When I walked out of the theater after watching “The
Revenant,” I was in a state of awe. Taut, thrilling, beautifully filmed,
amazing characters — I was really impressed with the film and, of course,
Leonardo DiCaprio’s heart wrenching performance. Now that I’ve had a few days
to think about it, however, my take on the movie is evolving, not regarding the
excellent work of everyone involved in the production, but about the storyline
subtexts.
“The Revenant” actually has much in common with the 1972
movie “Jeremiah Johnson” starring Robert Redford. Both feature a white man
dissatisfied with civilization who escapes to the untamed western mountains. As
mountain men, Johnson and Glass are attracted to Native Americans and their
culture, each marrying a tribal woman. After a cataclysmic event, a bear attack
in Glass’s case, Johnson leads white settler through sacred native land, they
must endure unimaginable hardships and violence to survive. Each movie ends
with a resolution that is both satisfying, and at the same time questionable,
knowing how much the journey has cost each man.
In both “The Reverent” and “Jeremiah Johnson,” each
protagonist is a white man who can’t help but have a foot in both the racist
white civilization from which they came and the dying Native American culture,
which they aspire to. It is in each case, however, a white man’s story. It feels
as though these two movies, and others, like “Dancing with Wolves,” are
Hollywood’s very weak and anglo-centric attempt at apologizing for the genocide
of Native Americans. It’s as if they’re saying, “Wait, we weren’t all racist,
genocidal maniacs.”
It is, however, a lame and insulting attempt. Think about a
movie where a Nazi soldier hides some Jews and despises Hitler. It could be an
intriguing movie, but is a film about a do-gooder Nazi any kind of apology for the
horrors of the Third Reich? Not all the Nazis were bad. So what?
We, our white ancestors, committed genocide on a national
scale and making some movies about good-guy whites during that period only distracts
us from the reality of our crime. America has yet to come to grips with our
treatment of Native Americans from nearly the moment the Pilgrims landed here to
this very day where they are still living in atrocious conditions on
reservations. “The Revenant” is a story about a good white man vs. an evil
white man. The Native Americans are mostly props for historical authenticity,
but don’t be tricked into believing this is their story. That movie has yet to
be made.
