I failed you all. I went to a movie and told you I liked it, and you were all shocked and horrified. But I can now compensate for that. I saw another movie, and I hated it.
It was The Revenant.
Some things I liked. It was very pretty, if you’re into winter scenes, watching snow fall, ice melt, glaciers retreat and advance, and people struggling to keep warm, then this is the show for you. In my case, though, I can just step outside my door any time between November and April and get that.
But otherwise, it stuck with the winter theme by having a plot that was glacially slow. It was prolonged torture porn. Hugh Glass, a trapper in the early 19th century, gets brutally mauled by a bear, and is then abandoned by his companions, in particular, the cowardly Fitzgerald, who tells everyone that he died and was buried. Except he wasn’t dead, and glass literally crawls 200 miles across Montana and South Dakota in the middle of the winter to return to safety, and possibly revenge.
It’s very loosely based on a real event, and a book, The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge
DiCaprio plays Glass, and is apparently up for an Oscar award. It was a horrible performance. He’s unable to speak for the bulk of the movie, so he grunts, grimaces, and has dreams about his Indian wife, who was murdered, of course. Real men can’t be tangled up in human affection, but need to be alienated and driven by hatred for the other men who killed his conveniently dead wife, in a frozen wasteland, which is kind of a metaphor for a refrigerator, I guess.
Similarly problematic is the treatment of Indians. They, too, are mostly dead and slaughtered, and are convenient motivators for the angry white man. Indian women get it even worse: bartered, prostituted in frontier bars, kidnapped, raped, murdered, and occasionally being privileged to reappear as mystical magical floating ghosts to inspire Leo DiCaprio to persevere. Warning: some people had an even stronger revulsion to the abuse of Indian women than I did.
The story has the same fundamental problem as Dances With Wolves. It takes a deep tragedy that shattered an entire people in a gloriously beautiful landscape, and centers it entirely on the lone white guy having a rough time on the prairie. There is a great movie waiting to be made about this period and this place, but The Revenant isn’t it. We’re still waiting for a movie maker who actually understands what the American West was about.
If a movie script actually showed the genocide committed by the invading colonists it would never get funded.
That’s another thing: the evil rapist villains we must all despise in this movie are the French-Canadians. The True American trappers butchering beavers are only the victims of marauding Indians.
So only the Canadians are accurately portrayed?
(Our history with the First Nations people is a horrendous shame.)
The Last Samurai was like that as well–white guy goes to strange, beautiful place, has a hard time, gets it on with native woman. They should just make a movie called White Meat that shows clips of all these movies. And people wonder why the natives maraud.
The very first trailer turned me off completely; my immediate thought was “here we go again.” Thanks for confirming that impression.
Well… I guess I should’ve read this post before agreeing to go see it next week. I have the worst feeling now that I’m going to have a list of things to comment on afterwards, and it might be a difficult discussion – the last thing we went to see was The Usual Suspects, and I commented on the Indian Kobayashi being played by the English and browned up Pete Postlethwaite with a head wobble and a dodgy accent… that didn’t get a hostile reaction, but there was definitely a sense of not getting why there was a problem there. I seem to remember a similar disconnect after commenting on the scene in Jurassic World where a few dinosaurs played Pass The Parcel with the kids’ supposed chaperone.
I wonder if I could make a convincing argument in favour of a third viewing of Star Wars instead?
redwood, #4
Can you imagine the dudebro outrage if this was done with a white woman going and getting it on with “exotic” native men? I bet it will all of a sudden become sexist and objectifying for the bros.
The most-likely-to-be-true version I’ve heard is actually somewhat amusing. There is nothing about revenge. Glass, who has previously survived some serious shit in his life, gets mauled by a bear that comes back to thrash him 2 more times before it’s killed. The guys left to watch over him figure he’s unconscious and isn’t going to wake up ever again and it’s fricking dangerous to be away from the group, so they take his rifle and rejoin the party.
There is no half-Indian son.
Glass wakes up, crawls the insane amount of miles to seek help, and then embarks on an epic quest: to get his stuff back, and to get those two guys to say “I’m sorry”.
I went to see it, because my friends wanted to go see it and I wanted to hang out with my friends. We made it about a half an hour in before me, my spouse, and a third friend of mine went “Nope, to the nopity nopity” and theater hopped over to Star Wars again.
I hope they give Leo his Oscar. I don’t think it was his best performance, but that man will kill himself trying to get an Academy Award if they don’t.
It takes a deep tragedy that shattered an entire people in a gloriously beautiful landscape, and centers it entirely on the lone white guy having a rough time on the prairie.
That is what I would call a “devastating one-sentence review.”
I don’t follow the whole oscars thing but it sure would be awesome if someone could work that sentence into the show.
The Last Samurai
AAAUUGUGUGHHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! I had managed to forget that.
(goes to wash out brain)
The whole ‘starts to learn how to use a sword in the beginning of the movie and by the end of the movie is able to take on experts who have been sword-fighting all their lives” thing particularly ups my intercranial pressure. The only way you can ever have that in a movie is if the character’s mitichlorians are completely off the chart. Otherwise, it’d be “white guy goes to Japan, learns to fight with the samurai, gets cut down instantly in swordfight.” Oh, and there’d then have to be “beautiful cardboard cut-out native woman who loves him for some unexplained reason kills herself in disgust at his incompetence”
I’ll see that and raise you a 47 Ronin. Even ignoring the addition of the fantasy elements to the story the way they shoehorned Keanu Reeves’s character into that movie was ridiculous.
I particularly loathe the cliché of the (white, male of course) hero who is the Only One Who Really Understands the Spiritual/Mysterious/Exotic Native Peoples and the only one they trust and who speaks their language and has Acquired All Their Mysterious Knowledge and has a Wise (or occasionally Young and Hotheaded) Native buddy/sidekick plus a Native Child (usually a boy) hanging on his every word (and conveniently available to be killed by the bad guys so the hero can unleash all his hero-ness with violence and explosions). Yet somehow despite how wonderful all that Mysterious Culture is, the only person we’re asked to consider an individual of any note or interest is the white male hero.
Somehow I am not a great fan of Steven Seagal. Ugh.
@ Bargearse
I feel the need to bring this up every time somebody mentions 47 Ronin. It was a pet project of Keanu’s and he just wanted to produce it. He loves the story (the Japanese folk tale) and then added fantasy elements to it and spent years trying to pitch it as a movie. The only way a studio would agree to do it is if he were in it. Apparently he turned down several offers with that condition before finally agreeing to it.
I’m not saying that to excuse how dumb shoehorning him in ended up being, just pointing out it was all political and how Hollywood works. I have a softspot for Keanu and overall he seems like a really decent guy.
Well, I thought the movie was okay.* Not great, but okay. I spent most of the time wondering why he wouldn’t die. Given what he went through and the … healthcare the Glass character had access to, he should have died of a dozen infections at the same time. His infections should have had infections. Just for starters. Or he could have taken the short-cut and died of ‘big unenthusiastic grizzly’ the nth time around.
The ‘poor white guy / natives as background’ theme is crappy but unsurprising. I was surprised the natives didn’t spend more time marauding. It would seem entirely justified.
*Snow is a curiosity over here, so yay for pretty landscapes. Would have been nicer without the blood staining the snow. But that’s what you get for picking Hollywood over BBC nature documentaries.
bojac6:
I’m not saying that to excuse how dumb shoehorning him in ended up being, just pointing out it was all political and how Hollywood works.
If he’d re-told the 47 ronin in the world/context of John Wick, he’d have had a genuine hit on his hands.
Kurosawa could have done the 47 ronin justice, and even he was wise enough not to go there.
bojac6 @14
Hey, I have soft spot for the guy too and I know why the studio did it. Still pisses me off though.
Have to say I enjoyed it.. up to the first needless death and then halfway through the thing I knew 100% how it would end and was pissed off that survival – the interesting part – had REVENGE!!! shoehorned in. Totally crap writing, they should’ve had the dude executed at the end and been done with it.
Now Hateful 8? That was much more fulfilling. And just as wintry! Just as bloody!
Did you see the part of the movie where it was revealed that the name came off the bottom of a coffee mug, and was not the guy’s actual name? And that the story involving him was fabricated?
Also, Kobayashi is a Japanese name, not Indian.
@Area Man, 19
Yes.
When do we learn that it’s fabricated, and not simply a massively editorialised, fictionalised, and obfuscated version of real events?
At most, only one of these two statements can be relevant.
Did you see the part of the movie where Kint is picked up by the real-and-not-invented -whatever his actual name is- Kobayashi after leaving the precinct, as Kujan is on his way out to find him?
Does the name being taken off a mug, or most of Kint’s story being misleading change the casting, makeup and direction choices somehow?
@Every except Area Man,
Sorry for giving into off topicry.
To pile on to The Last Samurai one of the things that bugged me a bit about it is that it ignored that a lot of the samurai class supported the Meiji Restoration. They decided that Westernisation of Japan’s politics, government, and military was the only way to prevent America and other Western powers from treating Japan like they were China.
There are a number of real life stories involving Japan’s early interactions with the West after 1868 that would make for good movies. An example would be the story of Yosuke Matsuoka, who was Japanese Foreign Minister in 1940. He went to the US at 13, and before he returned permanently to Japan at 22 received a law degree from the University of Oregon, graduating second in his class. Or Sutematsu Yamakawa, who was the first Japanese woman to receive a bachelor of arts degree when she graduated from Vassar in 1882. Finding someone who could make a good one, without a bunch of horrible stereotypes and clichés, is probably another matter.
Regarding Saad’s comment @7 I seem to remember that the made for TV film American Geisha, which was vaguely based on Liza Dalby’s experiences in the ’70s studying geisha(including working as one herself), had a romance subplot. I think the fictional title character Gillian Burke, played by Pam Dawber, gets involved with a Japanese man.
I hated ‘the Revenant’. I found it boring. Should have been around 2 hours shorter. I was wanting it to finish 5 minutes into the film.
I really enjoyed ‘the Hateful Eight’ though, even though it had exactly the same elements (the violence, the misogyny) ‘the Revenant’ had.
I read the book some time back. As I recall, it all took place in what is now Nebraska. The trailer just lost me, with jumping off waterfalls and such.
In the book, Hugh Glass is just plain tough. He doesn’t need complex motives. He crawls to survive, and to find the guys who left him. There is no inspiring goal, just a stubborn refusal to quit.
There is also a group of Native Americans that help him. Which contrasts with the fears of the guys who left him because they heard Indians.
Hugh Glass deserves better than that movie.
The thing about The Last Samurai is that despite looking like a formulaic story of a white man going to a primitive country, becoming better than the natives at their most honed skill, and commanding them, it’s based on an actual white man who had a very similar trajectory in Japan at that time: Jules Brunet. Except Brunet was French, not American, and he didn’t merely accept the “noble savages”‘ way of life but helped the rebelling Daimyos organize the Republic of Ezo along French-inspired democratic principles; until the Imperial Japanese Army put an end to it. I don’t dislike The Last Samurai for having a white male hero commanding the Japanese (since that really happened); I dislike it for making him American and throwing out all the historical social and political intricacies, to fit it into a Dances with Wolves-like narrative.
I keep reading his name as Hugh Jass, and that sounds much more like the kind of hero I can get behind.
If the name is made up and we don’t know anything about the character’s background or ethnicity, then accusing the filmmakers of miscasting a white guy in an Asian guy’s role makes no sense. The character’s real name might have been John Smith for all we know.
So there’s no problem with hiring a white, English actor to portray an [apparently] Indian character, with artificially darkened skin, a wobbly head and a dodgy Indian accent… because the character’s name might actually be John Smith? That’s absurd.
The worst thing is that arguing this is making it seem like it’s something I’m desperately concerned about. It’s not. The film is 21 years old, and that sort of casting generally doesn’t happen as often anymore. It’s just something I commented on at the time. “Isn’t it weird how that seemed ok back then?” I’m so glad I didn’t mention my reaction on my first time reading Tintin as an adult….
Did you notice the sign they hung on the hanged indian says “we are all savages”?
My translation, someone with better French can correct me.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one to find the film boring. I was so unengaged I spent most of the time thinking things like ‘why does no one have gloves?’, ‘how is he not drowning with all those heavy furs on?’, and (slight) SPOILER ALERT,
‘how does a fall over a cliff, even if it is via a tree, not cause at least a sprained ankle?’ Oh, and as komarov @15 pointed out, ‘how did he not get any infections?’ He should have been a big sack of puss, not healed within what seemed (from the shots of the moon) to be a month at most. I was so bored I even noticed all the continuity errors that are listed on IMDb!
And the fact that the only women in the film served as motivations for the men to do things, rather than be people in their own right, really pissed me off. Can we please stop using women as MacGuffins?
Tabby Lavalamp@3
“So only the Canadians are accurately portrayed?
(Our history with the First Nations people is a horrendous shame.)”
True but it’s unfair to single out our French speaking people for special notice in that regard. My English speaking ancestors were enthusiastically involved.
I think the filmmakers did the same thing I did on first seeing the word “revenant”. I assumed that it had something in common with “revenge”, and maybe meant “one who takes revenge”. Well, it turns out to be the older European word for “zombie”, or more precisely, “back from the grave”. “Revived” or “returned” might work as related words, but it definitely meant a living corpse.
A revenant was a recognized concept, but the filmmakers didn’t seem to recognize it. I imagine them reading the book as about revenge, and thinking it needed to be punched up a lot. I recall the book as being more about the Code of the West – the guys that left Hugh Glass for dead had failed in their duty, and he needed to pass the word to people who might trust them in future. (And to get his gun back – those things were expensive, and he could have used it in his struggle.)
I think the film putting so much emphasis on revenge, and constructing such an overwhelming motive for revenge, diminishes the humanity of the story. It’s nice to think that a human being who was left for dead didn’t just give up, but struggled through and survived. Maybe you and I might do the same, if we were in a bad spot. Maybe all people would and could.
But if the only thing that would get a man back on his feet after a bear attack is the desire to kill some other people as revenge for a rather unlikely series of horrible acts, well, the next time a bear chews on me, I’m just going to curl up and die. And if this comment doesn’t post, I’m gonna cry.
I had to look it up, turns out I have seen the previous movie based on this event Man in the Wilderness (1971) with Richard Harris in the lead as Zachary Bass (Glass) I remember that it did look pretty good and I did like even if it was just a little too unrealistic as to the events. John Huston standing by a “huge black keel boat” on wheels in the snowy and frozen ground was spectacularly surreal
Not sure I want to see this kind of fantasy again a realistic story would be nice for a change. May be some day.
uncle frogy
@#32 The film is titled that because Leo was left for dead, and in fact believed to be dead, and like a revenant, seems to return from the land of the dead. I share your weariness of Hollywood’s penchant for distorting science and history, but we haven’t yet reached the point where they pick titles without consulting a dictionary. There’s just nothing wrong with their semantics here. The film falls back heavily on the revenge theme because there’s just not much story in it otherwise, not because they misunderstood their title.
Saw this with Hateful Eight, both are good filmmaking, well-shot and acted, but the scripting was pretty atrocious, and especially in the case of The Revenant, nothing we haven’t been subjected to before on several levels. Kind of a pointless exercise.
Over 99% of films out of Hollowood that pretend to depict native Americans involve their interaction with their European conquerors, with plots almost invariably revolving around the representative latter. What can one expect ort of Hollowood?
There is only ONE movie that comes to mind that involves a plot entirely based within the realm of native americans before whitey ever shows up: “Windwalker”…starring Trevor Howard – a European, but who supplies a remarkable performance in a tale that is at once gripping as it is cinematically gorgeous. Recommended. Wish Hollowood would treat stories with the same dignity that great literature used to.
@9: “I hope they give Leo his Oscar.”
I really hope filmmakers don’t give him yet another role in which he must put his audience through another interminable round of straining at the toilet sounds. Enough is enough already. Sheesh.
anchor
Have you seen this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Man_(film)
Oh, I hated it. It pains me to say that because, in general, I like Iñárritu. It was such a disappointment.
The movie was well shot. I can’t imagine what the hell else it’s getting so much goddamn acclaim for. It’s an absolute bore. Even if you do think Di Caprio is playing the role effectively, IT’S NOT INTERESTING. His role is one dimensional and the film is slow. Painfully slow. And very, very little happens in over two hours. You’re sitting there, just waiting for something to happen and then it doesn’t. Complete bummer.
As a Canadian First Nations person, I kind of appreciated the depiction of First Nations women as systematically abused by white folk. Not that I’m OK with white people abusing aboriginal women. Not at all. If you’re going to use First Nations people as props in your movie though, I’d appreciate that you accurately portray white people’s attitudes towards them, which, as the movie illustrates, are abominable. When I was growing up and we were made to watch edutainment in social studies the worst thing about these wretched films was EVERYTHING was from the perspective of white dudes and when First Nations of Inuit or Metis folk got a mention, the creators would pretend relations between the French or the Americans and the First Nations people were just fine and there was a healthy mutual respect there from the get go! That kind of candy coating always horrifies me. If you’re going to do a piece about a white person in which you use aboriginal people as background at least have the courtesy to stand up and say, “Nope, white people treated them like complete shit”.
Hated the movie. Liked The Big Short though.
When it came out, I read two reviews from the Grauniad (here and here). Neither made me want to see the movie, so I think I’ll do with it the same as I do for Tarantino films: avoid at all costs.
Here‘s a movie review from a First Nations perspective.
I liked “Dead Man”. Its a “brave white guy hero” and “noble native sidekick” done rather better than usual.
Haven’t seen or even heard of Windwalker. Might have to hunt that one down.
In terms of whitey being the central figure surrounded by dark-skinned accessories in their own “exotic” land, I loved the recent Jordanian film Theeb. There’s a white man who shows up in the beginning, and for a while it seems like this will be another Dances With Wolves, but boy, is it not.
antigone10 #9
I know, I’ve seen his acting.
—
rq
That’s been my policy since Kill Bill.
A few points in defence of this particular aspect of that movie.
1. The white guy does not “start to learn how to use a sword in the beginning of the movie”. He was already highly skilled with a different kind of sword, a calvary sabre, at the beginning of the movie, to the point where he successfully kills an opponent wielding a katana with that sword in battle (though arguable he was lucky). So he’s not entering this as a complete novice. He’s coming at it from the perspective of an expert in a related discipline learning a new variant of that discipline.
2. The white guy is never actually shown becoming better than any of the Japanese experts. At best he achieves nominal competency and can outfight the occasional mook. He remains clearly, unquestionably, and obviously inferior to the experts who taught him, right to the end of the film.
3. The first time he tries training at Japanese swordsmanship, he’s beaten by a 8-10y old boy.
4. The first time he fights an adult opponent, he IS cut down instantaneously. It’s just that that particular duel was fought with wooden training swords, and so instead of dying, he’s beaten to a pulp instead. (And his opponent was clearly going easy on him as well)
Really The Last Samurai is a subversion of this trope. The Algren character, as I posted above, does not ever become “better” than the natives at their most honed skill, and he never commands them. He advises the Japanese rebel leader, specifically, on tactics for fighting against WESTERN arms and battle formations, a subject in which he was established at the start to be a legitimate expert in, and said leader, who is the one actually in command the whole time, adopts those suggestions according to his own judgment.
The only white men who end up in positions of actual command over Japanese troops were the bad guys.
It always jumps out at me in otherwise conventional action fare that when the main guy is Asian (for ex. Jackie Chan, Jet Li Hollywood movies) and the “girl” is white, they never get it on as, say, Bruce Willis or any other white action guy usually does. They just become good buddies. Prime example, Kiss of the Dragon Not so when the reverse is true (white main guy, Asian “girl”). Because of this it seemed so out of place to me that the Korean guy in The Walking Dead got together with the white woman… I guess all it takes is the zombie apocalypse.
Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds do a great telling of the real Hugh Glass story on ‘The Dollop’, their hilarious American history podcast. If you think it might be difficult to make a story this grim hilarious, you need to check that out.
And yeah, my reaction was pretty much the same a PZ’s: adding the murder of the son was a cheap, manipulative way of turning a story of survival into a story of revenge.
Glass’ story is one about life and the will to live, and they turned it into a story about the will to kill.