THE REVENANT

(Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, 2015)

The Revenant starts with a sudden, brutally violent attack upon a trapper camp by a war party of Arikara Indians in 1823. Arrows abruptly appear in throats, blood spurts, and all of a sudden a pitched battle of horrific violence and chaos is underway. Obviously inspired by his work on Birdman, Inarittu shoots all of this in what appears to be a single, awesome take, as the men fight, die and begin a panicked retreat towards their boat on the river, the Indians in pursuit.
Shot by the genius cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, this scene reminded me of nothing so much as the work of Terrence Malick. His masterful The New World, also shot by "Chivu" created an utterly immersive, 360 degree world upon the American Frontier, and Lubezki's camera patrolled it incessantly, as it does here. Only the world summoned up by Inarittu has a lot of Sam Peckinpah in it too - it is tough and masculine, filled with big and peculiar characters and terrible deaths, a sense of relish for the violence and suffering on screen.
This focus upon action is new for Inarittu. It is also quite refreshing. His earlier work was often weighed down by a pompous sense of seriousness, of a director with an undergraduate understanding of the world filled with conviction that he had important things to say. Babel is perhaps the nadir of his work, a trite and simplistic thesis on communication, interconnectedness and the modern world.
The Revenant too strains for seriousness, but it is taciturn film, entirely wordless for long stretches, and Inarittu reduced to images is a much more impressive director than the man who relied on vacuous screenplays to communicate his themes. On one level, this film is an absolutely incredible action film, with its plot concerning a man struggling to survive in an unbelievably harsh environment and his quest for revenge after he is left for dead, and watches his son murdered. Only Inarittu fills it with long, slow scenes glorying in his sensational landscapes, and sequences revealing the state of mind of his protagonist, Glass (Leo DiCaprio), as he is haunted by memories of a massacre in an Indian village, the death of his wife and his own actions to save his son.
The action scenes are outstanding: both that stunning early battle, a later pursuit across a plain, an extended and terrifying bear attack, and the final confrontation each contains a few genuinely jaw-dropping moments, and they help make this an entirely gripping experience, for all that its director has greater pretensions.
The ferociously committed performances are a great boon, too. DiCaprio does most of his work without dialogue, and still manages to convey his agony and fierce will to survive with just his face and body language. Tom Hardy, as the man who betrays him, unveils another funny voice and accent, but creates a weak, believably complex antagonist in his Fitzgerald.
The likes of Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson match them in smaller parts.
For all that, Lubezki is undeniably the film's true star; his work here is sensational, and this is truly an every-frame-a-painting movie. For all the effort that Inarittu devotes to creating a strong thematic content here - his suggestions that Tarkovsky as an influence say it all - this film is amazing. Powerful, beautiful and riveting, it is hard to shake off.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

(Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Blame Goodfellas. That more-or-less universally adored 1990 film was a comeback of sorts for Martin Scorsese, and it remains perhaps his most ostentatiously "directed" work; with its use of slow motion, freeze-frames and its reverse dolly zooms, it positively begs an audience to notice the hand of the filmmaker throughout. No wonder it's been so very influential (films from Blow to Boogie Nights to Mesrine and American Hustle all ape Goodfellas to various degrees) - it is one of those films that makes the director look like the main man.
That hadn't been quite the case prior to that in Scorsese's career. His films had always looked good, always featured dazzling sequences, showcasing his talent as a visual stylist, but never before had they been quite so joyously excessive. Since the huge critical and commercial success of Goodfellas, Scorsese revisits that style every couple of films and adapts it slightly for others. It has become his style, in effect. The shame of this is that it now seems self-parodic, or as one critic has put it, "Scor-cese" (as in journalese). A sort of hackneyed visual idiolect.
The Wolf of Wall Street is possibly the purest expression of that style imaginable.
A wicked, hilarious, epic black comedy following the rise and fall of Wall Street stockbroker turned fraudster Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the rambling, episodic storyline allows Scorsese to show us many of his tricks. The plot - filled as it is with an incredible amount of sequences of sex, drugs and general debauchery - allows for this, with the narrative asking that various altered states need to be interpreted somehow.
Like Goodfellas, it's largely told in flashback, narrated by a self-aware protagonist who actually talks directly to the audience, breaks off explaining things because they don't really matter, and generally glories in the twists and turns of his own story. That story is rich in supporting characters, most obviously embodied by Jonah Hill as Jordan's right-hand man, Donny, and Margot Robbie as his beautiful second wife, Naomi. As Jordan's activities become more lucrative and less legal, his habits swell until he is seemingly constantly enjoying either drugs or prostitutes (often both). Perhaps the standout sequence is a long quallude high which plays out like brilliant slapstick comedy.
This is probably Scorsese's funniest film. The silly debate over whether or not the director intends us to admire these people ignores the fact that they - and their babylonian excesses - are funny whether or not you admire them. That begins with Matthew McConaughey, whose cameo role as Jordan's mentor revolves around a standout sequence where he openly snorts coke over lunch in a restaurant, then begins a chest-beating anthem to Wall Street after revealing the secret con of the entire system to the younger man. Also hilarious is Rob Reiner as Jordan's father.
They are balanced somewhat by Kyle Chandler, somehow creating a layered individual out of an underwritten FBI agent who becomes Jordan's nemesis.
It is only with his arrival that the film really acquires a plot, as Jordan desperately seeks to cover his back and hide his money before the government catch up to him.
There are many dazzling scenes here - Scorsese is still a master, after all - but it is massively overlong, numbingly repetitive and strangely empty (which is perhaps the point, admittedly).
DiCaprio holds it together well, despite several of his co-stars walking away with their every scene, and  despite a seemingly random selection of tunes on the soundtrack (once a definite Scorsese specialty), this is genuinely, roundly entertaining throughout.
But from a master given this sort of canvas to work on, is that really enough?

DJANGO UNCHAINED

(Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Django Unchained seems, at least superficially, to be Quentin Tarantino's most conventional film. The Tarantino of the dazzling early work, all chronological shuffling, extended dialogue scenes and unusual frame compositions, has slowly faded away over the years and movies since. Here he crafts a somewhat predictable revenge Western, with all the familiar genre beats, shootouts and showdowns demanded by the genre.
And yet it is never quite so simple with Tarantino. For this is quite possibly the Tarantino film most loaded with meaning and subtext, its action-blockbuster status smuggling a ferociously angry assault on slavery and the way cinema has treated it into the world's multiplexes almost without warning.
Beyond that, he takes the stuff of cult cinema - Django Unchained is stuffed with references to Spaghetti Westerns which delighted this particular fan of that sub-genre - and somehow turns it into mainstream gold, combining them with allusions to the relatively few films made about slavery, a bit of Peckinpah, and twisting it all around his own distinctive story-telling sensibility.
The story is simple. Bounty Hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, plainly born to speak Tarantino dialogue) needs the help of slave Django (Jamie Foxx) in order to track down three outlaw brothers. He frees the slave and after they have collected the bounty they team up for a winter of wandering, hunting and killing. During this period, King teaches Django his trade and agrees to help him find and free his wife Brunhilda (Kerry Washington) who is now the property of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who lives a life of debauchery surrounded by a large court of cutthroats and sycophants on his immense plantation "Candieland" in Kentucky, enjoying Mandingo fights, having runaway slaves torn apart by dogs, and watched over all the while by his chief house servant Stephen (Samuel L Jackson, superb in the first real part he has had in far too long). When Django and King arrive at Candieland, they have a foolproof plan to emerge alive with Brunhilda. But Stephen misses nothing, and he has his own plans.
While undoubtedly around 40 minutes too long, Django Unchained is bloody, rambunctious entertainment throughout. If Tarantino needs to work with an editor or producer unafraid to tell him that certain sequences need to be cut, his writing and gift for crafting a brilliant scene are as matchless as ever.
He retains his extraordinary ability to create tension and then stretch a sequence beyond breaking point through simple conversation and orchestration of the visual elements and this is one genre that organically creates opportunities for him to do just that. Even the scenes that feel a little redundant - a debate between members of a hooded posse on the eyeholes in their hoods is the most glaring example - are frequently inspired; mixing comedy and tension in that effortless Tarantino manner.
If the film has a real weakness, it is an odd one. The hero and heroine both feel somewhat underwritten. Django himself has little personality beyond a truculent desire for revenge and his love for Brunhilda, and we spend so little time with her that she never comes into focus as anything other than an ideal. Indeed, this film has fewer strong female parts than any of Tarantino's other films, which can only partly be explained by the (traditionally intensely male) genre. The other male parts are more impressive - with Schultz and Stephen representing particularly nuanced characterisations.
The soundtrack is a fabulous collection of Spaghetti Western themes by the likes of Morricone, Bacalov and Ortolani, mixed with a few nicely-deployed hip hop tracks, and Robert Richardson, generally a bit of a one-trick pony (his tic is to massively overlight characters from above) makes it all look handsome in a gritty, aged, woodily textured way. Tarantino throws in a few early crash zooms precisely like the ones common in spaghettis, ensures that every gunshot injury gets a ludicrously bloody squib, and generally looks after the details even when the grand narrative drifts a little.
Despite its flaws then, Tarantino knows what he is doing, and he delivers laughs, a handful of terrific action sequences, and a strong love story, all of it based around a clear-eyed view of the horrors of slavery. Like most of his movies, Django Unchained works, and then some.