David Upton on an unexpectedly early Oscar campaign kickoff - Editor
It’s only July, but this stuff starts earlier every year: barrels are loaded and sights are set on Oscar season. No one has started earlier than the team behind The Revenant. The recent buzzy Grantland piece on the film harks back to a kind of promotion that is somewhat out-of-fashion: long form, detailed reporting that really digs into what the movie might be. By sheer existence, the piece becomes part of the hype machine, now rolling towards the end of the year when The Revenant sees a release on 25th December.
This is prestige movie promotion at its most precise; why else, you might wonder, would anyone want to see a film that sounds so utterly depressing on Christmas Day?
The success of the film, both in terms of awards season and box-office, will likely rely on critical endorsement. After all, as Chris Connelly’s article puts it, this is “a long-in-gestation project that teams the Academy Awards’ reigning Best Director with the world’s most sought-after actor.”
The way the article frames the film is as a dangerous, difficult production that could just as easily end in folly as in gilded success; Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, not without his own help, is portrayed as a maverick auteur akin to Welles, Hitchcock, Cameron – men whose passionate drive to make something huge and/or different can frustrate those working with them. He’s painted as an outlier, a man apart from the cogs of Hollywood’s machines. “I was in a period of my life [where] I wanted to live a year in nature,” he says of the time he acquired the script.
And consider these hyperbolic words from Leonardo DiCaprio:
It’s really a unique film, and I don’t think it’s something people have ever seen before. [Iñárritu] pulls off some pretty astounding techniques. If you can have the audience submerge into a completely different reality, you’re accomplishing something pretty profound.”
Kim Masters’ article for The Hollywood Reporter on the same film, deals with something Connelly doesn’t engage with, the buzzing rumours of a “troubled production”. Iñárritu’s direct quotes here don’t exactly portray a director without an ego. “…as a director, if I identify a violin that is out of tune, I have to take that from the orchestra." Masters’ insiders place blame at the door of producer Jim Skotchdopole, reportedly banned from the set, for not combatting Iñárritu’s more outlandish follies. “You've got to let the director know: 'We can't do that. We have no money or time in the schedule.’” Iñárritu acknowledges his own problematic perfectionism: “It's about incredible precision. … It's not easy. You have to be sculpting, sculpting, sculpting until you have it.”
Both narratively and conceptually, The Revenant is about returning to a purity that the world has left behind. Iñárritu’s disdain for special effects – which crew believe would have eased the difficulties – recalls the vitriol Lindsay Duncan had for cinema in Birdman. “If we ended up in greenscreen with coffee and everybody having a good time, everybody will be happy, but most likely the film would be a piece of shit.”
No pain no gain, then (?), realism being essential. For Iñárritu, this authenticity is about removing the familiar cushion of modern life and understanding the true harshness of the world we’ve been building over. “There was something very positive about shooting in those conditions, to understand what those guys [from the 1820s] went through. […] Actors were not in sets with green screens and laughing. They were miserable! And they really feel the fucking cold in their ass! They were not acting at all!” You can see in this morbid humour the man who really wouldn’t find anything offensive at all in his friend Sean Penn’s contentious Oscar joke.
The Grantland piece is as interested in DiCaprio as it is Iñárritu. He is, after all, one of our few bonafide movie stars, and one chasing that elusive even more mythic 13½ inch golden man. Both actor and journalist are vocal about how unusual this part is for DiCaprio.
It was a different type of challenge for me, because I’ve played a lot of very vocal characters. It’s something that I really wanted to investigate — playing a character that says almost nothing. How do you relay an emotional journey and get in tune with this man’s angst … without words?”
Iñárritu is as effusive about Leo as the actor was about his director.
He’s not just an incredible actor, maybe the best I’ve ever worked with… the way he conveyed what’s going on inside — by his eyes, his physicality, the body language — I think he did an amazing job.”
And Connelly isn’t shy about what his piece is starting a conversation around.
For DiCaprio, now 40, The Revenant marks a new scale of sorts; it’s a performance that could make him part of the Oscar conversation once more.”
Both pieces end with quotes – Grantland’s from DiCaprio, THR’s from Iñárritu – that refer not to the film’s quality, but to its audaciousness.
"When you see the film, you will see the scale of it," promises Iñárritu. "And you will say, 'Wow.' "
“A lot of this stuff that you’re going to see in this movie is going to be incredibly memorable. That I can say for sure.”
And it is these statements that leave The Revenant as something of a double-edged sword for us. The trailer is an arresting experience that showcases the typically breathtaking cinematography of Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki, and combines the vital immediacy of Children of Men with the poetic natural fluency of The New World. As Connelly describes of the preview of the film he was privvy to:
What follows is bravura filmmaking of the Chivo/AGI school, plunging audiences into the scene’s mayhem, fear, panic, and rage with the sort of rhythm and swoop and drive that is both viscerally thrilling and keeps viewers aware of what they’re seeing at all times, as the routed trappers flee for their boat.”
This emphasis on immense grandeur makes you wonder if this is all there is in The Revenant, even in Lubezki’s cinematography. Has Iñárritu’s ego blinded him to making a film that people will actually want to see?
Iñárritu's nostalgic chatter about a past he can never have known is emblematic of the mournful myths of masculinity that a film like this seems explicitly designed to engage with. It's true that I write this from a site that favours ‘actressexuality’, so perhaps we're always going to be biased against this type of story, but when the only female character mentioned is a mother implicitly sidelined for a father-son story (a father-son story that Iñárritu invented to fill out Glass’ tale) The Revenant does not emerge from these early pieces as a film that even wants to engage with a vast cross section of moviegoers.