Written by John Bleasdale.
![]() Someone said (I think Freud) that a nightmare is a dream come true. In the bustling, overpopulated, overdeveloped, congestion-charged world in which we live, who hasn’t dreamed of getting away - of escaping to the wilderness where at last we can have a one-on-one immersive relationship with nature: unfettered, unhindered, unmediated? But just as the lottery can seem designed to advertise how bad it is when the dreams of poor people come true, so films about the wild can often seem to be warnings not to go there. Just don’t. Even (or perhaps especially) if you really, really want to. The dream of escape can easily turn into a nightmare. Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) is based on the true story of a troubled young man, Chris McCandless, who desperately wanted to get away from the corrupting influence of modern life and the pre-plotted trajectory of his life. The book by Jon Krakauer (of Into Thin Air fame) is a mite thin, a stretched magazine article which swells the page count with some digressions into the author’s own fascination with the wild. Played by Emile Hirsch with a likeable intensity, Chris seems to have a pretty good crack of the whip.
Chris is the one that got away, and the tragic ending to which he succumbs is to some extent a cautionary tale. Tom Waits’ beggar in The Fisher King (1991) tells Jeff Bridges that he is ‘the moral stop light’. When someone gets a fantasy of stabbing the boss with a pencil, they remember Tom begging at the railway station and it holds their hand. We put up with the various compromises and humiliations that life has for us because rejecting it would be catastrophic and would mean rejecting all the safety and the luxury and the pleasure that comes with modernity. Likewise, Chris plays out our youthful fantasies with a vigour we couldn’t hope to match. The best we can do is ‘take a year out’. How feeble does that seem when put beside such a lifetime commitment as Chris’? But, then again (and here comes the stoplight), it’s not a very long lifetime to commit to.
Into the Wild is essentially a modernist work. It sees a fractured reality - the modern wasteland of urbanized living - and posits a tragically impossible but Romantic elsewhere, which Chris ultimately reaches only for it to kill him through a series of unhappy ironies. Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is, by contrast, postmodern. Despite the harrowing extremity of the true story - man gets arm crushed by rock, trapped for 127 hours, finally chops off arm with very small knife - the film is really a kind of joke, a film which begins with a superficial opposition to society, but which ultimately renders escape from it into a facile game. The joke can be spotted early on with Aron Ralston (James Franco) packing to go on his trip and missing the Swiss Army knife which is the foreground of the shot as he reaches for it at the back of a shelf. If only… we immediately think. Then there’s also a missed phone call, which again, if only…
He drinks his wee, makes his messages, communes with nature (a bird flies above him regularly), faces up to the possibility of his death, remembers a relationship which he neglected to death, comes to realise his arrogance and shortcomings, decides to be a better person. Danny Boyle endorses this by not changing the film at all stylistically. You would expect the film to switch gears once Aron has his arm trapped but no: there are still the odd point-of-view shots (inside a bottle looking up at Aron’s mouth), the wacky editing, dream sequences and memories, and a Gollum-like soliloquy done as a chat show with applause and whatnot. The rock doesn’t challenge Aron’s preconceptions, rather it repairs details and offers him a life lesson. Aron will exit the experience shy an arm, but enriched as a human being. Even the cutting off of the arm becomes an exercise in some primal scream type nuttiness. As he leaves his severed arm behind Aron says to the rock ‘Thank you.’ Nature has not really done anything to Aron except validate him.
So if Into the Wild is modern and 127 Hours postmodern, then what is this year’s The Grey? First of all, what it isn’t. It isn’t what you think it’s going to be from the advertising campaign, nor from the phoney wolf cruelty hoo-ha, nor from the presence of Liam Neeson, whose lead roles have tended to be unexceptional since 1996’s Michael Collins (with the possible exception of the anomalous Kinsey [2004]). That is to say, it isn’t one of Neeson’s cheque-picking-up performances with wolves standing in for Albanian pimps. Neeson plays John Ottway, a defeated and suicidal man who is employed as a hunter, protecting oil workers from wolves in the wild. When a plane carrying a contingent of workers back to civilisation crashes, it is Ottway who takes the lead and attempts to save the men from themselves, the cold, and a pack of wolves that is circling them. So far, so routine, and with a director like Joe Carnahan, who has spent most of the last decade with his tongue firmly positioned in his cheek (Smokin’ Aces [2006], The A-Team [2010]), it would be perfectly reasonable to imagine the film will be a by-the-numbers men-vs-nature picture. But, remarkably and thankfully, both Neeson and Carnahan have decided to take this idea seriously.
The men don’t come together. Self-discovery happens, but it takes place at the point of dying or even posthumously. Ottway doesn’t discover the value of life, discover resilience, find freedom or beauty - in short, he doesn’t say ‘thank you’. Everything he does turns to dust and ashes. He doesn’t save anyone. The last man drowns in front of his eyes because his foot has become jammed under a rock, his face just under the water. Ottway calls out to his god but, receiving no reply, growls ‘Fuck it! I’ll do it myself’. The absurd nihilistic joke is that his prayers are then answered - not via salvation, but by the wolves whose den he has stumbled into. From the very beginning, Ottway has been a dead man on leave. His suicide is prevented by the howl of a wolf in the distance which distracts him, but he really has no life worth surviving for. His acceptance of this is courageous, but it is heartbreakingly bleak.
So whereas Into the Wild and 127 Hours create a wilderness that is either a lost refuge or an adventure playground, for The Grey the wild is, simply put, the universe in which we live.
This article was published on April 06, 2012. Post your views Article comments powered by Disqus |
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