Escape's cartoonishness does not detract from its darker elements or its lived-in mise-en-scene. As Phipps puts it, Carpenter's dystopian action masterpiece "may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past." It is indeed very postmodern in feel, with a bleak, existential edge that few '80s action movies achieve with this much style and meaning.

As Brian Eggert points out, Escape from New York

comments on how the New York of 1981 has isolated itself to such an extreme that walls, both metaphoric or literal, enclose its inhabitants within the crime-ridden sprawl, itself a symbol for all of America. Carpenter explores a world in which the American Dream has failed, where the increasing crime rates never stopped. In response, America becomes a fascist state and transforms New York into a penal colony. Carpenter's unique dystopian future, set in 1997, exists on the verge of an apocalypse. And though the setting has been enclosed inside of New York Prison's walls, it resembles many post-apocalyptic worlds to follow in cinema.

As a feminist I must mention Escape from New York's most disturbing incidental scene. Using a tracking device to trace the missing President, Snake Plissken descends into the basement of the Fox Theatre. He passes by an area in which three men are manhandling a seemingly inert or unconscious woman. We watch from Snake's point of view as one of the men tears the woman's shirt off, exposing her breasts. We cut to a close-up of Snake, who just walks on by, consulting his scanner. We see and hear nothing of what occurs in the area after Snake leaves (the whole brief scene is eerily quiet and wordless) but imminent rape is clearly implied.

This "incidental rape" scene reminds me of The Road Warrior's very similar scene and of Escape 2000's generally exploitative approach to sexuality. The scene is included to make the film-world seem more harsh and to make Snake look more dark-edged and cruel. He's an antihero; he does nothing to stop the sexual assault. But what, we might ask, of the victim? The film never says.

I can offer no excuse for this. This scene disturbs me. Maybe that's the point -- that it should. But as Karen Valby points out, sexual assault is often misused in television and film as an "easy" go-to device to raise the narrative stakes. This particular scene feels exploitative because we are not encouraged to empathize with the victim -- she is kept silent, anonymous, at a distance. The focus is swiftly returned to Snake, our white male protagonist. The woman's suffering exists to make Snake look more badass.

Adrienne Barbeau, who plays a more compelling and central role as Stevie Wayne in The Fog, is ill-used as Maggie in Escape. Maggie is a one-dimensional, eroticized object whose main role is to be looked at and discussed by men, to be the bearer of the masculine gaze.** The male characters don't even call her by name, they just call her Brain's "squeeze." Her main motivation is to follow Brain around and protect him.

Indeed, most of Carpenter's work tends to be male-centered. This masculine focus, while partially explicable via the writer-director's ties to the action genre, may also explain why his best horror film, The Thing, is so goddamn good. It's Carpenter perfectly in his element, with nary a woman in sight. It is also a Howard Hawks remake. Carpenter is quite Hawksian -- for example, his Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is a reworking of and homage to Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo (1959).

However, despite Carpenter's indebtedness to Hawks, and despite the presence of spaghetti western star Lee Van Cleef in the second lead, Escape from New York is not a western. Carpenter infuses western moods and elements and plot structures into Escape but its setting and iconography have more in common with Blade Runner, a science fictional film noir, than they do any western.

Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), whose line about Snake "flying the Gulf Fire over Leningrad" helped inspire William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

Then there's the fuckin' music, composed and performed by Carpenter (with Alan Howarth). Escape from New York's soundtrack rocks, especially its totally badass opening theme.*** Some misguided souls consider keyboard-driven music, especially '80s-era synth-driven music, to be inherently silly or cheesy. What a sad case of affairs for such unfortunates.

For those who either grew up with synth-pop music or have otherwise developed an appreciation for it, Carpenter's early soundtracks, especially those for Halloween and Escape from New York, are absolutely top-notch.

In the end, the appeal of Escape from New York largely hinges on Kurt Russell's brilliant, spot-on portrayal of Snake Plissken. Russell is so goddamn cool as Snake Plissken that I can't really describe it  -- just watch the damn movie.

Or if you prefer campier fare, see one of the other Carpenter-Russell team-ups. Russell's badassery as Plissken is most of what sustains Carpenter's somewhat lesser, not too original, but still enjoyable follow-up Escape from L.A. (1996) -- a film which has its defenders. Hell, despite its myriad pleasures -- and they are many -- Russell is the funniest and most entertaining thing in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) too. His Jack Burton is one of the great American screen protagonists and is the main thing that makes that crazy-ass movie work.

As for Snake Plissken and the fine first movie built around him, if you enjoy male-centered action-movie fun set in a bleak, grungy, existential future -- 1997 as imagined by 1982 -- then check out the artfully constructed, action-packed Escape from New York.

"Call me Plissken."

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* Like most young people, I had rather catholic tastes as an eighth grader, which may explain my appreciation for 1980s action cinema (though it cannot fully explain my ongoing love for Oz-sploitation classic Turkey Shoot). I should also mention Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979), a film that properly belongs to this group but that I did not see until the mid-2000's. I additionally recommend Hill's under-seen Streets of Fire (1984).
** I am using terminology introduced by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her famous, accurate essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," originally published in Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975) pp. 6-18. Mulvey argues that the default gaze of Hollywood cinema, emerging as it does from a patriarchal society and sexist film industry, is gendered masculine. That is, our cinema is sexist, depicting masculine things (like male characters) as active drivers-forward of narrative and feminine things (like women's bodies) as passive objects best suited for erotic display.
*** You simply must check out John Carpenter's recent live studio recording of the Escape from New York theme song, plus its cool video:

EW #88: The Dark Knight (2008)

Eighty-eight is my very favorite number. I love the number eight to begin with, then eighty-eight doubles down on the lovely symmetry and orderly vibe of the numeral 8 while also taking the number eleven, another favorite, as a factor. So of course the universe would conspire to place Christopher Nolan's "serious" blockbuster The Dark Knight, a film about which I have decidedly mixed feelings, at the #88 position on Entertainment Weekly's summer 2013 Top 100 films list. Like the film itself, this coincidence, which surely is the outcome of several happy and unhappy accidents, nevertheless feels laden with portent.

My biggest problem with The Dark Knight is that I am not sure how morally responsible it is to make a superhero blockbuster film that purports to treat its subject "seriously," as if Batman existed in a world "grounded in realism," yet that seems so unthinking in its retrograde endorsement of conservative, pro-War on Terror, pro-vigilante ideologies.* It could be that the film's internally contradictory yet palpably right-wing messages are, as Jonathan Lethem puts it, simply a reflection of post-9/11 America's deep confusion about what or how to think about its own recent history:

In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, “The Dark Knight” echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance. No wonder we crave an entertainment like “The Dark Knight,” where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion.

I find these observations insightful. I agree with Lethem that "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content" -- this rings true.

It's also true that, Batpod chase and Heath Ledger's performance aside, The Dark Knight is not much fun. As I have said before, I am a huge proponent of fun and comedy in blockbuster action movies, so all of Nolan's trilogy misses the mark for me on a certain fundamental level.

"Waaaahhh! They blew up my World Trade Cent-- I mean, my girlfriend!"

In his review of the recent superhero film Batman vs. Superman, A.O. Scott sums up another facet of the "serious blockbuster" problem:

Intellectual pretension, long an occupational hazard in the superhero business, has been elevated to a creative principle. Christopher Nolan is partly to blame. His “Dark Knight” entries in the Batman saga raised the genre’s allegorical stakes and dialed down the humor to an all-but-imperceptible whisper. Still, Mr. Nolan’s filmmaking skill — above all the coherence of his inky, cruel vision of Gotham City and environs — enabled those movies to carry at least some of their self-assigned thematic weight.

While some (including me) have questioned the coherence of Nolan's vision or at least of his editing and directing skills, I admit that on the level of production design and with respect to the overall look, feel, and tone of the world he evokes, his Batman trilogy is the most effective (if not affective) iteration of a "serious" (or, as Scott calls it, pretentious) superhero saga.* Nolan gets the broad-strokes, big picture stuff right.

In my original introductory post to the EW list, I described The Dark Knight as "as zeitgeist-y as it gets" and "surely culturally significant" but also noted that it is a technically and structurally pedestrian, even sloppy movie. I stand by that assessment. I think the film's two biggest weaknesses -- aside from its right-wing ideology** -- are:

(1) the technical failings, mainly the shittily staged, edited, and filmed fight sequences. I noticed that Nolan doesn't know how to stage satisfying fight scenes back in Batman Begins, where the shooting and editing of Batman's first battle at the docks is completely visually incomprehensible. The weird thing is, Nolan and co. actually got worse at producing these kind of sequences in The Dark Knight. The police convoy sequence has been eviscerated elsewhere by wiser critics than me, but I also nominate the final battle with Batman vs. the Joker and his dogs as being one of the lousiest, hardest to follow "action" sequences I have ever seen. Fuck that shitty sequence, except the part at the very end with the Joker hanging upside down, which is memorable and cool.

When I teach about chaos cinema to college undergraduates, students always ask "Couldn't this chaotic, fast-cutting, close-up-heavy aesthetic be intentional?" and surely it most likely is. The Begins dockside battle may be deliberately shrouding Batman in mystery, taking a subjective or expressionistic approach to the action, purposely never really letting us see him. I am theoretically okay with that, and appreciate it when, say, Kathryn Bigelow uses these subjective, incoherent techniques more sparingly in The Hurt Locker, but it feels out of place and disappointing in The Dark Knight. I want that convoy chase sequence to feel exciting and and look cool, but it's mainly a headache-producing hot mess. I want to see Batman, a superhero known for his martial arts prowess, fight. The climactic Dark Knight interior battle is so badly lit and incoherently staged and edited that I simply cannot tell what's going on at most points during that sequence. I hate that. To me, that's not expressively evocative, that's just bad filmmaking.

(2) the film's lack of pathos or humanity, its lack of emotional resonance. This is director Nolan's biggest Achilles' Heel, one that can be seen across his whole movie career. The Dark Knight tells a (mostly) well-crafted story -- except that inexplicable part when Batman goes out the window after Rachel, leaving the Joker behind in a room full of defenseless rich people, a scene the film never resolves nor explains. Beyond that, the film's deeper ideas are usually interesting, even or perhaps especially when they seem contradictory. For example, the Joker claims to be an agent of chaos and Alfred calls him a man who "just wants to watch the world burn" but in fact his plans are incredibly intricate, precision-timed, and depend upon several amazingly lucky coincidences to boot (such as figuring out the exact route the police convoy would take or, once imprisoned, knowing how to time his two bombs beforehand without knowing when he would be interrogated). Yet these contradictions remain cerebral concepts, stuff other people (like Alfred and Bruce) talk about but don't really emote anything about. The Dark Knight never gets me to feel much of anything about any of these people, except the Joker and possibly Alfred. As Lethem reports of his Dark Knight viewing experience, "after the tide of contradictions had receded behind me I wasn’t stirred to any feeling richer than an exhausted shrug." Same here.

Of course, most every critic, positive or negative, agrees about the excellence of Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker. Ledger's performance stands out so strongly in The Dark Knight not only because he was a world-class actor (see his moving performance in Brokeback Mountain if you don't believe me) fully committing to an interesting and entertaining interpretation of an iconic character. Unfortunately, it also stands out because so little of what happens in this film outside of the Joker carries any real emotional stakes. For example, we're supposed to accept that Bruce/Batman really loves Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), but there's no real passion or romance there, just two characters reading letters in voice-over and insisting they love each other despite their lack of onscreen chemistry. (This was true when Katie Holmes assayed the role of Rachel in Batman Begins, too, though Bale and Holmes seemed to click a little better than Bale and Gyllenhaal do).

Anyway, all that said, if The Dark Knight possesses greatness, it is not only due to Ledger, though he is mainly responsible for making the film watchable. No, director Christopher Nolan deserves credit for committing to a vision for the world and character of Batman and then really delivering on that central premise, albeit at times clunkily. And if nothing else, The Dark Knight looks really good, and the opening bank heist sequence is just terrific, probably the best part of the whole movie.

I should add that I saw The Dark Knight three, maybe four times during its theatrical run in late summer 2008. Part of that is that the film was a major part of the cultural zeitgeist of that summer and fall -- it seemed to me like nearly everyone I knew (who were, admittedly, mainly English graduate students and Dungeons and Dragons nerds) saw and avidly talked about that movie then. It became a touchstone for discussing the meaning of 9/11 and the War on Terror, the fearful ramifications of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Bush Administration's dumbfounding invasion of Iraq and the lies Bush & co. told to provoke it.

I also saw The Dark Knight that many times because it maddened me, it bedeviled me, it bothered and unnerved me in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on. Despite my repeat viewings, I couldn't really figure out (until I analyzed it from a point of greater critical distance) what the film was actually saying about the War on Terror, the ethics of public surveillance, the role of torture in post-Abu Ghraib America, etc. I was puzzled. As Lethem says, "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway."

But maybe "morbid incoherence" is an appropriate tone to set for depicting Bush's America in 2008. Maybe in the end I do not object to The Dark Knight going on a list of "Most Culturally Significant" or at least "Most Culturally Revealing" films of all time. But on a "Best" or "Top" 100 films list like EW's? Probably not.

Director Christopher Nolan on the set of The Dark Knight. 

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* In a 2015 interview Nolan explains his Batman concept this way: "you had Superman in 1978, but they never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film." Actually it makes me like Nolan more that he gives props to the 1978 Donner Superman film, still one of the best superhero blockbusters ever.
** That said, don't get me started on the total failed pile of crap that was The Dark Knight Rises (2012). You owe me those two hours and forty five minutes back, Nolan!

UPDATE 3/26/2016: Check out Lee Weston Sabo's brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight Rises, in which he accurately notes that the Nolan Batman trilogy's

lessons in Bush era heroism are apparent: it is all right to lie to the public if it is for their own good (and as long as you feel sort of bad about it later); true heroes are willing to let everyone hate them if it means they do not have to suffer any consequences for their illegal actions; and faking self-sacrifice is as good as actual self-sacrifice, especially when it means you get to be loved as a martyr and live a life of unburdened luxury.

Indeed so! And if you want to read an even more nuts-and-bolts take on what's wrong with Rises, focused primarily on its shitty-assed writing and (lack of) story structure, check out this excellent review.
*** See also my forthcoming post on the sinister ideological meanings of The Dark Knight. The short version: the movie is ultimately pro-War on Terror and pro-fascist.

Alternate Top 100: 12 Angry Men (1957)

A few years ago, in 2011, the Criterion Collection released a new DVD edition of Sidney Lumet's classic 12 Angry Men. During a recent online Criterion Flash Sale, I bought said DVD and, once it arrived, joyfully re-watched this amazing film.

Courtroom dramas hold a special place in the American cinema. One of my college buddies, who went on to become a lawyer, was always particularly obsessed with Inherit the Wind (1960), Stanley Kramer's dramatization of the 1925 Scopes trial. Many folks consider the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to be one of the best such dramas ever made. Other key entries in this category include Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Few Good Men (1992), and Lumet's own The Verdict (1982) starring Paul Newman.* On the comedy side both Adam's Rib (1949) and My Cousin Vinny (1992) are standout courtroom movies.

For me, the original 12 Angry Men (I haven't seen the 1997 remake) stands as the greatest fiction film about the American legal system of which I am aware. It also stands as one of my favorite movies in any genre. I hereby nominate it for inclusion in my "Alternative Top 100," a list of films meant to be added to or swapped into the Entertainment Weekly Top 100 Films list to correct some of its oversights and errors.**

It's pretty much impossible to go wrong with the talented and consistent Lumet's directorial efforts. Indeed, there are other, later Sidney Lumet movies that are at least as good as 12 Angry Men including The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). But like Duel does for Steven Spielberg and Mean Streets does for Martin Scorsese, 12 Angry Men gives us Lumet at his most stripped-down and lean. The film performs the amazing feat of taking a concept that could be boring and then executing it so brilliantly that it turns out to be a gripping, poignant, all-time masterpiece of the American cinema.

From the outset, Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) stands apart from the others -- that's him at the far right of frame, looking out the window. 

The premise: twelve jurors spend the whole film sequestered in a jury room debating the verdict in a trial the viewer never sees. They stay in that one room and mostly talk. Sounds confining, even dull, yes? It isn't.

For one thing, Lumet and his cinematographer Boris Kaufman frame shots beautifully and keep the camera moving in lots of interesting ways. For example, one of my favorite shots is when one juror unexpectedly changes his vote. The camera tracks along the whole table at a high angle until it finally tilts down for a close-up of the guy who says he's changing sides.

Or there's the long take in which Juror 10 (Ed Begley) is ostracized for making inflammatory, bigoted comments. As he talks, most of the other jurors leave the table one by one and then stand around silently, facing away from him. Lumet and Kaufman shoot the scene mostly in wide shot -- in fact, the camera slowly tracks backward as Juror 10 rants, then tracks back toward the table after he leaves it. Having the crestfallen bigot walk into the foreground while the rest of the jurors stay behind, facing away, makes an extremely powerful visual statement without feeling unnatural in the jury room's confined space. Lumet is a master of staging and blocking.

In fact, Lumet's just flat-out great with actors in general. These jurors mostly just talk and argue with each other, yet the dialogue feels very real and natural and all the key players give compelling, moving performances.

Then there's cinematographer Boris Kaufman, the youngest brother of legendary Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Kaufman not only keeps the camera moving in enlivening ways, but also brings a distinct and provocative visual style to 12 Angry Men.

Let's start with the four-plus minute high-angle long take that backs the opening credits and begins the film proper. The shot is a bravura display of both Lumet's ability to block and pace a wordless sequence, and Kaufman's knack for finding the perfect camera placement, shooting from behind an electric fan at one extreme end of the room.

Furthermore, the close-ups and two-shots in 12 Angry Men are unusual, eschewing what cinematographer John Bailey calls the "compressed perspective" of typical Hollywood cinematography of the 1950s. Using wide-angle lenses for his close-ups, Kaufman deemphasizes the background and makes the foregrounded person's face stand out strikingly. As Bailey puts it quite accurately, in 12 Angry Men Kaufman's close-up work "walks that razor edge between it [on the one hand] being arresting and making you feel very present with the shot and [on the other hand] putting you off." ***

Bailey argues that whereas Lumet came from television and large 3-camera studio setups, former documentarian Kaufman was used to shooting close-up to actors, having shown a penchant for tight close-ups in his work with Jean Vigo in the '30s. Therefore much of the film's visual style may be rightfully attributed to Kaufman's contributions.

Nevertheless it is Lumet's amazing facility with actors and his penchant for liberal political advocacy that are most on display here. 12 Angry Men documents more that just a jury room proceeding -- it is a dramatization of the perilous place of hegemonic white masculinity just before the onset of the 1960s. In the 1957 of the film, the women's liberation movements and civil rights movements haven't yet begun in earnest, but the jurors know that their traditional, patriarchal way of life is being threatened.

For example, when Juror 10 goes on his racist tirade, subsequently to retreat into the foreground all alone, his rambling lines "I mean, what's happening in here? I speak my piece and you . . . listen to me. This kid on trial here, his type -- well, don't you know about them? There's a danger here. These people are dangerous" echo the thoughts of a generation who doesn't yet understand that the times are a-changin'. He genuinely expects everyone else to think as he does, to support him, and he is quietly devastated when he realizes his racist beliefs are not shared by anyone else, not when articulated so bluntly.

The anger the film's title alludes to may be superficially about the length of the jury's deliberations, a missed baseball game, or even the kinds of deep personal secrets that emerge over the course of the film. But the jurors' collective anger is really about their being forced to face a changing world in which people of color, like the defendant whose fate they will decide, must be accepted as their peer in a system which still unduly favors white men. The film is, in sum, about structural racism and classism in the American justice system -- a very timely topic indeed.

Lumet scholar Frank Cunningham calls 12 Angry Men "one of [Lumet's] most thematically rich and cinematically evocative films" and writes of the director more generally that

Lumet's union of cinematic technique with literary and thematic moral meaning precisely defines his directorial significance. Lumet may not always move the camera in ways that call immediate attention to his technique, yet his frame is rarely static but usually full, busy with life's detail and flow. Though the camera work is seldom spectacular, its controlled movement is subtle and filled with the movement of human event.†

Indeed, that is the best way to describe it: Lumet's films feel vibrant and alive and urgent in a way that relatively few films do. There is an intelligence and moral purpose behind them, yet they almost never come off as preachy or pedantic. They are tightly crafted, cleverly scripted, and loaded with tension and pathos. They are, in short, gripping films for thinking adults -- the kind of films Hollywood can and should make more often.

As Cunningham concludes,

Lumet refuses to make films that as a group fall easily into categories. Of course, facile categories and theories make headlines, and so the Godards gain more fame than the Frankenheimers, even though work without such theoretical embellishment may possess the greater excellence.††  

I don't entirely agree with Cunningham's pooh-poohing of Godard -- or, by extension, of other directors whose work is genre-based and/or "theoretically embellished" by which I assume he means more self-reflexive and/or formally experimental. That said, I take his point that many critics and cinephiles lavish more attention and praise upon the work of filmmakers with flashier, more easily detectable directorial flourishes. Ultimately, I am in total accord with Cunningham in wanting to laud the work of directors like Lumet -- ones like William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, and Hal Ashby -- who are more subtle in their filmmaking craft and therefore trickier to pin down.

Al Pacino gives a career-topping performance as Sonny in Lumet's 

electrifying thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Bonus Afterthought: Cunningham places 12 Angry Men alongside Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Fail Safe (1964), and The Pawnbroker, calling these Lumet efforts "four of the culture's most distinguished films." (p. 1). I agree with him about Pawnbroker, however, for me, the other Lumet essentials beyond 12 Angry Men also include Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). Of those, I think Dog Day Afternoon is the single most essential and best -- it is a great thriller, driven forward by incredible performances by Al Pacino and John Cazale.

Lumet films I want to see but haven't include his final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), and The Fugitive Kind (1960), an overlooked gem starring Marlon Brando discussed at length by John Bailey in the documentary featurette I cited earlier.

Regarding the aforementioned 1997 remake of 12 Angry Men, I've never seen it. It may be very good indeed for all I know. But I seriously doubt it is as technically and dramatically marvelous as Lumet's lean-and-mean rendition.

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* Of course in Mr. Smith the title character is a senator, not a lawyer, and the drama takes place on the senate floor, yet the film's structure and the content of its pivotal scenes aligns it with the courtroom drama.
** I am not engaging upon this "Alternative Top 100" project in a particularly methodical or organized fashion. I am not (so far) generating my own alternative list nor am I numbering the entries. I am simply naming some films that I think should be on any legitimate list of this kind. See my second footnote here if you want an idea about which titles I would cut from EW's list to make room for my alternative selections.
*** Bailey's remarks about Kaufman's contributions to 12 Angry Men can be found on Disc Two of the Criterion Collection edition of the film, in a documentary featurette called "On Boris Kaufman." His comments on 12 Angry Men's cinematography start around the twenty minute mark of that feature.
† Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (Second Ed.) (U. Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 109, 119.
†† Cunningham pp. 120-1.

Double Review: Carol (2015) and Room (2015)

In the past several days, I have seen two of the films mentioned at the end of my 2015 roundup as the ones I most wanted to see next. I have not been disappointed. Both Carol and Room, especially the latter, are must-sees. They are two of the most emotionally layered and holistically satisfying movies I have seen this winter.

Carol is the latest film from New Queer Cinema auteur Todd Haynes, who I recently described in a Facebook post as being "the Stanley Kubrick of queer cinema." I call him this due to his meticulous attention to detail and the tendency of his films to unfold at what I call a "stately" pace. Not slow exactly, but deliberate and visually dense, much like Kubrick's films tend to be.*

Carol is adapted from a Patricia Highsmith novel called The Price of Salt (1952). Both film and novel are about a budding homoerotic romance between a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) and an older woman (Cate Blanchett) who is in the process of divorcing her estranged husband (Kyle Chandler) while maintaining connections with her beloved young daughter Rindy (Sadie and Kk Heim). What is most remarkable to me about Carol -- besides its amazingly high quality of cinematic craft and eye-popping set and costume design -- is its attention to the fine nuance of human interactions, applied to ALL the relationships in the movie. That is, while the film's primary focus is upon the romance between Therese and Carol, it really shows us how that new, fragile relationship unfolds within a matrix of other key interrelationships, especially Carol's lingering tie to her soon-to-be-ex-husband Harge and her deep bond with ex-lover and current best friend Abby (played brilliantly by a superb Sarah Paulson).

Rooney Mara gives the standout performance in Carol as shy shopgirl Therese. Despite its title, Carol mainly unfolds from aspiring photographer Therese's point of view.  

Most importantly, Carol treats all of these characters and interrelationships with nuance and respect, refusing to lionize or vilify any one person at the expense of another. Sure, many of the men in the story, especially one of Therese's young male suitors and Harge himself, make presumptions about their entitlement to, even implicit ownership of, their female objects of desire. Yet the film does not paint them as irredeemable villains -- Harge in particular is able to do the right thing by the end of the film, even though he is still an unthinkingly patriarchal dickhead. As in Haynes' earlier works Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002), Carol manages to critique patriarchy and show us its general savagery without utterly dehumanizing its onscreen male agents.

Carol conveys all the fine details of its characters' feelings toward each other via delicate, precise attention to character gesture, camera distance, and editing. One of my favorite examples of this is a close-up of a small hand gesture Carol makes at the beginning and end of the film (we see the same sequence twice, as a kind of frame story). It is a silent placement of her hand on Therese's shoulder that has enormous emotional consequences, yet it is not over-emphasized with a clumsy music cue nor unduly broadcast by the camera pushing in or by an obvious reaction shot. No, it just happens, we see it, and if we have been paying attention then we know what great emotional weight it carries. This is confident, assured filmmaking that trusts its audience to make connections.

In other words, Carol is a film every thinking filmgoer should see. A little looser and more upbeat than some of Haynes' previous works, and endowed with the world-class period set design, amazing costumes, and beautifully composed visuals we have come to expect from this directorial master, Carol explores the nuances of adult relationships in a way that few American films do. Highly recommended.

Even more highly recommended is Room, director Lenny Abrahamson's follow-up to 2014's remarkable Frank. If Carol easily beats out the visually stunning yet emotionally hollow The Revenant for overall impact, then Room in turn beats out Carol -- or pretty much anything else I've seen recently -- in that area. Resonant, heartfelt, and intermittently heartbreaking without being exploitative or nearly as harrowing as I expected, Room is an absolute must-see.

One probably wouldn't anticipate Room's accessibility and potentially wide appeal given its bleak-sounding premise: a mother (Brie Larson), kidnapped and held in sexual servitude for seven years, has a child, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), two years into her stint as a prisoner in a windowless (but skylight-equipped) shed. That is all backstory; the film depicts the weeks following Jack's fifth birthday, including the duo's nail-biting escape from captivity and -- really the bulk of the movie -- how they begin to adjust to life in the outside world.

Regular readers know that I like bleak, grim films, and I fully expected Room to be pretty damn dark. Yet it mostly isn't -- that is its miracle. Room is, in fact, an enormously uplifting, even feel-goodish film about how these two central characters survive their imprisonment and beyond by "sharing their strong." It is about human bonds, parental love, and the will to survive. Its escape sequence is one of the best suspense sequences I have seen in a long time, and its performances, especially those given by Larson, Tremblay, and Joan Allen, are also some of the best I've seen this season.**

Room deploys a lot of handheld camera and, especially in its opening thirty minutes in the confines of the shed, lots of close-ups. This technique really works. Even once the mother and son reach the outside, the film is very sparing in its use of wide shots -- the focus remains, via abundant close-up work, tightly on these two, their feelings, and their bond. As such, Room is one of the most beautiful paeans to motherhood I have ever seen -- it rivals classic maternal melodramas like Stella Dallas (1937) and Terms of Endearment (1983), and contemporary works like We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), in this regard. Room is, quite simply, an emotionally rich movie that all moviegoers interested in these themes should see.

The film's point of view -- carried over from the novel by Emma Donoghue, who also adapted the screenplay -- is Jack's. I think this is what allows the film to work so well, and permits Abrahamson and company to depict the opening scenes in the shed without ever becoming graphic or exploitative about the horrible things occurring there. No, we are aware -- in ways Jack himself is not -- of what the mother is going through, yet the emphasis remains on the mother-son dyad, their love, their mundane ways of getting through the days, and their eventual planning for their escape.  

In its fixation on the emotional, rather than legal or procedural, consequences of the mother's kidnapping, long-term imprisonment, and sexual assault, Room offers an implicit critique of films that use female suffering as a pretense for masculine action, legal resolution, and/or tales of violent vengeance. Room dares to be something much more provocative and vulnerable: it is a film about love, and about human strength and weakness, told from the point of view of a child who has been raised under unique and (somewhat unbeknownst to him) traumatic circumstances. It is a beautifully crafted film about dark deeds that nevertheless ultimately functions as a meditation about love and endurance and family ties.

Both Carol and Room are films about younger protagonists (Therese, Jack) who explore new horizons (lesbianism, the outside world). Haynes' film is perhaps formally more beautiful -- the hair! the costumes! the gorgeously framed shots through car windows! -- yet Room delivers emotionally in a way few films do. Confident, bold, true, and resonant, Room is one of the great films of its period. You should go see it.

Room director Lenny Abrahamson with most of his film's stellar cast plus Room novelist / screenwriter Emma Donoghue.

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* Of course there are exceptions to the stateliness of Kubrick and Haynes. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) move along at headlong, even frantic paces, and Haynes' three-part debut film Poison (1991) and his glam rock homage Velvet Goldmine (1998) both exhibit a certain pep and fierce energy that his other films, like Safe (1995), Far From Heaven (2002), and Carol eschew.
** If I were able to regard the Academy Awards as an indicator of quality, I would hope for Brie Larson to win the best actress Oscar this February. I would also want to give Rooney Mara an award for her work in Carol -- she outshines Cate Blanchett IMO -- and young master Tremblay for his knockout turn as Jack in Room.

Review: The Revenant (2015)

I saw Alejandro G. Inarritu's The Revenant last Thursday -- that and Carol are the two Oscar-contender films I most want to see in the theater on the big screen -- and overall, I enjoyed it very much. Cinematographically, The Revenant is easily the best film of the year. It is flat-out enchantingly beautiful to look at. In this sense it reminds me a lot of the work of Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, two filmmakers who consistently produce extremely striking and vibrant visual images, often of wilderness landscapes shot on location. However, despite its great cinematography, lighting, and strong performances throughout, and despite the fact that it will most likely clean house at the Oscars in February, I judge The Revenant to be something slightly less than a holistic masterpiece.

I would be tempted to call The Revenant a noble failure except that it doesn't truly fail at anything its sets out to do -- I don't think. However, this uncertainty on my part is the root of my problem with the movie.

The Revenant's single biggest weakness is the arc of its "betrayal and revenge" story, which is incredibly predictable and conventional in the way it plays out. There are no surprises nor cathartic revelations to be had here. Now of course I have no inherent problem with films that stick to a formula, but The Revenant seems to want to suggest something more than a simple genre exercise via its slow pacing and arresting camera work. Yet its "arty," seemingly thematically suggestive visual aesthetic does not quite jibe with the simple, straightforward story the film actually tells. I do not know what, if anything, some of The Revenant's visuals, specifically its lingering shots of nature imagery and heavy-handed flashback sequences, are attempting to convey on a deeper level.

Maybe I expected too much from the film narratively and thematically. If indeed my initial expectations for The Revenant were unrealistically high, then the director and film have no one to blame but themselves. I have written elsewhere about how great I think Birdman is -- it is basically one of my top two or three films of 2014. Birdman more or less perfectly balances its straightforward comedy elements with its thematic deconstruction of the U.S. entertainment industry -- its visual aesthetic, its narrative structure, and its underlying thematic meaning fit perfectly together. It totally earns its productively ambiguous conclusion. (In contrast, The Revenant's final shot suggests an intertextual shout-out to the last shot of Birdman more so than anything intrinsically meaningful to The Revenant.)

Furthermore, the stories of The Revenant's grueling, troubled production, and Inarritu's and the cast and crews' perseverance in the face of those obstacles, have lent the whole thing an aura of momentousness and the promise of substantial artistic achievement. I admire Inarritu and appreciate his commitment to location shooting and his perfectionist tendencies in the camera and lighting departments. Yet if Inarritu and company struggled so hard to get this film in the can, wouldn't we hope it would be a total masterwork?

Yes we would, but the film, for all its great achievements, has problems:

1. Let's return to the Malick - Herzog comparison. Malick -- I am thinking mainly of The Tree of Life (2011) here, though all his films (that I've seen) evince this tendency* -- uses natural imagery to suggest deep interior states of character psychology and, simultaneously, something cosmic and vast and non-human at the same time. That is, there is an ambiguous yet meaningful symbolic aspect to Malick's use of such imagery. For example, The Tree of Life's "through the eons" sequence and concluding oceanside scenes, and the moving desert landscape shots paired with Holly's voice-overs in Badlands (1973), meld natural landscapes with character emotions and states of mind, using imagery to create a kind of landscape of the human soul.

Conversely, as Herzog says on camera in Les Blank's great documentary Burden of Dreams (1982),

Nature here is violent, base. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery -- I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain.

For Herzog, nature is a brutal, existential place, not necessarily an abstract symbol for other things as it might be in Malick or in Nicholas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising (2009). Nature is just nature and in Herzog's view it simply wants to kill us and/or make us miserable. Thus when Herzog's camera lingers on the onrushing river early in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) it is meant to suggest that that river is a physically insurmountable thing -- indeed, it will prove to be a key factor in Aguirre's undoing. Though the shot is lengthy and therefore somewhat meditative, I don't think it is meant to suggest any abstract meaning to the river -- no, Aguirre presents that river as simply an indefatigable obstacle to be struggled with, not as a metaphor for any character's inner state. This point of view is consistent with the rest of the film and with the director's larger body of work.

For me, the main problem with The Revenant is that I cannot tell if its meditative, drawn-out nature shots are meant to depict the beautiful but brutal indifference of the wilderness, or to work as some kind of metaphorical cypher giving us access to Glass's soul. I don't think the film knows either. The best clue we have is that The Revenant is very much situated within the subjectivity of Glass -- in the opening shot we literally inhabit his point of view, and throughout the movie we get several weird flashbacks and visions and quasi-dream sequences shown from his perspective. These sequences are supposed to tell us about Glass's interior state but really only repeatedly and unnecessarily reinforce the idea that he loves his wife and son, neither of whom we are allowed to know in depth or care about. Is his love for his indigenous family members really all that motivates this man? Is that all that's going on here?

As EW's Chris Nashawaty writes, The Revenant "almost works better as a series of stunning images and surreal sequences than as an emotionally satisfying story." He concludes that

Here, story and style never quite get on the same page. It’s a movie that’s so focused on dazzling your eyes that it never quite finds its way into your heart.

I am sadly inclined to agree.

2. Whatever steps The Revenant takes to humanize its indigenous characters -- and I count only one, a speech given by Hikuc (Arthur RedCloud) to the French traders -- those efforts come too little, too late. For the movie's striking, impactful, pulse-pounding opening sequence places the viewer among the white traders and frames the attacking Arikara as terrifying, sinister monsters of whom we should be afraid. We see their death-dealing arrows long before we see them, and none of the natives are given individual identities we might empathize with or relate to.

I am sure the filmmakers do not consciously intend to recycle damaging indigenous stereotypes, as DiCaprio's conclusion to his Golden Globes acceptance speech makes clear. Yet as Aisha Harris notes,

What makes this [speech] so awkward and cynical is the fact that it’s so at odds with the movie DiCaprio and director Alejandro González Iñárritu produced. The Revenant is only the latest in a long history of major Hollywood studio films featuring indigenous characters that is told from the white male perspective.

This is hard to argue with. I am sure DiCaprio and Inarritu mean well, but they have indeed made a film whose racial politics and white-male-centeredness are as retrograde as a 1940s Western. As Carole Cadwalladr puts it in her scathing Guardian op-ed piece, The Revenant is a "vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle. [. . .] It's simply the kind of tedious, emotionally vacant film that has certain critics and Academy Award judges wetting their pants." Harsh but not entirely inaccurate words.

3. As the AV Club's Iggy Vishnevetsky points out, there are a great many actors who could have assayed the role of Hugh Glass with more depth and interest than Leonardo DiCaprio does -- his cast-mate Tom Hardy chief among them. Indeed, I found as the film unfolded that DiCaprio, while certainly very capable and believable, did not really wow me -- I kept getting distracted by the supporting players like Hardy, Will Poulter, Domnhall Gleeson, and the bear.**

The bear sez: "I just want to thank my co-star Leonard, and of course my director Alejandro. I'm a two-year-old bear from the Sierra mountains, you know, and you took a chance on me, and honestly, I don't forget it, pal."

To be clear, I really enjoyed The Revenant. I will probably watch it again, if for no other reason that I want another look at its stellar camera work, lighting, and mise-en-scene. My criticisms here are meant to finely point out how this film manages not to be an utter masterpiece in my view. It is still better than 98% of all other movies out there and most everyone should go see it, in a theater if at all possible.

In the end, I wanted to like The Revenant more than I did. I wanted it to be an outright masterpiece. Instead it is a visual stunner with great individual performances but with an extremely questionable ideological point of view and a few inconsistencies that keep it from cohering as powerfully as perhaps it could. It is too thin on the ground thematically given its running time (two and a half hours) and visual grandeur. It suggests -- too vaguely and indeterminately -- more than it ultimately delivers.***

UPDATE 2/26/2016: I thought last year's Birdman was flat-out superb and I do not agree with this author's hyperbolic assertion that Alfonso Cuaron is "a genius," but I generally agree with his assessment of Inarritu's latest effort:

Even the best thing about The Revenant is maddening: It is one of the most visually stunning studio films in recent memory, with long takes winding through dusk-dappled woods, seemingly impossible shots of men floating through whitewater rapids and horses falling off cliffs. All this useless beauty, in service of obscuring a lazy screenplay and aggressively dimensionless characters.

Ouch! Sad but true.

UPDATE 5/21/2016: For an even more in-depth analysis of Innaritu's self-defeating overuse of a "BEAUTIFUL & SOULFUL" visual aesthetic, see Film Crit Hulk's long discussion of The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road (which includes discussion of Malick).

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* I really need to see The New World (2005), one of the few Malick films I haven't seen, since I suspect it may be the best one to compare to The Revenant to illustrate how Inarritu's use of "trippy / meditative nature visuals" differs from Malick's.
** You may think I'm joking but I'm serious: the bear attack is the best scene in the film by far, an amazingly believable and pulse-pounding sequence the likes of which I have never seen before.
*** In this one way only The Revenant reminds me of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), another film that seems at first glance to have a lot on its mind, but finally reveals itself to be a straightforward white male power fantasy and a retrograde celebration of post-9/11 neoconservative values.