The Revenant
Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
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If you want to watch a film where the main characters end up holding hands and singing Kumbaya under a rainbow, you may want to avoid the movies of Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Even his most light-hearted film, Birdman, featured enough violence, quasi-rape, and mental breakdowns to truly earn the "dark" in its "dark comedy" moniker. The Revenant fits right alongside his other works: it's a brutal, showy, technical masterpiece that will make you want to take a shower afterwards, but it may not have as much going on under the hood as you might think from such an Oscar-hopeful production.
A group of frontiersmen in 1923, led by Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), explore the uncharted wilderness, among the dangerous environmental conditions and native people, around the Dakotas. Glass, after sustaining near-fatal injuries from a bear attack, is left for dead by his fellow explorer, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). The movie is basically Glass's unrelentingly painful, fueled-by-revenge trek across a wintery hell to track down and kill Fitzgerald. You couldn't make a simpler revenge plot, but it happens to be captured in the most beautiful way possible.
Emmanuel Lubezki will likely win his third Oscar in a row for cinematography - The Revenant is one of the best looking films I've ever seen. Similarly to Birdman, an emphasis on long takes is employed, making each of the action scenes - especially the Native American raid at the beginning of the film - feel both completely realistic and grounded, but also strangely haunting and calm at the same time. The camera moves deliberately and carefully through the forrest as axes swing into scalps, arrows shoot through necks, and guns blast away. It's difficult to describe, but it's simply unlike anything I've ever seen - the style almost reminds me of a first-person shooter video game, where there are no cinematic "cuts" during gameplay. Lubezki is also a master at shooting nature, as seen in his work with Terrence Malick, and similarly The Revenant truly captures the indifference and brutality of nature in a dazzling way.
If DiCaprio doesn't get the Oscar for this, I don't think he'll ever win. He literally drags himself through a frozen, grimy, violent hell, putting his body through torture just for our amusement. The aforementioned bear attack scene is disturbing and feels like the manifestation of that horrific audio tape that Werner Herzog told that woman to destroy in Grizzly Man. DiCaprio grunts and screams and claws his way through this film, and there's only so much you can "fake" - I mean, he had to have gone into a frozen lake, grab a fish and just start eating. And Tom Hardy was great as well, when you can understand what the hell he's saying (I swear, I've never seen Hardy in a role that was 100% intelligible). He has a real "Aguirre: Wrath of God" thing going on, and as Lloyd said to Harry in Dumb and Dumber: "you have that crazy look in your eye!" You can kind of see the survivalist gears turning in Fitzgerald's head as he leaves Glass for dead, but Hardy is great at bringing that "I've been out here too long" insanity level up just a hair.
So while I loved the mind-blowing camera work and the incredibly committed performances, the story ultimately left a lot to be desired, and after 2 hours of watching a grunting, half-dead DiCaprio caked under layers of mud and grizzled facial hair, you kind of hope there's more to it than a run-of-the-mill, Kill Bill-ian Western revenge flick. But as is, this is a must-see movie in the theater, if only for that first action sequence!
Rating: B
Carol
Dir. Todd Haynes
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It certainly must have sucked being a lesbian in the 1950's. The book upon which Carol is based, The Price of Salt, from suspense writer Patricia Highsmith, was written in 1952 and features a lesbian romance that actually ends up working out in the end, which was unprecedented at the time. While I haven't read the novel, just by virtue of the year in which it was published it's remarkable (though at the time Highsmith used a pseudonym to remain anonymous). However, in 2016, being a lesbian is a bit less scandalous. Maybe that's one of the reasons Todd Haynes' latest film didn't click with me that much, simply presenting a repressed lesbian couple on screen doesn't have the same impact as watching the subtle lesbian undercurrent in say, Hitchcock's Rebecca from 1940, because we're living in a post-Orange is the New Black world where it's not that big a deal.
Blanchett is predictably good as the titular Carol, an object of desire for both her frustrated husband (Kyle Chandler) and the doe-eyed, much younger Therese (Rooney Mara), who falls under Carol's spell while working at a toy store around Christmastime. The two have what is supposed to be a daring, steamy affair behind a veil of secrecy (in a McCarthy-era world where it was becoming harder to stay anonymous), but Mara's lack of personality sort of ruined the movie for me. I must be crazy, since the Tomatometer apparently doesn't lie, but I didn't think Blanchett and Mara had any chemistry whatsoever. Their ultimate "bed session" was like the exact opposite of Blue is the Warmest Color. Bland and passionless. I kind of feel about Rooney Mara the same way I feel about Arnold Schwarzenegger; neither are phenomenal actors, but when they have to play cold and distant/robotic characters (see: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Terminator, respectively), they're excellent. But in Carol, it's like watching an Academy-Award winning actress have a relationship with a Romero zombie.
While the film certainly doesn't lack an immersive 1950's feel (thanks to Edward Lachman's beautiful 16mm cinematography, and lush period costumes from Sandy Powell), and it isn't necessarily badly produced, Carol just didn't do it for me. I felt like I'd seen this story before (even Haynes' feature Far from Heaven had a much better 1950's taboo relationship), and I must have missed the subtle spark between the leading actresses that all the other critics have latched onto.
Rating: C
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Dir. Michael Bay
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Typically when a big-wig director takes a break from their major franchise pictures, they pick a smaller or more cerebral story, something of a passion-project that they can use their relative "power" in Hollywood to get made. Joss Whedon took a break from the Avengers to make a black and white Shakespeare adaptation, Christopher Nolan made Inception between Batmans, and now Michael Bay, the brainchild behind the brain-dead Transformers movies, took a small reprieve from giant, ugly metal dinosaur-riding robots to make 13 Hours, about the real life attacks on an American compound in Benghazi by Islamic militants. But instead of making some kind of introspective break from explosions, the film is pretty much still the mindless, spark-flying jingoistic dreck Bay's already force-fed us through four (and soon to be five) Transformers movies.
I don't understand why critics are giving this one a pass. Other than John Krasinski, who gives a solid performance as one of the soldiers holding ground, 13 Hours felt like it took 13 hours to sit through. The script and "characters" are terrible (all the soldiers can be summed up by the size of their sweaty biceps) and the action has no real rhythm to it. It's just a mass of explosions and lens flares hinging on a "true story" to justify their existence. There's really not much to say about this movie. It does absolutely no justice to the bravery of the soldiers, nor to the tension and horror of the situation (unlike Lone Survivor), and feels more like Bay being Bay.
Rating: D
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