Yap vs. Yap: The Revenant

Given the absence of a Yap vs. Yap across the entirety of 2015, you might assume every Yapper lived in harmonious agreement with each other’s opinion. Loving and loathing the same films. Smiling. Hugging.

Go dawn your Age of Aquarius somewhere else, pal.

And there are few better choices than “The Revenant” — a brutal, bloody tale of man-versus-man, man-versus-nature and Tom Hardy-versus-intelligibility — for which to resurrect this gladiatorial gauntlet.

In one corner: Christopher Lloyd, who ranked “The Revenant” 12th on his list of the year’s top 75 films. In the other corner: Nick, for whom the only thing “rank” about “The Revenant” is its smell.

Who is right? You decide and let us know in the comments below. Be warned: Mild spoilers below.

But now … fight!

NICK

Let’s first dispense with alternate-title groaners: “The Bear Necessities,” obviously; given a tenacious-badass father trying to avenge a child’s death, not “The Limey” but “The Grimy”; or “Sad Beards: The Movie.”

The last decade has seen many fine survival films, whether fictional or frighteningly real — “127 Hours,” “Life of Pi,” “Gravity,” “All is Lost,” “Lone Survivor” (despite that regrettable last act), “Captain Phillips,” “The Martian,” “Buried,” “The Road” and “The Grey.” These films alternately suggest weary-resignation reminders that we’re doomed to die or the rallying cry of humanity’s better instincts to save our own.

“The Revenant” aims to join their ranks by crossing survival tropes with a revenge story amid handsomely mounted nature cinematography. You’d be right to expect a Terrence Malick-esque meditation with more action. Instead, had “The Revenant” come out in the 1980s, it would have had a trailer by Don LaFontaine starred Sylvester Stallone and / or Rutger Hauer and, mercifully, shaved away at least an hour.

After what feels like a real-time slog of boring, bloody and pointlessly brutal bloat, “The Revenant” reveals nothing about itself other than Alejandro González Iñárritu’s directorial vanity — to a far more irritating degree than in “Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).” I didn’t care for “Birdman,” either, but I’d watch it again while nestled inside a freshly carved horse carcass than watch one second of “The Revenant” again.

“All I’m sayin’ is savage is savage,” says one of the characters. That’s the extent of the film’s animal-kingdom thesis, along with God is whomever delivers, or denies, mercy in the wild. I’ve got no problem with bleak vengeance films, bloody Westerns, or stories that reinforce the nasty, brutish and short aspects of existence. I’ve got many problems with a movie that pretentiously stretches out 30-second symbolism to prestige-picture length when concise pulp would have served it perfectly well.

More frustrating is that there are points when “The Revenant” could evolve. I thought the story of one Native American tribe’s pursuit of a woman abducted from them may reverse-engineer “The Searchers” — a fusion of Malick and Michael Mann … or least Malick and John McTiernan. Instead, just another tired depiction of odious, unpleasant rape.

When I saw so much breath (or other sources of condensation and viscera) fog the camera lens to remind you it’s a movie and that camera operators were that close to actors’ faces, I thought maybe that would play into a theme, too. The camera’s physical presence reminding us of the artifice in mortal vengeance — a compulsion sated that restores nothing you’ve lost. Perhaps a you-are-there cousin to “The Hateful Eight’s” monologue about the danger of dispensing justice that isn’t dispassionate. Nope, just more showing off, as if to say you can make a major movie under harsh, cramped conditions and get usable footage. What’s intended as intimate becomes inanimate and inorganic.

If you want a better version from the same year, “The Salvation” offers as much purposeful stylization and more interesting characters in 90 minutes. Or if you seek a scrawny idea given heft by room to breathe and ambitiously nihilistic vision, my affection for the subtext of “The Hateful Eight” is on record.

Instead, “The Revenant” revels in death, carnage and misery to no end other than to:

• Shame Oscar voters into giving Leonardo DiCaprio a make-good statue for a performance that does little more than convey persuasive physical pain

• Indulge Tom Hardy’s vocal inscrutability as a cross between Sandor Clegane and bumpkin forefather of Buffalo Bill from “The Silence of the Lambs,” and

• Encourage someone to create a One Perfect Shot Twitter feed with shots exclusively from this film.

In keeping with its caveman mentality, a lot of work for very little meat.

Et tu, Chris?

CHRIS

Wow, Nick, I entered this (virtual) mano-e-mano chamber expecting erudite ruminations on your disappointment with Iñárritu's latest overuse of Steadicam cinematography and overshadowing of a lead actor's performance, contrasted with strong-but-measured defenses on my part that essentially boil down to “Hey, at least it’s not ‘Birdman or (The Completely Expected Narcissism of Overpraised Immigrants)’!”

Instead, you arrived with a wheelbarrow heaping full of black bile for "The Revenant,” which you’ve obviously been saving and composting for some time, Mark Watney-like, to unleash for your vile purposes. The Martian grew a pod full of potatoes, you cultivated an entire ecosystem of odium. To paraphrase Sally Field, "You loathe it, you really loathe it!"

The problem being, I didn't love the movie as much as you despise it. I put "The Revenant" at #12 on my best films list, whereas based on that hurricane-force opening salvo it's #1 on your burn-in-hell list, indubitably etched in blood.

So I'm somewhat at a disadvantage here in reaching for rhetorical weapons I don't truly wish to uncork. In "Untouchables" parlance, you brought the tommy guns and extra drums of magazines, and I'm left with just a little stiletto with which to do battle.

Well, stabby-stabby.

“The Revenant” isn’t a great film, but it is a very good one, albeit without a lot of depth to it. Your summoning of the spirits of Michael Mann and John McTiernan -- sans wiretapping, hopefully -- is apt. Both are consummate visual storytellers adept at using scenes of arresting nonverbal violence to punctuate the tension of the plot.

Their movies exist in the moment and engage us at eye level, and keep the deep portents and metaphysical musings on a distant back burner.

That’s the same piece of cinematic real estate that “The Revenant” occupies. It’s hardly the frontier of filmmaking aesthetic – West-North Malickvania, let’s call it – where the director sees things like character development and story as inconvenient obstacles to his chaotic paintbrush swirls and intuitive color combinations.

But while that quixotic, individualistic form of “doing movies” sometimes produces the magical equivalent of Tolkien’s Undying Lands (“Days of Heaven,” etc.), often as not it leaves the viewer exploring uncharted territory in search of a Mount Doom, a Ring to Rule Them All or a any kind of reason why they commenced the trip in the first place.

Somewhere Sean Penn is still wandering that land of sharp broken rocks in “The Tree of Life,” wondering what the eff he’s doing there.

I don’t doubt Iñárritu thinks “The Revenant” is about more than it is. He sees it as Man’s Journey, whereas it’s really just a man’s journey. It’s a voyage that takes place not in the firmament but, literally, drags itself along the ground. But it’s a compelling trip nonetheless.

Hugh Glass wants to live and, possibly even more so, wants the man who did bad things to not live. It’s a story of survival and revenge, a simple tale with a lot of technical embellishments.

I admire “The Revenant” mostly because Iñárritu employs his technique in service to the story and the lead actor, as opposed to “Birdman” where I thought the film would’ve been greatly improved with someone else’s hindquarters occupying the director’s chair.

If “Birdman” seemed like an exercise in egotism, the director practically vaulting in front of the camera and shouting “Look at me! Look at me!”, then here the same man disciplines himself and keeps the focus where it should be. Iñárritu serves the film, rather than making it serve him.

Having been fraudulently awarded Oscar gold, he smelts it and hammers it into something truly worthy…

...except for the breath fogging up the camera lens. That was annoying as hell.

NICK

I’d never send you to the morgue, Chris. Or the hospital, for that matter. At least not intentionally.

“The Revenant” isn’t 2015’s worst film. That was “The Visit.” Had Mark Watney that much fecal matter at his disposal, he could have ridden out a full decade waiting for a ride.

Regarding your No. 12 placement, that is still the 94th percentile (assuming 200 movies). Way too high, I’d argue, for a film you deem merely “very good.”

And to be clear, I hoped for a confluence of Mann and McTiernan but never got it. I’d also strongly contend, and at length, that Mann (if not McTiernan) explores as many deep portents and metaphysical musings as he does aggressive violence. As 2015 goes, I found “Bone Tomahawk” a more harrowing, horrifying meditation on men suffering for Manifest Destiny hubris.

What I got here was an insufferably long day’s journey into night, complete with perfunctory CGI Animal Theater. I’d argue the duration of the ballyhooed bear attack, and its inability to cut based on the visual effect, robs it of staying power.

I can say a few nice things: I appreciated the spatial coherence of its action, particularly its coonskin-cap “Saving Private Ryan” sequence, even as it otherwise grew tiresome. Indeterminate locations didn’t bother me; it felt like the end of the known world, as it should. I loved cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s shot in which humans felt so small among trees as to resemble ants, mighty but miniscule in the larger order of things. (Who knows? Maybe they’ll run into Sean Penn out there in “The Revenant II: Bear Down.”)

We agree Iñárritu likely sees more “there” there than there is. We diverge on the discipline of what he’s delivered. I see a movie nearly a full hour longer than “Birdman” and infinitely more indulgent. (Did you notice Iñárritu repeat a fireball spiraling toward Earth a la “Birdman”? Is “The Revenant” canon? Did Raymond Carver secretly write a play about Hugh Glass?) What, specifically, so deeply compelled you about “The Revenant” and what did you admire about DiCaprio’s performance?

CHRIS

Nick, we share our adoration for the virtually invisible “Bone Tomahawk,” but its combination of Western, horror and comedy elements doesn’t exactly holler “prestige picture” to the hills. “The Revenant,” on the other hand, wears its Academy Award-vying vestments with pride.

Both movies sever fingers, but only one does it with class.

OK, OK, I am kind of mocking the somewhat overwrought tenor of “The Revenant.” There is a layer of pretension there, like the frost powdering DiCaprio’s famously sculpted cheekbones when he wakes from his swoon.

I wish Iñárritu could’ve toned down this aspect, but I think based on his filmography and “Birdman” swag that’s like expecting Tom Hardy to enunciate with Shakespearean elocution. You just have to swallow it, like Watney’s bloody potatoes, and go with it. It’s a feature, not a bug, to their filmmaking M.O.

As to the bear attack, I’d argue that its enduring run time adds to its you-are-there thrills. Short, sharp bursts of screen violence shock, whereas drawn-out ones force us to feel the torture. Just when you think the ravaging of flesh is over, it begins anew again. You are immediately put into Glass’ fur-lined shoes: Should he continue to play dead? Will the bear return to finish the job? Fight or flee? Would other men die (his son?) if he possums it?

You can practically hear Glass thinking in the midst of this pain, and that’s what I liked most about DiCaprio’s performance. He’s always been a verbal leading man, a talker who tells you what he’s going to do before he does it. “The Revenant” allows him to chase the character’s interior more fully than any other role that comes to mind.

He seeks the stillness, even as Glass scrambles for his life.

Roger Ebert famously said that no bad movie can ever be too short and no good one can ever be too long, but he was also famously wrong. “The Revenant” could’ve used some tightening in the editing bay. But not a whole bunch -- maybe 2¼ hours instead of 2½.

Whereas just watching the trailer for “Carol” gave you the exact same emotional experience as enduring the entire movie. Minus Todd Haynes’ many lingering shots of Cate Blanchett’s rosy fingernails, and her bold employment of shoulder blade nudity.

(For the record, “Revenant” is 37 minutes longer than “Birdman,” though the latter should really be measured in sighs.)

NICK

Careful, mister. Besmirch “Carol” again and I will send you to a hospital. Perhaps Our Lady of the Meaningless Comparison; you can share a room with “My All-American.”

I’ll look past it due to our shared love of “Bone Tomahawk”; now that’s an attack that stays with you. But I’ll say I still hear much equivocation about the purported excellence of a film you ranked so high at the end of a year rife with riches.

What bums me out most about Iñárritu is that I don’t believe we must expect intrusive imagery. To one of your earlier points, is he taking what won him, however dubiously, a Best Director Oscar? Yes. But this style was certainly absent from his first films — “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams,” which remain his best works before he gave in to another gimmick (gluing together one roundabout narrative after another).

I once eagerly anticipated Iñárritu’s films, but he seems to have abandoned his abilities of elegant, emotional storytelling for elbow-throwing showmanship. If it’s not a bug, it’s at least a malevolent genetic mutation. That’s the foundation of my problem with the bear scene: It may accurately simulate the duration and intensity of a real attack, but Iñárritu would rather we marvel at his effects team’s lifelike work on the animal than how it’s destroying DiCaprio.

And while DiCaprio is fine here, I can think of three movies right away — “Catch Me if You Can,” “The Great Gatsby” and “This Boy’s Life” — where I felt more of his inner workings at play separate from the dialogue. As a preferential performance of physical persuasion, I submit “The Wolf of Wall Street’s” classic Quaalude scene.

Even if I sensed Hugh Glass thinking, it’s a thought of one dimension and direction driven into the ground on which he crawls. DiCaprio needs no Oscar to up his clout, but he’s at his least surprising when chasing one (“J. Edgar,” “The Aviator,” this). If winning helps him focus on more of the great stuff he’s already done, I’ll allow it.

I had the first word, so I’ll give you the last. I think we walked away with most of our fingers intact. We may disagree, Chris, but we wouldn't leave each other rotting in the woods.

CHRIS

Sometimes one of the worst things that can happen to a director is becoming the frequent target of praise. Hitchcock was regarded as a gifted craftsman of genre pictures until a bunch of French upstarts started calling him an auteur, and then we got “Marnie” and “Torn Curtain.” I do fear Iñárritu could head down the same path.

But “The Revenant” reassures rather than stirs my anxiety. It’s an engaging film that achieves considerable (but not total) success at what it’s trying to do. It’s not an existential quest, but it is a quest for existence. Like “Gravity” and some of those other films we’ve discussed, it draws you into a time and a place, and mostly inside one human’s mind, as they fight to live. “The Revenant” explores both the nobility and savagery of that instinct.

Why am I equivocating about my 12th-most favorite film of the year? Because it’s what I do. It’s part of my life philosophy, and certainly how I approach movie criticism. Glasses are rarely fully full or wholly empty. People who burn with the righteous fury of certitude make my feet itch. I can usually find something to like about even the worst flicks, and rarely fail to pick a nit about the ones I adore.

(I love “Star Wars” in all its iterations, but can still laugh at the occasionally inept line readings by Mark Hamill – or John Boyega.)

Gene Siskel counseled that we should judge a movie for what it is, not what we would wish it to be. (And sometimes that includes the wishes of the people making the film.) By that yardstick, “The Revenant” is a captivating tale of misery.

Some movies buoy us, others endeavor to sink us low. But the real question is, Are we swept up? I was.