(Pt II. Critics and the “masculinity” question.) 

What’s intriguing is that Kate and I formed such similar ideas about The Revenant having studied in the same film class. Time can’t be undone, so there’s no way of saying for sure whether we would have come to the same conclusions in second year, separately, not knowing one another and not having studied under the same film aesthetics tutor. Our correlated responses prove that intersubjectivity is always held ransom, at least a little, by previous experience. In that George St. Odeon cinema auditorium, we were like everyone else: we wanted to know whether Leonardo Di Caprio had a shot at winning his first Oscar, and were interested in seeing whether Iñárritu lived up to his. We were also avatars of our own complex past engagement with ways of seeing and responding to cinema, some of those “natural”, others accessible only because we had been disciplined or “schooled” to process cinematic information in a certain way.

But what Kate and I certainly weren’t in that auditorium, were “women”. At least, not the kind of women whom notable film critic Jeffrey Wells tried to warn off seeing the film back in November. Following a pre-release screening, Wells observed the reluctant reactions of a few of his female colleagues towards the film, and extrapolated from this some advice for a whole gender. To somewhat paraphrase: stay away, ladies — The Revenant is not for your delicate constitutions. 

Hmm. If Kate and I (and, more prestigiously, writers like Manohla Dargis) are an indication of anything, it’s that women can sit through onscreen violence of The Revenant‘s scope and scale, and come out of it fairly unscarred, perfectly capable of forming an opinion on the film which hasn’t been wholly disturbed out of our systems by bearing witness to the repeated ravaging of Leonardo Di Caprio’s body by metal, claw, and weather. While I didn’t necessary like the repeated animal slaughter — while, indeed, I felt uncomfortable — I’m not sure that was a discomfort I felt only because I’m female; or that such discomfort, if it is indeed supposed to be felt by everyone, should only be felt by men. 

While I think Wells probably meant relatively little harm by his comments (and indeed there may even have been an element of misapplied chivalry in them), he did end up inciting plenty of furore amongst certain online communities. Clunky arguments in poorly-delivered prose help no white man in a position of authority; not on the internet, at least. I’m less interested in dismantling Wells’s position with feminist rhetoric — it’s easily doable, but for more talented feminist writers than I — than I am in observing a trend in film criticism more generally: recently, while the idea of “women’s cinema” has faded away from critical perspective, the notion that there is such thing as a “men’s cinema” (and that, somehow, it alienates the female viewer) has witnessed something of a renaissance. 

Kyle Smith’s hapless retrospective ‘Women are not capable of understanding “GoodFellas”‘ (New York Post, June 2015) was just as incendiary as Wells’s. It managed to confuse the inability of women within the fictional world of the movie to sufficiently access the wise-guys’ inner circle, with the inability of all women everywhere to “get” Martin Scorsese’s seminal film. In his piece, it’s as though women both real and imagined are the same species, and neither have idea of the toxic internal stratification that arises within a pack (I can’t tell if he’s just never watched Mean Girls). For Smith, it’s as though subjectivity’s limits build their most impenetrable walls out of the hegemony of masculine experience. Men apparently know the goodfellas’ particular branch of camaraderie — presumably they also know the psychopathic bloodlust of Joe Pesci’s character Tommy or the neurotic greed of Robert de Niro’s Jimmy as well, and have all experienced the cocaine-fuelled paranoia of Ray Liotta’s Henry following a botched heist and a murder spree. Oh, and Smith bases the thesis of his article on a declaration made by a single girlfriend in the early nineties (her expansive verdict: “boy film”). 

The poor prose quality and problematic reductivism of Smith’s article aside, what’s fascinating is how these professional film writers — both men — have internalised the concept of “masculine cinema”, and to what ends the definition of that has been skewed and manipulated to suit a semi-conscious purpose it was never really designed for. Because men’s cinema is not something they’ve conjured from thin air or subliminal misogyny: no, it’s legitimate critical terminology. When critics like O’Connell describe The Revenant as “masculine” they aren’t doing it simply to preserve the movie as a plaything for a worldwide fraternity; they’re tapping into a deeper comprehension of the implications that gendered language has for cinematic style. 

Stella Bruzzi’s brilliant academic book, Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-Scene in Hollywood navigates its way through a nuanced reading of major blockbusters like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and asserts that it’s not so much themes as aesthetics which shade subconscious coding of what makes movies “manly”. In a complex interaction of camerawork, positioning of the character within the composition of the frame, minute sequencing and broader editing, “men’s films”, Bruzzi suggests, rely on an a complex cinematic configuration of stylistic elements which “evoke” masculinity rather than simply “represent” it. So in The Revenant, when we talk about men’s cinema, we don’t just mean that it features two burly leads (Leonardo Di Caprio, Tom Hardy) grunting and fighting it out (vaguely homo-erotically) to the death on the mountainside. We mean that there is a complexity of cinematic behaviours which play with gender mythologies by intersecting semi-identification with the protagonist with a visual and sensory distance from them; it’s subtle, and barely registers in the general audience consciousness, but it’s potent enough to let Glass (Di Caprio) transcend the ordinary and become our “star”. Men’s cinema, at its most basic level, gives us our heroes by showing us men who are recognisable yet strange, near yet far.

Obviously, this is no major interrogation of The Revenant‘s masculine aesthetic; that requires a book of its own, and after being so blown away by the film, I look forward to seeing one written. But that Bruzzi is a woman doesn’t prevent her from pioneering such a credible theory of screen masculinity. So why, in more general discourse — say, in articles written for newspapers, magazines, or on the internet — does “men’s cinema” seem to translate, not as something up for women to assess and debate and examine, but as something which simply excludes them from the conversation? 

It’s not a stretch to see a relationship between this culture of male critics chirpily telling women there are films which are simply not meant for them, and the exclusionary climate of the critical profession at large. In The Atlantic, an article was recently published called “Why Are So Few Film Critics Female?”, investigating how a profession once propped up by women as industrious and prolific as Pauline Kael and C.A. Lejeune has now diminished their presence to a mere twenty percent of bylines. One of the possible reasons for this, posited by article journalist Katie Kilkenny, is that the machismo culture of Hollywood has so inflated in recent decades, it has generated a response dialogue which beckons men’s opinions more than it does women’s; the other is that reluctance to employ women on the part of big publications has generated in direct correlation with the increased recognition of film journalism as a legitimate, and even prestigious, kind of cultural commentary. I will add that while “machismo Hollywood” is a shorthand term for the male dominated industry, “men’s cinema” and its affiliated terms have seemingly become a way to preserve certain movies for a critical boys’ club. This totally misunderstands the phrase. It’s supposed to simply present a mode of filmmaking which is up for analysis; it’s not supposed to serve as a rulebook for who can and cannot interact with a movie. 

It’s ironic that even as we observe feminised terms like “chick flick” dropping out into obscurity when movies are reviewed — surely for the better — those kinds of films which, a decade or so ago, would have warranted that phrase, can be reviewed by a whole host of male critics who are hardly ever told they don’t “get” a movie because of their gender; and even if they are, it’s is hardly symptomatic of a wider mistrust which ousts them from the profession. Men with a skilful eye and a talent for words can remind us why film criticism is great. Critics like Roger Ebert have given the world glorious insights into movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral or Bridget Jones. Can the same not be said for women who want to write critically about Die Hard? 

Yes, not every woman will enjoy movies like The Revenant or GoodFellas, and some will write their complaints pretty stridently, a la Cadwalladr, or Emma Brockes (who concurred somewhat with Smith, and derided the violence of movies starring Robert de Niro and Al Pacino in another Guardian article this year); but nor will some men, and there is little sense in advising women out of the auditorium before a film has even had a mainstream premiere — how do we raise a new generation of Pauline Kaels if we’re always setting up perimeters around certain films? It only compounds the pressure on women to define their response to a movie in relation to their perceived alienness when that movie is repeatedly tagged as “masculine”. Or, more precisely, too masculine for them to engage with “correctly”, as if subjective cinematic response is overridden by the homogenising effects of bi-polarised gender constructs.

It’s as though there is some uncrossable threshold for women which dispossess them of a necessary ability to identify with certain characters in in certain films the “right way”. And this is hardly fair, since women have already proven they “get” film criticism — before male critics accorded the medium its current prestige, they were the ones who recognised its magical potential in the first place.

 â˜…★★☆☆

Three Stars

Creed tells the story of Adonis ‘Donnie’ Johnson, the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, who fans of the Rocky series know as Rocky Balboa’s rival-cum-friend. Adonis is saved from juvenile prison by Apollo’s wife and given a life of luxury to help him avoid his father’s fate in the boxing ring. However, he feels called to the ring and tries to make a name of his own under his Mother’s surname. Donnie’s fate eventually catches up with him, as his genealogy is discovered and he earns a prize fight with Liverpudlian Ricky Conlan. His love interest Bianca finally convinces his to embrace his legacy: “Use the name. It’s yours.” Actor Michael B. Jordan certainly knows what it is like to try to make a career burdened with a famous name- as his conspicuous middle initial affirms.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly Sylvester Stallone, who reprises his most famous role as an aging and lonely Rocky Balboa. Michael B. Jordan and his Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler managed to convince Stallone to reprise his role which most people thought the unrealistic 2006 reboot Rocky Balboa had put to bed. Rather than make the 70-year old fight, Coogler sensibly puts him in Donnie’s coaching corner. Balboa is a pitiable character who knows a lot about death, and the action star’s genuine pathos leaves audiences unsure whether to cry or giggle cynically. The Academy are keen to relive memories of Rocky’s ‘million-to-one’ Best Picture win in 1977 and hand Stallone Best Supporting Actor this year; but this would be a disservice to the brilliant Mark Rylance.

The fight scenes are some of the most realistic on screen. The Rocky series has come a long way since the ropes obscured the view of the fight in the original. Coogler brings the camera inside the ring and holds long shots of realistic boxing. This realism is furthered by the fact that no stunt doubles were use and Donnie’s opponent is played by boxer (and genuine Everton fan) Tony Bellew.

However, the melodrama and hype sometimes spills over into absurdity. The use of Goodison Park as an arena and omnipresent Everton FC crests is slightly jarring in a Hollywood boxing film. Also, the training montage showing Donnie supported by a quadbike gang ends up looking more like Mad Max: Fury Road than Tyson Fury.

It’s fitting that Creed was released around the same time as Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Both are the 7th films in series that began in the late 1970s and subsequently went wayward. Both straddle the awkward line between reboot and sequel. And both somehow managed to pull it off.

(Pt I. The Revenant and affective response.) 

It can occasionally be amusing to witness the tempests storming through movie criticism. After all, when it comes down to it, the relationship between reviews and the effect they have on cinema audiences is a contentiously multidimensional thing: while plenty of audience members internalise professional critics’ opinions prior to watching a movie, others are just as happy to take what they’ve read at face value, and actively pursue their own independent ideas instead. And, of course, great swathes of cinema ticket buyers simply don’t read the press verdicts at all.

Still, culture operates in a predominantly digital orbit these days, and the internet is always clattering with proffered polemics, with everyone who has access to a keyboard vying for the elusive accolade of Definitive Opinion On This Movie. At the moment, anticipating the Academy Awards, it’s all about The Revenant. Hyped films court hyperbolic language; and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest Oscar contender provokes exaggeration in spades. That’s not only true of the amateur bloggers – the professionals are just as guilty of overenthusiasm. It’s “a gruelling, exquisite, mystical odyssey of survival” (Nick de Semlyen, Empire) with “an anchoring performance of ferocious 200% commitment from Leonardo DiCaprio” (Justin Chang, Variety); it is “punishing, visceral, masculine, grisly and utterly captivating” (Sean O’Connell, Cinemablend). And, perhaps in the most admiring review of all, it is “primal; it is the lethal force of a wild animal, the savagery of man against man, the sustaining power of revenge…” Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, I salute you. That’s some crystal prose. 

Mind you, it isn’t all heaps of praise. Carole Cadwalladr, writing for The Guardian, rebuked that newspaper’s own chief film critic Peter Bradshaw for his ardent response and called The Revenant tantamount to “revenge porn”. (She is also of the opinion that the movie will probably influence ISIS — who, after all, are always very influenced by the Oscars — and who may soon abandon other forms of covert warfare, and instead begin to commit Terrorism By Bear.) 

If, like me, you eat up movie reviews the way some people devour Heat magazine, then you too may have started to form your own opinions on The Revenant by situating them in relation to the thoughts found in the big publications. Personally, I agree mostly with Manohla Dargis, of the New York Times, but that said it’s usually hard not to be persuaded by Dargis: her style is alchemically seductive (“It’s that kind of movie, with that kind of visual splendour — it spurs you to match its industrious poeticism”; who else can write like that, matching their words perfectly to the tone of the movie itself?)

Still, I watched the movie before I read her article, with Kate, a friend whom I met on a film criticism course, and we formed our views independent of her influence. We both concluded that we were struck by how The Revenant‘s visceral, multi-sensory aesthetics focused on the extremes which could manipulate the human form, and how in doing so, it provoked actual bodily responses from the audience. Our walk home was filled with an excited unknotting of our own responses. We liked that the plot was simple, stripped down; we liked that it had an uncomplicated linear narrative borrowed from the controversial revenge genre which enjoyed as great a surge of interest in the 1970s as it did in the Jacobean period. So many movies these days are convoluted in their aspirations towards complexity. We thought that the simplicity of the plot — while vicious, while bloody, while gory — was a strength, not a weakness. Unlike Cadwalladr, we didn’t see the film as an endorsement of terrorism so much as an artisan interrogation of how the human can become unharnessed from the civil by terrain, and how man can subsequently be returned to, in fact reborn into, the animal. Plot feels practically inessential to what this movie tries and manages to achieve, we said.

But most excitingly: watch The Revenant in the cinema auditorium, we both remarked, and you enter an immersive semi-simulation. You may not feel the “exact” physical responses of the characters to the violent stimulus of their stark world — the laws of fiction make that impossible — but your own body coordinates its responses to the bodies on screen. Or, in other words: what hurts Leo, kind of also hurts the rest of us. 

When Glass (Leonardo Di Caprio) lurches into supine formation under attack, bear’s claws raking down the flesh of his back, record the behaviour of your muscles. Feel your sinews tauten, your stomach flip; feel your body’s knee-jerk reaction as it grapples to find a way of mimicking the pain. Later, when Glass navigates the sublimely brutal landscape and surmounts the perimeters of human physical ability — not to mention tears his teeth hungrily into raw, steaming bison’s innards — his transformation into grisly isn’t just observable allegory: it’s a real, raw physical metamorphosis, and one which we (supported and led by soundtrack choices, deft camerawork, and a digital cinematographic commitment to stunning detail) partially experience by proxy. 

From an affective perspective, the movie feels like it rides more closely to “audience participation” than most blockbusters have ever previously managed. And perhaps that’s the film’s greatest achievement, even if we can never be sure it’s Iñárritu’s singular obsession. Would the film rather be an ode to surreal religiosity, or a stunningly visual portrait of how men compete violently for territory? Who knows. Who cares? The implied “politics” of the film (so derided by Cadwalladr, who is of course perfectly entitled to write an opinion piece in whichever way she sees fit) and the narrative of the piece (not precisely commended by David Edelstein at Vulture, who ultimately called it “pain without gain”) seem secondary to its engagement with its own temporal, spatial presentness. It feels like an exploration how the human body engages, transforms and physicalises in order to become its own weapon against the elements. It feels like tactile cinema; it feels like cinema about cinematic experience. 

Crunch, splodge, rip, boom, crack: these violent, painful, symptomatic sounds are the very poetry which Dargis observes, and that poetry is realised in a kind of breathtakingly fresh cinematic onomatopoeia (if you’ll forgive the GCSE English terminology). The blood, the guts, the gore — are they beautiful, in their own weird, twisted, faux naturalistic way? Absurdly — yes. It’s not “pretty” beauty, exactly. Just the beauty of a kind of sensual, obliterating immersion. The Revenant is a movie that seems to want to close the gap between the aestheticised world of the screen and the viewer on the other side of it. It does that by being sensuous, by being physical, by canvassing a new landscape. And general film criticism itself has yet to invent modes of assessment which are adequate to exploring that kind of thing, because the practice has always valued retrospective analysis over present reaction. The Revenant asks: forget what cinema makes us think, for once — what is cinema making us feel?

★★★★☆

Four stars

When you come out of a screening of Room, it is hard not to feel dazed. Everyone feels just a little too close. Walking down the street away from the cinema, I was almost overwhelmed with a disconcerting haze of claustrophobia. I imagine that this is the complete opposite kind of dazedness to what Jack, the 5-year old protagonist of Room, faces upon his first foray into the outside world at the film’s halfway point. The foray marks a shift in the film, in that it finally departs from the eponymous 10×10 shed which forms, exclusively, the setting of the film’s first half. It is a testament to the effectiveness of this first half that one is still feeling its consequences by the end of the film. 

During this first half, Lenny Abrahamson creates a whole world within a tiny space. A clever use of focal lengths and framing ensures that the prison-shed can at times feel surprisingly expansive. Abrahamson knows when and how to direct our attention away from the size of the setting, allowing us to forget its claustrophobic nature for long enough to focus on key exchanges of dialogue. 

It is these exchanges, between mother and son, which sit at the heart of Room. Much has been said of Brie Larson’s performance as Ma, and she is excellent at communicating honesty in a disarmingly unostentatious manner. But she is brilliantly brought out by Jacob Tremblay’s astonishing ability to be both naïve and knowing in a way that only a child can. I say ‘be’ rather than ‘portray’ because it never feels as if Tremblay is acting. There is a supreme comfortableness here, and it grounds the relationship between mother and son (and, more widely, the entire film). Never would I have thought that I’d cry at the act of walking down some stairs, but the simple pathos invoked by seeing a young boy cower away from three stairs before being carefully and lovingly helped down them by his mother was clearly too much for me. This was by no means a one-off occurrence – I lost count of the number of times tears came to my eyes. Stephen Rennicks soundtrack attempts to play off this invocation of pathos and, though often poignant, it sometimes misses the mark by being overblown or trite – sounding a little like a TV advert for a bank. Thankfully, these misjudgements only occasionally impinge on the overall experience of the film.  

Soundtrack aside, the film’s handling of tone is subtle and astute. Brie Larson’s ability to switch very quickly and very naturally from playful and light-hearted to desperate and serious – something all good mothers must be able to do – is key to guiding the film’s tone, especially in its first half where she is Jack’s only source of knowledge about the world. Danny Cohen’s cinematography also deserves praise. The earlier scenes, in the claustrophobic ‘room’, often employ naturalistic lighting and handheld camerawork, but this all changes in the post-escape hospital scene. Like a modern day Mowgli, the longhaired Jack, clad only in underwear, examines his surroundings before carefully climbing down off of the bed and walking slowly across the hospital room to the large windows, through which bright daylight seeps into the room. The scene, in its brightness and use of a fantastically realised tracking shot, indicates through its visual language that it is the start of a new chapter, both in the film and in the protagonists’ lives.  

Interestingly, the post-escape scenes which form the film’s second half are, at times, harder to watch than the scenes that take place within ‘room’. The outside world, after seven years in captivity, is harsh and overwhelming. The talk show interviewer, searching for good primetime TV, is toxic under a façade of friendliness, and relations between the protagonists and the family they return to are often strained. No longer the sole method through which Jack learns about the world around him, Ma loses the need to maintain what Larsson herself refers to as the ‘two faces’ of the character. She no longer needs to seem strong, and so quickly breaks down. Jack, conversely, becomes the stronger of the pair. In a late scene, when Ma is asking for forgiveness from him, he says simply: ‘It’s okay. Don’t do it again.’ In an earlier scene, he sends his mother the long locks of hair he cuts off, so that she can have his ‘strong’. He becomes, in many senses, the parent. 

Room, then, is a film concerned with the bond between mother and offspring. Ma and Jack’s relationship leads the film, and the lack of connection between Ma and her own Mother is a major cause of the tension in the film’s latter half. But it is not purely a personal film, concerned as it is also with our perceptions of reality. In ‘room’, mother and son were the creators of meaning within a space which they were forced to make their whole world. Both, in their own ways, struggle to come to terms with a world in which reality is not controllable. There is an incredibly simple shot in the film’s second half which zooms slowly toward Jack as he constructs a structure out of Lego, sat in the comfortingly small space of a wardrobe – a piece of furniture that served as his bedroom in ‘room’. When the shot is repeated moments later in reverse – zooming away from Jack as he disassembles the Lego – it gains a strange resonance, in its depiction of a child desperately trying to control the reality around him.  Escape not only brings with it freedom, but also – for a while at least – lostness.