Drama

The Revenant: In This Wilderness, It’s Men vs. Nature, and Man vs. Man

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio braves the wilderness in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant"

The Revenant defies categorization, not because it refuses to serve as a particular type of movie, but because it is so many movies at once. Both art film and action flick, both meditative drama and survivalist thriller, both historical fiction and contemporary allegory—the latest and craziest picture from provocateur Alejandro González Iñárritu wants it all. This level of naked ambition is rare in modern cinema, and it is tempting to praise The Revenant—a two-and-a-half hour adventure film with minimal dialogue and maximal craft—for simply existing. But look past its staggering audacity, and The Revenant reveals itself as a work of true duality, even beyond its mirrored ambitions. It is, in empirical terms, both a good movie and a bad one.

Let’s begin with the bad. Based on a novel by Michael Punke (Iñárritu wrote the screenplay along with Mark L. Smith), The Revenant‘s storyline is exceedingly slight. Set in the early nineteenth century, it follows a band of fur trappers in the American wilderness. Initially, there are roughly 30 of them, but after the native Arikara (dubbed “Ree”) spring an ambush—a characteristically bloody sequence filled with loud musket-fire and zooming arrows—their numbers are reduced to about 10, though only two are of any consequence. They are Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), an inveterate tracker with a half-Pawnee teenage son, and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a brusque trapper who is as unapologetically selfish as he is culturally insensitive. After Glass is severely wounded by a bear—more on that in a bit—he and Fitzgerald are separated from their unit; not one to loiter with an invalid, Fitzgerald murders Glass’s son and leaves the immobilized Glass for dead. The remainder of The Revenant focuses on Glass’sagonizing efforts to survive in the forbidding wild, driven by his need to enact revenge on his son’s killer. Read More

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The Hateful Eight: Fun and Fury in the Old West

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

The Hateful Eight is silly, self-indulgent, overlong, and obscenely ostentatious. It is also funny, bracing, suspenseful, and supremely entertaining. It is, in other words, a film by Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s poet laureate of grisly violence and savory dialogue. This is the kind of happily ridiculous movie where the no-good woman spends the entire second half with her face covered in blood, and where the manly men seem to have engaged in a mustache-growing contest. As a writerly work of fiction, The Hateful Eight is difficult to take seriously. As a thrilling piece of pulp art, it is impossible to dismiss.

That is especially true for cinephiles. The world’s most celebrated former video-store clerk, Tarantino can be exasperating in his nerdy superiority, his compulsion to constantly remind you of the scope of his encyclopedic knowledge of film’s annals. But he possesses real love for the movies, and The Hateful Eight—which, as the opening title card gratuitously announces, is the eighth picture of his career—is his most pronounced valentine to the form yet. Shot in the fossilized format of 65-millimeter film, its languorous opening scenes—featuring painterly images of a stagecoach striving against the snow of a Wyoming blizzard (shooting took place in Colorado), and of a cloaked man with his head bowed against the cold—beautifully capture the visual majesty of the medium. (Most theaters with digital projectors are showing The Hateful Eight in a slightly truncated version, but a “traveling roadshow” is exhibiting the film in select areas in 70mm, complete with an overture, intermission, and a few extended scenes.) Tarantino’s screenplays may go overboard with their insouciant humor, but in these striking early scenes (shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), he makes clear that his craft is not a joke. To him, movies still matter. Read More

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Carol: As Society Frowns, True Love Blooms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in Todd Haynes's "Carol"

Carol is the new film from Todd Haynes, though perhaps I should have preceded that factual nugget with a spoiler alert. Over the past two decades, in features such as Safe and Far from Heaven (both starring Julianne Moore) and in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (with Kate Winslet), Haynes has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of the tragedy of feminine domesticity. He makes movies about putatively happy women who are nevertheless battered by normative prejudice and suffocated by societal constriction; his heroines, visibly content to onlookers, are secretly trapped by a lack of mobility and an absence of true freedom. Given this, you may anticipate—perhaps “dread” is the better word—that bad things will happen to the women in Carol. But while the characters here do endure their share of misfortune, what is stunning about this remarkable, enormously empathetic film is how life-affirming it is. A work of raw, pure emotion, Carol testifies to the power of human compassion, even as it also unflinchingly depicts human ugliness. It breaks your heart, and then, in startling fashion, it puts it back together again.

Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel called The Price of Salt, the movie’s title is somewhat deceptive. Yes, one of the principals is named Carol, and it seems only logical to christen the film after her, given that she is played with luminescent magnetism by Cate Blanchett. Yet the movie belongs equally to Therese Belivet (an extraordinary Rooney Mara), a twentysomething woman with a pageboy haircut and wide, hazel-green eyes. When we first take stock of Therese (the year is 1952), her life seems perfectly satisfactory. She has a steady if thankless job at a Manhattan department store, she has secured the romantic attentions of a good-looking man (Jake Lacy, from The Office and Obvious Child), and she has a fairly healthy social calendar, sneaking viewings of movies with friends in a projectionist booth and occasionally grabbing beers with them at a local bar. She appears to be on the fast track to a life of security, comfort, and contentment. Read More

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Creed: With a Legend in His Corner, a Young Man Enters the Ring

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan in "Creed", a sequel to "Rocky"

The main character of Creed is an aspiring boxer striving to make a name for himself, and to evade the giant shadow cast by his father, a former legend of the sport. And Creed itself is on a similar mission. This movie, which was directed by Ryan Coogler from a script he co-wrote with Aaron Covington, is the sequel to Rocky, the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976 and one of the most beloved sports films of all time. (Technically, it’s the sixth such sequel, but let’s forget about those intervening installments for the moment.) That fact poses a monumental challenge for Creed: It must pay tribute to its predecessor while also standing as its own, fully realized creation. That it passes the first test is no great feat; as soon as Sylvester Stallone eases into the frame, shoulders sagging from the weight of playing the American icon that defined his career, the film instantly connects with its cinematic ancestor. What is more surprising—and more satisfying—is how Creed establishes itself as an enjoyable boxing movie in its own right. It doesn’t break much new ground, but it doesn’t need to. Like its hero, it relies on a combination of agility and determination to deliver a rousing experience that is simultaneously comforting and exhilarating.

As its title suggests, Creed is not primarily about Stallone’s Rocky Balboa, the Italian-American prizefighter who captured the hearts of Philadelphia (and the rest of the country) 39 years ago. Its protagonist is instead Donnie Johnson, played by Michael B. Jordan, the former television actor from The Wire and Friday Night Lights who finally broke out two years ago in Coogler’s earnest drama, Fruitvale Station. Donnie is a bright young man who works a desk job at an unspecified Los Angeles corporation, where he has just earned a promotion. Despite his relative success, his heart isn’t in finance, and he moonlights as a boxer in Tijuana, where he routinely pummels opponents at seedy underground rings. That’s where we first meet Donnie as an adult (the film begins with a quick prologue that illustrates his penchant for roughhousing as a child), the camera approaching him cautiously from behind, observing the muscles rippling down his back as he psychs himself up before delivering a brisk, savage beatdown of an unworthy foe. As soon as Donnie lands the knockout blow, he starts to remove his gloves before the fight is even called, a silent indicator of both his talent and his arrogance. Read More

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Brooklyn: Welcome to the United States. Now Start Your Life.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Saoirse Ronan, center, as an Irish immigrant in John Crowley's soaring "Brooklyn"

Brooklyn is a movie about an immigrant seeking a modest life on America’s rocky shores. In these tumultuous times, that alone makes it an interesting artifact. But while it is a thoroughly global production—it was directed by the Irishman John Crowley from a screenplay by the English writer Nick Hornby, adapting a book by Irish novelist Colm Toibin, and it is being distributed here by the American studio Fox Searchlight—it is not concerned with current political or social issues. In fact, it has little interest in contemporary complexities at all. On the contrary, Brooklyn—with its period setting, its classical warmth, its swooning simplicity—is proudly, almost brazenly old-fashioned.

That is a dangerous label to apply to a movie, one that suggests either snobbish nostalgia (“They don’t make ’em like they used to!”) or sneering modernism (“Old movies are so dated!”). But Brooklyn is neither a strained tribute to pictures of the past nor a wistful critique of the uncertainties of the present. It is instead its own creature: funny, tender, a little bit treacly, and entirely true. At its core, Brooklyn is about nothing more than a woman searching for happiness. Watching it, you will have no struggle finding the same. Read More

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