The Revenant

THE REVENANT   **1/2

Alejandro González Iñárritu

2015

IDEA:  19th century fur-trapper Hugh Glass seeks revenge against the aggrieved expedition mate who left him for dead.

BLURB:  The Revenant is quite something as you’re watching it. Visually imposing, immersive, brimming with tactile details and visceral drama, it plunges you headfirst into a vivid 19th century American frontier. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera keeps us unnervingly tied to every step and breath of the protagonists as they weather the merciless elements and contend with their own brutal human natures. Employing long, continuous mobile takes and low angles to place us at a ground level, practically first person perspective, Lubezki continues his run of virtuoso choreography and establishes himself as a legitimate auteur with his own completely identifiable visual language. The filmmaking craft on display is so formidable across the table, from the enveloping sound design to meticulously recreated and lived-in sets, and so engaging as a full-bodied transportation system to another time and place, one may shrug off the most suspect features of the film’s narrative and politics while soaking up the atmosphere. It becomes increasingly difficult, however, to swallow Iñárritu’s ham-fisted metaphors and frequently overblown gestures, his insistence on his film’s Importance as a reckoning with America’s violent legacy. One is apt to question why a film that acknowledges and condemns such a legacy still concerns itself with the heroic journey of a white man, who is literally guided and emboldened by the ghost of his beatific Native American girlfriend. By emphasizing his superhuman resilience, strength, and courage, Iñárritu exalts him above all else. Come the frankly groan-worthy ending, The Revenant has been a thrilling, often awe-inspiring sensory experience and a dubiously inflated tribute to its protagonist’s – and its makers’ – prowess.

The Hateful Eight

THE HATEFUL EIGHT   **

Quentin Tarantino

2015

IDEA:  Wyoming shortly after the Civil War. Eight disparate individuals on the way to Red Rock are cooped up in a cabin stopover during a blizzard, suspicions growing as nobody seems to be quite who they say they are. 

BLURB:  Tarantino seems to be regressing. As his films have grown more grandiose in subject matter and theme, they have also become increasingly bloated and overwrought, not to mention juvenile and cruel. For a while, The Hateful Eight appears to be building toward something better as it carefully sets up its chamber piece scenario, corralling its diverse characters and generating tension from the distrust, animosity, and guarded motives they harbor. Ennio Morricone’s dread-inducing score pounds away with their every cautious forward movement, signaling that the film belongs as much to the horror genre as it does the western, and that a collective release of malice is surely yet to come. And come it does, resulting in queasily bountiful sprays of blood and bodies piling up. It’s sooner rather than later that the narrative and its intrigues fall apart, the reveal of the story’s true course as unimaginative and ultimately predictable as the bloodlust that seems more than ever to be the main goal. Tarantino has always enjoyed setting up overripe scenes and letting them unfurl before a burst of violent mayhem, but rarely has the aftermath felt so gruesome for gruesome’s sake, brutality so punishingly acrid that any trace of humanity has been all but extinguished from his sordid game. Although he positions his viper’s nest of racism and rancor as a microcosm of volatile post-Civil War America, and by extension of an enduringly fraught sociopolitical climate, any serious indictment of violence the movie may offer is quickly erased by how much glee the director derives from the cruelty he engineers. Cloaking his three-hour schlock under the pretense of contemporarily resonant historical drama isn’t only self-aggrandizing, but highly dubious.

The Good Dinosaur

THE GOOD DINOSAUR   ***

Peter Sohn

2015

IDEA:  Dinosaurs continue to roam the earth after the asteroid intended to extinguish them passes by. In this alternate reality, a young, estranged Apatosaurus named Arlo befriends an orphaned human boy.

BLURB:  It seems entirely paradoxical, but The Good Dinosaur may very well be Pixar’s most formulaic film to date as well as its most unusual. For a studio renowned for its inventiveness and expansive imagination, it is unusual, firstly, because it feels so formulaic. Discarding a bounty of unique storytelling possibilities inherent in its intriguing premise, the studio ends up with a derivative journey-back-home narrative centered on orphans, interspecies friendship, and familiar themes of family and overcoming fear. Most unusual, though, is not the fact of this slim and uninspired narrative but what is foregrounded in its stead. The Good Dinosaur represents perhaps the first time Pixar has shifted its primary focus from story or even character and placed it on purely perceptual principles, drawing our attention to the meticulous optics of texture, light, and movement. Mountains, water, rocks, dirt, foliage, and various animal flesh are rendered with jaw-dropping, hyperreal tactility, becoming the film’s true content. They are observed with a reverence for the natural world seldom seen in mainstream Western animation. Even rarer is the film’s violent physicality, its lifelike sense of the effects of environment on bodies and its bizarre, at times comical fascination with somatic trauma. Where so much CG animation feels plastic and weightless, Pixar’s film is remarkable for how much it invests in corporeality and tangible physical expression, a gift for conveying through image that extends to the beautifully wrought central relationship. On one hand, The Good Dinosaur is a disappointingly undercooked piece of storytelling. On the other, it has freed up the technologically and artistically superior studio to indulge in its most lyrical work yet.

Cemetery of Splendor

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR   ***1/2

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2015

IDEA:  A woman volunteers to assist comatose soldiers, who are being treated in a makeshift hospital that sits atop an ancient cemetery. As she spends time with them and a young female medium who also works there, she begins to have perceptions of other times and places.

BLURB:  In Cemetery of Splendor, a woman is taught how to literally open her eyes as wide as possible so she can be sure she is awake. A similar encouragement of mindfulness is extended to the spectator, whose senses are simultaneously sharpened and soothed by the magnificent flow of images Apichatpong has assembled. Intermingling past, present, tradition, modernity, lucidity, dream, and all manner of consciousness in between, he creates a vital space in which various temporal and otherworldly realms seamlessly blend, inviting us to experience them all at once. His mastery is in letting them coexist so organically; no visual or aural signposts are necessary to convey the concurrence of all that is visible and invisible within this space. Even if it is nebulous there is always the sense that we can access its levels, which means that the obfuscation of other Apichatpong films has been stripped away in favor of a concentrated, cohesive, and emotionally direct approach to spiritual worlds. As his lead character, played by the serene Jenjira Pongpas, finds her perception enriched, so do we, through the transcendent language of film. And by positing the cinema as one of our most profound states of perception in its mesmerizing centerpiece sequence, Cemetery of Splendor rebukes political oppression by reinforcing the status of film as impregnable, a legitimate spiritual realm through which release from physical prohibitions is not only possible, but miraculously unavoidable.

Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS   ***

Danny Boyle

2015

IDEA:  A look at Apple pioneer Steve Jobs through the prism of three of his product launches in 1984, 1988, and 1998.

BLURB:  There is an overdetermined, showboating quality to Steve Jobs that feels both excessive and befitting the story of a self-anointed deity-cum-corporate giant who hawked his product like it was the Second Coming, even when it had not an ounce of consumer utility. That is to say, the film is as frustrating for its overcooked dramaturgy as it is compelling for its depiction, and perhaps occasional embodiment of, megalomania. It is not Boyle who indulges here: the typically flashy director seems to have handed the reins over almost wholesale to Aaron Sorkin, who splurges on his patented rapid-fire dialogue with its endless shouting matches, recriminations, and metaphors. Oh, the metaphors. Sorkin’s tendency to underline theme by having characters analogize is at its most unrestrained here, resulting in contrivances and heavy-handed attempts at imposing meaning. And yet, his script revolves around an idea that cuts through some of the pomposity: that Jobs, wounded by rejection and human fallibility and gripped by a need for control, sought to create an inviolate technology that would be better than us. It’s a poignant concept Sorkin – and a scorchingly possessed Michael Fassbender – play to complicated effect. They manage to maintain an ambivalence about Jobs that makes us question why and how we vaunt individuals, and what it is about them that drives our culture into the future.

Sicario

SICARIO   **

Denis Villeneuve

2015

IDEA:  An FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to help target the head of a major Mexican drug cartel.

BLURB:  As our entry point into Sicario’s world of abject moral chaos, Emily Blunt is a dramatically convincing audience surrogate. Her visceral confoundment and revulsion at the immoral tactics being employed around her, by both her own governmental team and its gangland opposition, is potent, and is shared in every way by the spectator. This conception of real-life morass turned personal nightmare is Villeneuve’s most effective strategy: unfortunately, it is not nearly enough to compensate for his film’s narrative and ideological deficits, which run deep through a clunky, hackneyed script. Content to rehash a boilerplate formula without added nuance, the film goes through the prosaic motions of a morally ambivalent 21st century political thriller, concluding with redundancy that the supposed good guys are just as corrupt as the criminals, and violence begets violence, and nobody wins. Its indictment of US exceptionalism and the untenable suspension of ethical standards in the pursuit of a goal might hit harder if any of the characters actually felt like dimensional human beings, or if Emily Blunt, so emotionally bared, didn’t exist in the story just so that she could finally be put in her place by imperious men. Sicario may have damning words for those men and for the terror they’re so ready to breed, but instead of disempowering them it resigns itself, unimaginatively, to their bankrupt reality.

Mistress America

MISTRESS AMERICA   ***1/2

Noah Baumbach

2015

IDEA:  An introverted college freshman reluctantly meets up with her gregarious, soon-to-be stepsister, and instantly becomes enamored of her boldly enterprising lifestyle.

BLURB:  Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s latest and most jocular tag-along with floundering millenials, a vibrant snapshot of young middle-class ambition stoked and arrested by uncertain creative potential. Baumbach punches up the pacing and dialogue to veritably screwball-level speeds, but he never lets the relative weight of his themes get compromised. On the contrary, his characters’ blithe patter keeps underlining what they lack, and his zaniest, most manic scenes, including a marvelously sustained romp at a wealthy designer’s mansion, are often the ones that chip away at their delusions best. The script, co-written by Gerwig, is loaded with witty, pithy quotes that manage to sound profoundly real and archly theatrical at the same time, the latter effect self-reflexively used to play up the performative aspect of social behavior. Instead of sounding like writerly back-patting, they constellate into rich profiles of the identities constantly being cultivated and negotiated by the film’s rudderless young adults. Baumbach’s commitment to sincerely evaluating their foibles, anxieties, and misgivings through shimmering comedy that neither trivializes nor glorifies is beguiling. It’s what makes Mistress America, in many ways thematically familiar but in others a mature expansion of familiar themes, a disarmingly valuable delight.