Before I saw The Revenant, I thought the year’s oscar-winning best picture should be Spotlight or The Big Short, both serious, well-executed films about the large-scale misuse of power. I couldn’t really compare them: the damage done to children is unquantifiable, and the damage done to the economy by the greed-induced housing bubble is enormous. Everyone should see both movies.
I now suspect that The Revenant has the inside track to an oscar because it’s still another satisfying rendition of the myth of America. Like John Ford’s classic The Searchers, it shows the perseverance of our culture (read:white) to survive and triumph. Our technology was stronger than the weapons Native Americans opposed us with, but more than that, there’s a long literary and movie history showing whites to be superior to Native Americans, even on their terms. When Hugh Glass is left to die in the wilderness, he is stripped of everything that might aid him, yet he manages to survive in spite of it. Like Fenimore Cooper’s frontiersman, Natty Bumppo, he can do what a Native American can do, only better. The Arikaras are hunting an abducted woman, but it is Glass who finds her and rescues her from a band of French trappers.
The beautiful wilderness vistas in the film weren’t shot in US territory, however. We’ve destroyed too much of that pristine land to accommodate the filming of The Revenant, and, as I write, a ragtag group of heavily-armed malcontents is occupying a federal bird sanctuary to complain that the government hasn’t turned over enough land to ranchers. So the American wilderness scenes were shot in Argentina and Canada, and the director who has given us a powerful version of the American myth is Mexican.
People believe what they want to believe and ignore inconvenient truths like pedophilic priests sheltered by their institution and greedy bankers defrauding the American public. Definitely not “feel good.” For me, the most heartrending moment of The Big Short was seeing the man who had paid his rent but was the victim of a landlord who hadn’t paid his mortgage and probably didn’t deserve to have been given a mortgage in the first place. But on an intellectual level, the knowledge that the ratings agencies were in bed with the banks was just as bad. Standard and Poor, which at one time I might have thoughtlessly thought of as the gold standard of accrediting bonds! Who can you trust? maybe Ghostbusters.
- Spotlight and The Big Short are about our own time and place, and the events they represent happened more or less as seen on the screen. The Revenant, instead, taps into the desire of many Americans to see our history as exemplifying something great. The violence was productive, and against all odds, Glass survived to confront his betrayer and show himself to be able to transcend the desire for revenge. A Pawnee he linked up with briefly during his odyssey said that he would leave vengeance to the Creator. Glass remembers this when he has a chance to kill the man who killed his son and abandoned him. In reality, he was thwarted in his desire to kill the villain by the U.S. Army. Myth is history as we as a people would like it to be, making a satisfying kind of sense and validating the past. In this feel good way, The Revenant has it all over Spotlight and The Big Short, although, taking a longer view, we might see that its story paved the way for their stories.