Month: December 2015

The Revenant is a masterpiece, American realism and naturalism in all its glory. Alejandro G. Inarritu delivers 19th-century trapper existence as manifest destiny and the will to live, and, along with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the most beautiful portrait of unspoiled wilderness and empowering depiction of American Indians to date. I would suggest to Anthony Lane (New Yorker) that Hugh Glass’s (DiCaprio) “moral monotone” is part of the film’s realism, and that Lane is looking for 21st-century laptop “personal growth” in 19th-century frontier stoicism. Of course, Glass permits the river to decide Fitzgerald’s (Hardy) fate, which could mark some change on Glass’s part. Manohla Dargis (New York Times) and David Edelstein (New York Magazine) mistakenly see the dream or hallucination sequences as Inarritu “blowing it” rather than what might come from a trapper’s suffering and survival. At no point does this film’s sublime realism lose itself to spiritualism or mysticism. It is more likely that these few mixed reviews succumb to the intentional fallacy.

It’s the anchoring element of a vast commercial program, painstakingly factory-made for maximal audience appeal, which means maximal inoffensiveness. The result tells us a lot about the state of entertainment today, and about the future of Hollywood.

Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times

But I cou’d not at the same Time carry these Things to the heighth that others did, knowing too, that natural Causes are assign’d by the Astronomers for such Things; and that their Motions, and even their Revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated; so that they cannot be so perfectly call’d the Fore-runners, or Fore­tellers, much less the procurers of such Events, as Pesti­lence, War, Fire, and the like.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year