My Thoughts on The Revenant (as a native filmmaker descended from trappers)
When I first heard about the Revenant, it was a casting call in the Alberta/NWT area looking for native actors to appear in the new “Leonardo Dicaprio” film shooting in and around Alberta. I was curious what it was so I looked it up to see “the Birdman director” Alejandro Iñárritu was set to direct with master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Being a movie making nerd I had also read that they were going to utilize the Alexa 65, a new large format camera that had yet to be used. I live not too far from where the production was happening, so this was very exciting to me.
As much as I was intrigued, I was also fearful for the eventual response from the native community that would probably be torn, leaning towards the negative seeing it was being made by non native filmmakers. I’m a bit of an old buzzard when it comes to certain opinions and one is that I think we should be making our own movies if we want proper representation and portrayal of our peoples, instead of focusing so much attention on what Hollywood does. But that’s just me.
In recent years there’s been a huge increase in backlash from mostly the academic community towards portrayal of Native Americans in film and media. Trust me, this is very very important to me as well as it translates into self esteem of native youth, and since our youth mortality is so high I’m a firm believer that media portrayal plays a part in this. We should hold them accountable, but at the same time we are looking for a mythical unicorn of a Hollywood movie that perfectly portrays us as a people. To me, this is defeatist and capitulating to the idea that we are not self reliant for our own image. We practically beg Hollywood to portray us the way we want to be portrayed. This makes no sense to me.
So fast forward to Christmas 2015. The Revenant is finally released after months of rumours that the production was a disaster, destined to become the next “Heaven’s Gate”, an infamous production that the media crucified before it was even released, destroying director Michael Cimino’s career. The Revenant seemed it was about to meet the same fate, along with the production team. Surprisingly, the release was a huge hit and it took me weeks to find a showing that wasn’t sold out.
It takes me a couple times to register a movie in my brain, as upon first viewing I’m looking at technical aspects of the camera work, then I get the story on the second viewing. So I watched it once in IMAX, then again in “Ultra AVX” and I have to admit, I was blown away and really enjoyed it. Yes it was hard to watch at times but the sweeping cinematography and portrayal of the hard life of hunters and trappers had me riveted. Even the way it was shot in completely natural light (Lubezki also shot “The New World” which did the same technique) was a brilliant choice that was in line with the world at the time.
You see I’m the descendant of hunters and trappers, both native and of Hudson's Bay. It’s in my blood, and my grandparents lived the trapper's life, even up until the 40s when my mom was born. So many of their children lived it too. I’m only a generation removed from that life so I grew up with these kinds of stories on how absolutely difficult that life was, and was myself taught how to trap at a young age. It was how my family lived since time immemorial, how they interacted with other cultures (not just white, other tribes/nations, previous to English, French, Americans there was also the Russians).
While watching it, I wasn’t even thinking about the portrayal of natives. I thought “Yes, white traders intermarried with natives. Yes they spoke our languages. Yes they committed horrible atrocities. Yes they loved their mixed breed kids”. The most common misconception in regards to Native Americans was that our lives were (thanks to the Thomas Hobbes quote) “Nasty, Brutish and short”. But in reality this was the life of the settler more so than us, and the Revenant really captured that. I appreciated Tom Hardy’s character using the term “tree n***ers, which was one of many colourful terms used at the time. It didn’t pull any punches.
Many of the cultural stories I grew up with revolved around the act of rival peoples kidnapping our women, and the subsequent efforts to rescue them, or the women using their wits to escape. So the story of Elk Dog searching for his daughter who has been taken by settlers rang true to me. This day and age, there is a considerable push to draw attention to the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada and the USA, and the Revenant was showing the roots of this modern problem. The attitudes dates back to the days of trappers seeing our women as another commodity to trade and abuse.
The film was also a love letter to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of my all time favourite filmmakers. Much of the philosophy that infused his films was the idea of the chaos in nature and man’s lack of control of it. Man always falls, and is imperfect despite what he may think of himself.
The running themes in the Revenant were rebirth, falling down, and how parents go to extremes to preserve their legacy. The bear who attacks Glass is protecting her cubs, the same spirit transfers to Glass as he fights to avenge his son Hawk, paralleled with Elk Dog fighting to find his daughter Powqa.
The idea that Hikuc tells Glass “vengeance is in the hand of the creator” is a very common idea you see across all nations in North America. Walking out of the Revenant I wasn’t so much thinking about the physical representation of natives, but it really captured the philosophy and ideas I grew up with.
No surprise I saw the backlash begin to mount. Many fellow Natives absolutely loved it, but the detractors compared it to “Dances with Wolves”. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, as Dances With Wolves seemed to focus on the onslaught of white people coming in numbers “like the stars”, and reinforced the idea that we basically “disappeared”. Even then, when Dances With Wolves first came out Natives everywhere LOVED it, and were thrilled to see a different side portrayed on screen. Not as savages, but as humans. Trust me, that was a fresh idea in those days.
Of course now Dances With Wolves is basically the most “white savior” movie of all time which kicked off a trend (every Edward Zwick movie has the same issue). As much as I want to criticise that film, my grandmother loved it, so it did have it’s positives despite kicking off an ugly trend in cinematic stories. It almost went the other way and romanticised our lives and turned us all into stoic mystics staring off into the distance.
With the lack of diversity a huge focus in the 2016 Oscars, it’s hard as a Native person to look at the situation and tread carefully as to what to support. On one hand you have this film, where the filmmakers allowed the native cast and consultants to alter the script and improvise to make it authentic. You have Leonardo Dicaprio telling the world about “First nations” issues, which is great of him to do, but yet we as a people ourselves have been screaming the same words to deaf ears. It’s taken a white actor to say those words to be accepted.
The movie is directed by a Mexican, and anyone familiar with the situation down there is you also have a clash between fierce independence of the Mexican spirit who fought off the colonizers, but distanced from the indigenous rights of the various native peoples throughout the country. Yet, it was a country very entrenched with European subjugation, so I think this played a part in how the story of Hugh Glass was told.
Some of the backlash coming from cinematic bloggers and cultural critics state that the Revenant “has no story or structure” and this is the essence of the native world view clashing with the eurocentric one. The hunter/trapper life did not require shaping the world to how you want, which is how agriculture works. With farming cultures, you have straight lines created by your own hands, you grow things to how you want, creating patterns where there wasn’t. The hunter’s life, you adapt to your surroundings and following the pattern nature puts in front of you.
The final frames of the film, Hugh Glass breaks the fourth wall and stares into the camera, shivering and shell shocked after experiencing his vengeance. He doesn’t look happy, or fulfilled. He looks lost.
I think this was meant to be the audience, look at its own reflection. A time capsule being opened with a message, forcing the “settler” to question their own existence.
So in a year where there’s a considerable lack of diversity in the Oscars (the voting body is practically 90% white), I think the Revenant is quite an achievement. It embraced the native worldview in some sense, yet its existence is labelled “erasure” by some detractors. At least I’m glad the film itself didn’t jump on the mystical “disappearing race” trope.
As a filmmaker I would love to see more of our own films get the same acclaim, but if I think what my grandmother would have thought of this movie, a woman who was an actual trapper, she would have loved it. She really believed in balance between the two worlds, she didn’t want her kids to live the hunter/trapper life but she didn’t want them to lose their identity.
I think the Revenant is a reminder that we are still in the middle of a grand identity crisis, and there’s a long way to go. If it were to win best picture tonight, in 50 years the themes will still ring true.
