2015 in review: the revenant

(dir: Alejandro Inarritu) My favorite Malick film since the New World, only stuff happens and there's actual dialogue! All the elements are carefully, lovingly handled. Ryuichi Sakamoto got robbed, Oscar-wise: music so good you don't even notice it until the end, when you realize how it's been gently altering your mood throughout. Critics point to Inarritu's clumsy dialogue and metaphors (DiCaprio's wounded mountain man takes refuge in a horse carcass and emerges from this steaming womb newly healed), but the grandeur of the thing, the vastness and quiet and sheer hard work of it, it's all magnificent on the big screen.

Ye gods, what a breath-taking experience this is. Once, while two opponents are squaring off for their final battle, a wonderful flooding of sunlight falls through a ravine in the distance behind them. Another time, the characters pause to watch a flaming meteorite tumble to earth behind the horizon, or, again, to watch an avalanche triggered by gunfire rearrange a mountain face. Clumsy as the story-points might have been in lesser hands, you can let a lot of things slide when it's this awesome to behold.

It's an old-fashioned vengeance narrative, and so comes complete with a long and distinguished pedigree. Does it qualify as pain-porn, which Emmanuel Lubezki makes palatable with the magnificence of his cinematography? Maybe. Does it fail the Bechdel Test? Miserably, having only two speaking women in it, both surrounded only by men; they are both named, but we watch one raped and the other killed. Does that mean it should be avoided? No, absolutely, no.

IN SUMMARY: See it on the big screen if you can. It feels like 3-D even without the technology. The world feels real; you'll have dreams about it later.