It was comforting to see two typically niche directors in Tom McCarthy and Adam McKay break out with broader successes in 2015. Amidst murmurs of pending demise, the past year also provided American independent film a platform to showcase its enduring strength, with Tangerine, Carol, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 99 Homes and others powered by prescience and quality. And between I’ll See You in My Dreams, Grandma, 45 Years and The Lady in the Van – all worthy, and in a few cases quite excellent, films – the gendered ageism so pervasive in movies took a back seat as Blythe Danner, Lily Tomlin, Charlotte Rampling and Maggie Smith all thrived in career-capping roles.
But none of those stories defined the year in film. At the beginning of May 2015, I wrote a diatribe against Avengers: Age of Ultron – and I’ll admit, it was a little cranky. It wasn’t that the movie was god-awful or mind-numbing – though it was pretty awful, and plenty stupid – but that, with an enviable cast and crew behind it, the finished product felt distressingly mediocre. The film appeared content with its incoherencies, something I took as unfortunately representative of the state of blockbuster moviemaking.
A few weeks into that same month, however, Mad Max: Fury Road charted a very different path. In direct opposition to the clunky Ultron, George Miller’s franchise update was brilliantly simple and artistically daring. Even in its 1979 incarnation, Mad Max set itself apart, but its significance to the 2015 landscape was greater. Like Gravity of two years earlier, the film took big money and ran with it to create something singular and cinematic – a fairly remarkable proposition in the era of computer-generated spectacle and dialogue written for a dozen or so languages. It felt raw and pointed, beautiful and nightmarish – pure.
Even better, Mad Max didn’t turn out to be anomalous: to be artistically indifferent was far from a requisite for last year’s big-budget movies. In my review I called Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic The Martian, now a Best Picture nominee, “radically tame,” as it spanned countries and planets with life-and-death stakes, but invested most heavily in the inventive details of Andy Weir’s source novel and the light comedy of Matt Damon’s sturdy performance. Inside Out, churned out by the mega-studio Pixar and aimed at children, featured a level of emotional intelligence that was without comparison among the year’s formally “adult” dramas. Ryan Coogler’s Creed revitalized an American icon while cannily introducing a new one – and with no shortage of exhilarating action and genuine emotion along the way. The two mid-sized studio pics to enter the Oscar race this year were Bridge of Spies and The Big Short – the former classically exemplary, the latter unconscionably bold – and to close it out, J.J. Abrams’ resuscitation of Star Wars surprised with top-notch reviews, and more expectedly cleaned up at the box office. (It’s now the highest-grossing film of all time.) Indeed, despite the ever-widening financing gap between studio and indie film – and despite the noisy “TV is better!” crowd – American film proved itself to be alive and well in 2015.
I was late to see The Revenant, mainly because it’s the kind of divisive, large-scale movie that I prefer some distance from before watching and analyzing (as with Interstellar last year). And the wait paid off: viewing Alejandro G. Inarritu’s wilderness revenge tale, which was budgeted at over $100 million and featured two of the industry’s more bankable stars in Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, turned out to be a fitting cap to a year marked by artful, ambitious spectacle.
I’ll preface by saying that the film doesn’t quite work. Centered on Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), an experienced hunter left for dead on a fur expedition in 1823, The Revenant is loaded with frontier mythology and conventions of Western cinema. It’s a brutal, bloody and arduous meditation on the narrativization of survival that we see in history textbooks and Hollywood movies alike. Emmanuel Lubezki’s stark cinematography, invoking boundless wilderness as natural light creeps through rows of forest, works in tandem with Inarritu’s thematic goal: to honor the beauty of life and nature, and depict its abuses as perpetrated by our founders. Glass, who married a Native American woman and became quite fond of her culture, shows an appreciation for indigenous peoples and wild animals as those who abandoned him do not. In that regard, he plays audience surrogate.
As with Birdman, The Revenant simultaneously feels indulgent and exceptional, overwrought and original. Inarritu spends far too much time jumping around: he's persistently focused on the contrast between Glass and his rival (played by Tom Hardy), which merely stretches out the running time and drains out whatever drops of subtlety the film manages to produce. As he spares a brown-skinned woman from being raped by a white explorer, Glass also drifts into “white savior” territory; the film itself is either patronizing to or lauding of its Pawnee subjects, treating them as peripheral symbols rather than actual human beings. (Its combination of insidious racism and aesthetic brilliance recalls, of all movies, Dances with Wolves.) And its ending, despite a potent action sequence and a harrowing final image, is ideologically cheap, a soft bout of structural revisionism to conclude a work that is, ironically, condemning of historical revisionism.
And yet as those two paragraphs alone indicate, Inarritu provides much to mull over. The Revenant has plenty of meat on its bones – it’s also rich with cinematic homage and archetypal subversion – and, contrary to some unfair criticisms, it’s not restricted to substance-free visual finesse. In the vein of 12 Years of Slave, the film seeks to dismantle structured ways of thinking about our past by way of provoking thought about the eternality of violence and oppression. Unlike Steve McQueen’s recent masterpiece, The Revenant lacks formal concision and erudite commitment. But it’s still a stimulating product – at the very least, a fascinating failure.
Inarritu may be overrated – right now, he’s the pariah for unwarranted Oscar attention – but it’s hard not to admire his ambition. Years ago, the awards darling whom critics were decrying was Tom Hooper, director of the competent The King’s Speech, bombastic Les Miserables and, now, passionless The Danish Girl. His latest is a far less interesting failure than The Revenant, one that takes a transgender pioneer as its subject and neglects to say anything remotely fresh or complex about identity, sexuality or gender. (At times, he seems to confuse gender fluidity with Dissociative Identity Disorder.) The film feels less empathetic than sentimental, less tasteful than whitewashed, less groundbreaking than conspicuously ripped-from-the-headlines. With television programs like Transparent, Orange Is the New Black and even I Am Cait – oh, and remember Tangerine? – providing detailed depictions that confront established portrayals and ideas, The Danish Girl looks timid by comparison. It’s stuck without a reason to be.
I watched these two movies back-to-back, and was struck by my dramatic preference for – and the disproportionate amount of thought I dedicated to – The Revenant. The Danish Girl premiered in a year that also featured Stonewall and Freeheld – additional LGBT*-focused dramas that completely missed the mark – and, in combination with them, perhaps demonstrated the problematic limitations of such “issue”-oriented films. With same-sex marriage and transgender rights erupting as monumental topics in 2015, it was dispiriting to watch these films capitalize on the Zeitgeist with trivial illustrations of such thorny issues. The Revenant, conversely, fit nicely within a slate of films that were made for a lot of money and with a lot on the mind – a collective affirmation that those two traits needn’t be mutually exclusive.
The low-budget social drama encourages a healthy allocation of deliberation time, but to end 2015 I found myself looking towards the blockbuster for intellectual relief. And for a year that included Inside Out, Creed and the glorious Fury Road, such a shift felt just right.