The Revenant (unpublished review for Manchester Confidential, posted here because bored on lunchbreak)

USA ǀ 2015 ǀ 156 minutes

Dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu ǀ Leonardo DiCaprio ǀ Tom Hardy ǀ Domhnall Gleeson

How do you make an original end-of-the-world movie in 2015? One way is to set it in the nineteenth-century American Midwest. Having carried off several statuettes at last year’s Academy Awards for multiple-personality-disorder comedy Birdman,  the uncompromising independent filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu returns with something completely different: an epic revenge drama pitched somewhere between Aguirre: Wrath of God and Rocky, but with less hubris and more shots of comets.

A group of hunters and trappers operating deep in the wilderness is attacked by a Native American tribe called the Ree. After a savage battle the survivors begin a gruelling trek back to their fort, but it isn’t long before another misfortune befalls them, as their scout, Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), is mauled by a bear. Seemingly on the point of death, he’s left behind with three men, whose orders are to tend to him and ensure he gets a proper burial. But Glass – whose Balboa-esque motto is ‘never give up’ – stubbornly refuses to die.  When the unscrupulous Fitzgerald (Hardy) attempts to expedite the process, killing Glass’s son for good measure, the injured frontiersman crawls out of a shallow grave and sets off in search of revenge.

The Revenant is a brutal and spectacular film that can’t quite bring itself to settle for brutality and spectacle. It reaches for some higher meaning – something to do with how the death of an individual relates to the death of an entire people, and how western man has pillaged the earth, and how behind our differences we are all the same. But whatever this meaning is, the The Revenant fails to grasp it, falling back on blunt symbolism and a posturing authenticity. Much has been made of the strenuous conditions of the shoot, but it’s not clear these privations added a great deal to the end product, except in the very basic sense that it’s difficult to photograph snow-capped mountains without going where there are snow-capped mountains. DiCaprio has scowled his way through movies before, and will surely do so again; are we supposed to think that this time he really meant it?

The film also suffers from occasional lapses into what can only be termed ‘survivalist camp’. In one scene Glass rides a horse off a cliff, disembowels it and crawls into the carcass for warmth, finally emerging – naked ­­– to the strains of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Delightfully grizzly as this sounds, the dual associations of The Empire Strikes Back and Nazi concentration camps make for a confusing ambiance. Perhaps ‘Eye of the Tiger’ would have been more appropriate?

Of course, none of this matters too much. The Revenant is worth watching just for the breath-taking cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki – a frequent collaborator of both Iñárritu and Terrence Malick – who captures a landscape of pitiless beauty in which the presence of human beings seems like an absurd mistake. Forests shiver in the wind, rivers surge seaward, distant mountains shrug off capes of pristine snow. And through it all trudges Academy Award-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, scowling. It seems at times as though someone has taken a Sebastião Salgado album and pasted in production photos from The Basketball Diaries.

Werner Herzog’s kamikaze runs into the heart of darkness were inspired by his – bonkers – existentialist philosophy, and the absurdist results are right there on the screen. Who can forget the sight of Klaus Kinski strutting up and down a makeshift raft in the middle of the jungle, shouting insults at God in front of a crowd of tiny, child-faced monkeys? Unfortunately, The Revenant has nothing as bold or bizarre as this to offer. It looks like it was shot by a team of consummate professionals working under capable management to a well-designed schedule. Which is to be commended, of course – it’s how good films are made – but what about the monkeys?

The New York Aquarium sea turtle that swallowed Donald Trump’s conscience in 1955 is still trying to build an orphanage with its flippers

“Isn’t it just the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?” asks Walt Fischer, a senior keeper at the New York Aquarium, pressing his hand against the glass of the water tank in front of us. I peer past him into the dark interior. At first my eye is distracted by the ominous figures of the sharks and rays, gliding by like warships on patrol. But that’s not what Walt is talking about. What Walt is talking about is the large, ungainly creature at the bottom of the tank, the creature that, with awkward motions of its hind flippers, is attempting to dig a hole in the sand.

This is Ann, a sixty-four-year-old loggerhead sea turtle. She was born in 1952, the year her namesake, Ann Davison, became the first woman to sail the Atlantic solo. In the summer of 1955 a little boy tried to climb into her tank, and when the keepers went to stop him a small silver pebble dropped out of his ear into the water. The boy was Donald Trump, then nine years old. The silver pebble was his conscience. Ann swallowed it, and she has been trying to build an orphanage with her flippers ever since.

According to Walt, it took a while for the Aquarium staff to work out what had happened. “All that digging – they just thought she was a crazy turtle. You get them from time to time.” It was only when Ann started taking young orphaned turtles and putting them in the hole that the truth began to emerge. It seemed she was trying to protect them, trying to provide a safe, nurturing environment in the dog-eat-dog world of the sea. Nor was this her only act of kindness. She would save food for her weaker tank-mates, carry sick manta rays on her back, even wipe smudges off the inside of the glass with her beak.

Such was Ann’s commitment to these altruistic projects that the keepers began to joke that she was trying to atone for some terrible misdeed. But she had never committed a misdeed in her life. According to Walt she is an exemplary sea turtle. “Loggerheads can be aggressive – biting other animals, charging keepers. But Ann has never done any of that, not in my experience. And according to the older keepers I’ve known, not before she swallowed the small silver pebble that fell out of Donald Trump’s ear, either.”

What started as a joke was finally confirmed in 1983. In an interview with Forbes, Trump – who at the time was celebrating the construction of Trump Tower, a project completed using low-paid non-union Polish laborers – recounted the story of his misadventure at the Aquarium. “I tell you, this thing falls right out of my ear, this little silver whatever, and then this dumb turtle swims right up and eats it. And at that moment it’s like a weight is lifted off of me, a huge weight. I realised whatever I wanted to do I could do it, and I knew, with total certainty, what I’d only suspected before: that I was going to be a great, great man. And now look at me.”

The day the interview was published, Ann the turtle nearly lost a flipper trying to help a tiger shark with toothache. The keepers were skeptical, but by now the evidence was overwhelming. Sure, it seemed odd that a person’s conscience could fall out of his ear in the form of a small silver pebble and be eaten by a sea turtle that would then assume the psychological burden of that person’s wrongdoing, but how else could you explain Ann? How else could you explain Donald Trump?

The sad thing about it all is that Ann’s efforts are in vain. The hole in the ground that she attempts to operate as a turtle orphanage is fundamentally useless, and due to safety regulations the keepers are obliged periodically to fill it in. Walt tells me that it breaks his heart every time. But in spite of all that, Ann keeps on digging, keeps on laying the 400lbs of her wrinkled old turtle body in the scales of good and evil, hoping to shift the balance just a little. “I take comfort in that,” says Walt, blinking away a tear.

As I’m leaving, I ask Walt, just as a joke, if he will be voting for Trump. To my surprise, he says yes. “Obviously he has his flaws,” he explains. “But I feel like there’s a connection there. I can see the good in him.” I want to tell Walt he’s crazy, but instead I just smile and say goodbye. It’s only later that his words begin to make a certain sense. In a way, it is Donald Trump in that water tank, swimming with the manta rays and sharks, kicking up sand to make a hole for orphaned turtles to live in. This is what so many in the mainstream media have failed to understand. And even if the presidency of the United States ultimately eludes him, he will always be able to say this: “I, Donald J. Trump, am the greatest female loggerhead sea turtle the world has ever known.”

The Smartest Rock Star in the Room

Each time I hear a song by Muse
I think of Matthew Bellamy
at work in his Italian villa.

Arpeggiating long into
the night, he searches for the chords
that will express Rachmaninov’s

opinion of Godel’s incom-
pleteness, Freddie Mercury’s take
on eternal return.

If God is dead the world must need
a new piano player, one
who is in tune with the Zeitgeist

and looks good in a jetpack high
above the adulating crowd.
If God is dead the world must need

arpeggios, hand over hand,
that rise like empires and then fall,
angelic, into the abyss.

The world will never have this thought: it moves

too slowly, the world I mean, or perhaps

I mean the thought, or maybe each one moves

too slowly for the other…

anyway,

the world and this thought will never be seen

in the same room at the same time, which makes

you wonder, really.

Language Acquisition

Now that I understand the French language

I no longer find it beautiful.

Or rather, I am no longer in a position to mistake

its strangeness for beauty.

There is a true beauty that resides somewhere

in the French language, but I know now

that I will never know enough to find it.

The next thing on my list is Italian.

Including Moderation

I don’t think many people know
that Icarus, besides being told
to fly not too close to the sun,
was instructed to avoid the sea,
lest the salt water soak his feathers.

So hypothetically there is
a second child of Daedalus,
who erred in a different way, but with
the same result. And then a third,
who did as he was told and died

much later on, let’s say at fifty,
let’s say falling from a window, drunk,
while his own sons, now grown, were watching.
A situation that did not
much recommend itself to myth.

The Mater Gloriosa

In this updated version of the classic tale,
the ageing scholar, played by Jason Biggs
in old-man makeup, signs a contract with the devil
(Kelsey Grammar) and is restored to youth.

Immediately forgetting all his noble plans
for the betterment of the human race,
he heads straight back to high school, where he meets
a teenage girl, impregnates and abandons her.

Later, while he is partying with other women,
she strangles the baby and is condemned
to death by the State of California.
(He becomes a senator and goes to heaven after all.)

Tragedy – Comedy = Time

For my first phishing scam I invent
a dot-com millionaire with an alcohol problem,
whose depressed wife is on holiday in Mexico
with the kids when tragedy strikes.

Drunk for three weeks straight, the millionaire
goes up one evening on to the roof
of his penthouse to commit suicide,
loses his nerve, falls asleep by the pool

and is found the next day at noon, choked
on his own vomit, and badly sunburned.
$10,000,000 is still resting in an
off-shore account. I need your help.

At the Medieval Conference

They told me there would be felt hats
at the medieval conference – I
imagined men in chainmail, women
with headdresses and sweeping sleeves.

But when we got there all I saw
were people dressed as lecturers:
corduroy jackets, ugly ties,
a goth, two goths, three goths and then

an elderly woman in disguise
as a South American leftist
guerrilla – el pueblo unido! –
her khaki cap pulled down low.

How much is this one? she asked me,
Court and civic society
in the Burgundian Low Countries.
It’s thirteen pounds comrade, I said.

Mixed Media

I was the smoke alarm
at the Richter/Pärt exhibition
at the Whitworth Gallery
in Manchester, 2015.

From high above,
as the choir sang, I blinked
my one red eye, slowly,
waiting for a fire.

But no fire came,
only hallelujahs. In time
I saw the god being praised
was me, and started

blinking faster,
until my eye was a constant
point of light. That was how
the fire began.