Dead Man: THE REVENANT

The Revenant is a simple pulp revenge story blown up to epic proportions. A gnarly tale of extreme survival and an ambivalent ode to masculine gruffness and stubborn righteousness, it takes as its setting wintry snow-swept tundra and forests of the American West in the early 19th century. There we find a group of fur trappers whose expedition is about to go wrong in just about every way it could. It’s a rugged Western and a bloody survival thriller, shot in gorgeous widescreen landscapes and patient lingering looks at fading sunsets, snaking fog, and curling smoke. There’s a great sense of place and space, striking and vividly photographed in graceful shots of impeccable detail. With it comes the feeling that this endlessly stretching wilderness trampled by invading white men and cycles of violence has led to a form of derangement. Even those who survive will be ever changed by the sheer effort it takes to survive on a good day, let alone when stranded in a cascading series of worst-case scenarios.

Star Leonardo DiCaprio exerts tremendous effort as the main figure tortured by the events of the film. It’s practically a secular passion play of frontier suffering. He plays an expert tracker and trapper haunted by memories of dead loved ones. After a bloody battle with Native Americans (shot in harrowing, expertly choreographed long takes), his colleagues are desperate to get home. Too bad, then, that DiCaprio is mauled by a bear (an overwhelming, mostly convincing, sequence) and left for dead. He's hastily placed in a shallow grave by a greedy and mean coworker (Tom Hardy) who’d just rather get back to the fort than sit around waiting for help. This all unfolds with patience and slowly accumulating dread, a series of inciting incidents gradually occurring. We meet a variety of men (Domhnall Gleeson, Maze Runner’s Will Poulter, newcomer Forrest Goodluck, Buzzard’s Joshua Burge) who are exhausted, crabby, sore, beaten down by the elements, resigned to dreary life in an isolating kill-or-be-killed ecosystem. But then there’s merely DiCaprio, alive only through some combination of vengeance and righteous spite, stumbling agonizingly slowly back towards civilization, and the man who did him wrong.

It’s one violent setback after the next as DiCaprio – torn to ribbons, rendered mainly mute, limping, groaning, spitting, bleeding – scratches his way through ice cold water, blinding snow, roaring winds, mysterious Natives, vicious traders, and other assorted conflicts and obstacles. It’s practically a catalogue of every way frontier life could kill you: weapons (rifles, arrows, knives, tomahawks, pistols), the elements (low temperatures, rapids, avalanches), disease, infection, dehydration, starvation, accidents, battles, and murder. The film sets up clearly a variety of reasons why Hardy is loathsome, though still reasonably human. And DiCaprio goes through a wringer of endless sequences of torturous pain – a faintly and grimly hilarious pile on of deadly and dangerous incidents – escalating in an exhausted what-now? effect. These visceral strands combine to create an elemental desire for DiCaprio, who should be dead several dozen times over, to get back to the fort and prove Hardy wrong.

But of course the overarching tension of the piece is not whether or not DiCaprio will live to confront Hardy again. Nor is it whether or not he’ll learn along the way that revenge is ultimately unsatisfying. (This is a revenge tale with movie stars, after all. We know where it’s headed.) It’s a tension between art house existential dread and gooey genre fare – never more than in a subplot about Natives looking for a kidnapped daughter (an inverted Searchers) treated as a plot engine and overly mystical essentialism. Alternately transcendent and brutal, the main suspense comes from wondering just how much punishment is going to be dealt to our hero. By the time we get a climactic nasty close-up of blood-soaked snow, we’ve already seen a mauling, a stabbing, a hanging, a rape, a few massacres, and a dead horse used for warmth, Tauntaun-style. It’s a lot to take, each new act of violence handled very seriously, with the thudding weight of a film out to be tactile and gross, emphasizing how difficult it all is.

Torn between artful self-importance and gripping narrative demands, it nonetheless forms a compelling whole. It’s directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who makes Very Important and very showy movies about human suffering like Babel and Birdman. His co-writer is Mark L. Smith, who wrote the brisk and nasty little horror movie Vacancy. It’s an interesting pairing. Together they’ve made a movie that’s gripping and long, a beautiful, miserable, suspenseful slog, well over two hours of one thing after another. It’s elegiac and solid, staggering natural formations held on screen as long shivering breaths between moments of pain, and then human figures slowly make their way through them. We might watch for several minutes as DiCaprio limps and winces his way up a hill, then crouches down behind a tree to see what new complications are in store. Nothing happens easy in this film. Iñárritu takes a simple story and makes it a showcase for his style and his skill, and the expert craft of his cast and crew, holding the ominous and steady tone.

The Revenant relies on committed performers and incredible cinematography to achieve its aims. DiCaprio is at his most primal here, often playing wordless scenes of anguish and exhaustion that are among his least phony on screen moments. But just as good is the supporting cast, especially an intense and unexpectedly darkly funny Hardy, a quietly panicking Poulter, and a hesitantly authoritative Gleeson. Together they form a nice cross-section of the different ways people can react to conflicts of lawless violence from nature and from man. The action is captured in dazzling photography by Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work on the likes of The Tree of Life, Children of Men, Burn After Reading, and many more equally visually rich films, has cemented him as one of modern cinema’s best image-makers. He uses austere long shots, drinking in natural beauty, and then hammers home turmoil in fluid takes. He gives the film its massive wide-open spaces, and its close-up intensity, clinging to actors, swiveling and swooping as they get swept up in chaotic moments. This is exquisitely inflated pulp.

Man v. Machine: EX MACHINA

Like the best sci-fi of the seductive, suspenseful, smart variety, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina explores heady questions of science and progress in a gripping entertainment. It locks us into a deceptively simple concept and proceeds to get deeper and creepier, turning up unexpected developments, at once great surprises and, better still, utterly inevitable in retrospect. A film of sleek surfaces, silent astonishments, and quiet terror, it’s a beautifully unsettling thought experiment about the speed with which technology might outpace mere humanity, and our matter-of-fact folly in outsourcing so much trust in our lives to the whims of the tech geniuses among us.

Mad scientists these days aren’t the lab coat-wearing, wild-haired eggheads of yore. Now they’re more likely to be billionaire tech moguls, eccentric, brilliant, mysterious, with unlimited resources and unparalleled access to our lives. Oscar Isaac plays one in Ex Machina, using his likability as smarmy charisma. Holed up at his futuristic mansion/research facility in the middle of nowhere, he’s working on a top-secret artificial intelligence project and needs an outside opinion to test it. Enter Domhnall Gleeson, a programmer in Isaac’s vast company. Thinking he’s simply won a trip to this mysterious rich man’s outpost, the programmer is forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, then shown the object of study: Ava, a humanoid robot with womanly curves, exposed fiber-optic panels, and fleshy face and hands. It’s uncanny, a mechanical person metallic in long shots, persuasively real in close-ups.

The inventor wants the programmer to study his creation, testing the limits of Ava’s consciousness. Is she experiencing real emotions, real thoughts, or is she only coded that way? Garland sets up the film as a series of interrogations between man and machine, normal dialogue turned uncanny by the inescapable sci-fi mysteries simmering underneath. The man tests Ava, is drawn into her reality, her personhood. When the camera pulls close to her face, we can see how real she looks. The more he interacts with her the more she becomes a character to which we can ascribe motive, interiority. But should we? What’s she up to? And, for that matter, can the man trust his host’s intentions for this experiment? The film’s score underlines unease with a constant digital hum murmuring suspense.

What makes this dynamic effective is the striking, complex work of Alicia Vikander, who supplies the robot’s face and, with eerily convincing special effects, fluid movements with a trace of electronic gears in her gait. There’s a bit of Maria from Lang’s Metropolis in her build. It’s a chilly performance with a hint of warmth – of life – behind her eyes that is contextually fascinating. Such a totally credible fusion of writing, acting, and effects, I almost immediately stopped admiring the creation and simply believed. Her expressions seem normal, but carry a dash of suspicion. What does it mean to smile? Is she mimicking? Is she manipulating? Or is she actually emoting? It remains a tantalizing open question for the audience and for the characters. What is she capable of? I’m sure there’s some satiric point in a story of men who literally build an objectified woman. It’s complicated, and yet unsurprising.

Of course the mad scientist has secrets. What else could you expect when his massive building has power outages, doors swooshing shut, unpredictable keypads, hidden rooms, dark corridors, and rows of locked cabinets. And of course the true subject of the experiment is up in the air – who studies the other, the robot or its creators? But Garland, making his directorial debut after a career scripting great sci-fi features like 28 Days Later and Never Let Me Go, creates of the expected plot points a nervy story that proceeds logically and methodically through its twists. It makes great use of a shifting protagonist. Who will escape this increasingly claustrophobic setting, painted in cinematographer Rob Hardy’s darkly smooth surfaces? Who should we root for? Rather than sticking with one rooting interest – our everyman entry point, or the enigmatic mogul, or the compelling robot – it questions aims and intentions of each in turn. Who will escape? My answer shifted with the film’s reveals, as it packed familiar but profound implications in small gestures and artful pulp.

Survivor of the Fittest: UNBROKEN

Unbroken tells a true story with bright, well-built, Hollywood epic storytelling. That’s fitting, since its subject, Louis Zamperini, lived a full and amazing life, built out of the stuff movies are made of. He’s a man for whom the adspeak “incredible true story” seems to have been made. He was born in 1917, became a juvenile delinquent, then a high school track star, an Olympic athlete, a World War II bombardier whose plane was lost at sea, a captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and a survivor of all the above. I’m sure he was one of the only people who could’ve seen Memphis Belle, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, Chariots of Fire, and Life of Pi in their original theatrical runs and see something of his own life experience reflected back at him.

The film is an effective dramatization by turns unflinching – gaunt bodies caked in dirt and blood – and sentimental – wistful flashbacks and swelling score. It’s button pushing in that way. It coasts on the easily apparent drama of the story itself, which certainly has enough surface incident to fill a run time. It starts in the skies over the Pacific front in the middle of WWII, a tense dogfight shot completely inside Zamperini’s plane. We linger behind the various gunners and pilots, watching as small dots grow into enemy fighters, spraying bullets and getting return fire. It’s exciting stuff, brightly lit, displayed with convincing effects courtesy Industrial Light and Magic. We then cut back to our hero’s early life, following childhood scrapes through his Olympic competition, notable backstory swiftly filled in. Then we’re back to the war, where his dangers are just beginning.

Directed with smooth competence by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay with credited drafts by Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson, the film has clear admiration for Zamperini’s resilience. They’re most concerned with portraying his indomitable spirit, returning again and again to his face as Jack O’Connell plays the man staring purposefully past the problems at hand. He’s stranded on a lifeboat with the survivors of his plane’s crash (Finn Wittrock, Domhnall Glesson). They’re lucky enough to be rescued, but unlucky enough to find their rescuers are the enemy. He ends up at a POW camp where he’s beaten by a cruel Japanese sergeant (Miyavi), and falls in with the scarred and weary prisoners (Garrett Hedlund, Luke Treadaway). He looks purposefully into every obstacle, the punches, the backbreaking labor, the blood and bruises. He grits his teeth and lives to see another day. He’s unbreakable.

What gives Zamperini the strength to go on? How did he survive? Was it luck or happenstance? Determination or divine intervention? Optimism or sloganeering? I don’t know. The movie’s more enamored with the facts of his survival than investigating him as a character. It’s a surface level examination, which is fine when the plot’s hopping, but drags down the occasionally monotonous dark night of the soul in the POW camp. The film hits every big mark, but I was starving for small details to color in the time between. There’s never a sense of who the characters are, just what misery they’ve been through.

I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the people trapped in various conditions with Zamperini, or his family, or his captors. They’re simply facts of his life, the elements that make the miraculous extremes possible. There’s some great early details in the young man’s homelife, scenes of discipline, religion, and discovery of his talents. In some ways it plays like the opening moments of a superhero origin story. The film’s first hour is its best, time to follow an eventful life on its first, positive trajectory with energetic sequences of sports and war. But it seems to skip so quickly through these vital foundational moments that by the second hour it starts to feel like a catalogue of miserable incidents where I’d hoped to find a character study wrapped up in epic trappings. Instead, it’s all smaller.

But Unbroken is respectful, handsomely made, and technically proficient. Jolie has cinematographer Roger Deakins behind the camera and he does sharp, solid work. She has a fine cast, and they inhabit their roles convincingly. The editing is propulsive, the sound crackling, the score syrupy strong. In style and perspective – the square, proud, sturdy take – it could’ve been made more or less exactly like this ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more years ago. It’s old-fashioned, made with professionalism and care, but it’s also anonymously produced and a bit bland. There’s plenty of craftsmanship put into a story interesting enough on its own the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to really dig into the details. They simply evoke the big moments and trust our interest will follow enough to excuse the all-surface approach.

Time is on His Side: ABOUT TIME

It was Pauline Kael who said “melodrama with a fast pace can be much more exciting - and more honest, too - than feeble pretentious attempts at drama.” So it is with About Time, the new film from Richard Curtis, the writer-director of Love Actually, that sentimental hydra-headed Christmastime romantic comedy that some say drowns in sappiness as if that’s a bad thing. His new film is a romance about falling in love with a woman, but even more so about falling in love with life itself, helped along by important relationships and Big Moments – births, deaths, weddings, funerals – that make one stop and appreciate time as it goes by. To this is added a light dusting of high concept sci-fi that’s at once easily digestible and, just below the surface, as incomprehensible as any time travel plotting can grow when one stares at it for too long. But anyway, this isn’t a movie that one experiences with the head, intending to chart it out for one’s date afterwards, arranging straws into timelines on the dinner table. This is a movie that socked me in the heart early and often, terrifically emotionally manipulative and much more involving than feebler fare.

It starts with Tim (Domhnall Gleeson, a Weasley son) turning 21 and learning a family secret, so secret neither his mother (Lindsay Duncan) nor sister (Lydia Wilson) knows. His father (Bill Nighy) calls him into his study, sits him down, and says that all the men in his family can travel through time. “It’s not a joke,” he so flatly states it must be true. With this information comes knowledge of the ability’s restrictions, learned, we’re meant to assume, through generations of trial and error. He can only travel within the space of his own lifetime. He can only travel backwards, other than returning to the present, of course. He can only return to places and times he knows. To achieve this feat, he simply has to stand in the dark, clench his fists, and think his way there.

It all sounds so simple, and in practice it is. The film uses the sci-fi hook to power its storytelling and uses the rules to keep the plot from spinning out of control. It’s silliness treated if not literally seriously, than emotionally seriously. It helps that Nighy is such a warm presence, eager in his fatherly insistence on ethical uses of time travel. Look not for riches or manipulations, he says, but for generating more chances to do what you love. What’s he done with this gift? He says he has found more reading time, mostly.

Tim wants a girlfriend and at first sets about creating his own personal Groundhog Day in order to gather information to woo his crushes. Once he realizes that no matter how often he tries to redo moments to make them just right, others will behave in unpredictable ways, he simply moves on with his life. He moves to London, gets a low level job at a law firm, meets new friends, and falls in love at first sight with a young woman (Rachel McAdams, exuding sunny appeal) he meets by pure coincidence. In this story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl by going back inadvertently changing their meeting. He erases it, in fact.

He must win her back by going back, using his powers not to control, but only to be a better flirt and a better lover. He’ll still redo social stumbles, but he’s just as likely to jump back and relive a great moment. There’s a funny bit where he selfishly relives a Big Deal three times, and then is too exhausted to go again when McAdams asks him to. He time-traveled and didn’t even have to.

As the film progresses through moments romantic, comedic, and dramatic, it builds up a picture of a young man learning to come to terms with the finite nature of life. Sometimes the story will even take a break from its mild sci-fi possibilities and go for a stretch without bringing up its central premise at all, playing out as tasteful, sentimental melodrama. It works on that level quite nicely. Principally a romance between two characters rather charmingly portrayed (Domhnall and McAdams have an on-screen connection that instantly provoked my rooting interest) this is a movie full of tender, warm, heartfelt moments of swooping, swooning true love and all that mushy stuff. It’s a movie about learning to experience life as it happens instead of always striving for some ideal life you feel you aren’t living, but could be or should be.

About Time uses its modest time travel trappings not as plot mechanics, but as metaphor for learning how to manage and truly appreciate the time you have with those who love you. It’s a warm and fuzzy movie that tells comfortable, but no less moving, truths. It has the romance of a cozy rom com, the philosophy of a greeting card, and the sentimentality of a life insurance commercial. But the combination comes together so wonderfully that it won me over all the same. It’s all a slick and lovely artifice through which Curtis can movingly and sweetly find some great emotional resonances. A lush piano score that dances around the tune of one of my favorite Ben Folds songs ties together a story that’s small in scope, telling only of one young man’s maturation through complications both romantic and temporal. And yet its syrupy life-affirming implications are so grandly expressive. It’s a movie of broad feeling and overflowing heart.

Note: This is undoubtedly the mildest R-rated film I’ve seen in quite some time. It has a handful of stronger profanities deployed tastefully and a few non-explicit references to sex. Why that’s not considered a PG-13 here when I’ve seen worse in PG-13s past (in trailers, even), is beyond me.