Frank Peebles' March 24 article "Actress, profs bring hit movie to life" presents an interesting example of current academic analysis that, in the case of The Revenant, supposedly reveals the movie's historical, racial and gender biases.
I hope as northerners we might also see some of the film's more obvious literal flaws; for instance, the likelihood and believability of a mauled and badly wounded man in the dead of winter floating down an ice-bound river in a soaking 100 pound bearskin cape, and surviving to catch a fish with his bare hands, and then to build a nice big fire.
As for The Revenant's literary flaws?
The oldest themes of revenge, survival and redemption move tediously without creating much sympathy for the main character Hugh Glass, who, as one professor puts it is "a typical white Anglo-Saxon imperialist hero."
Is this to suggest that it is Glass's zeal as an odious white imperialist fur trapper with a craven thirst for wealth, and not revenge for his son's murder, that gives him the energy to trek the next 300 km to confront his antagonist in yet another ubiquitous snow bank?
But these questions aside, my concern is for the actress Grace Dove who admits, referring to the professors' comments, "I wish I knew all of that before I did the movie."
I can imagine that this kind of critical intellectual dissection and its suitcase full of phrases, with Ms. Dove present on the panel, would in the least be embarrassing and at the worst, offensive - especially when this is said by one of the academics: "Even the women in the script were there to symbolize aspects of the mythologized male as seen by Western culture."
So now Ms. Dove, the actress in an academy-award-winning movie, is to be viewed merely as a symbolic and ideological pawn at the "expense of historical truth?"
The professor then goes on with a strained gender analysis: "the mother grizzly was shown only as dark and primally dangerous compared to Glass's ghostly wife who was always depicted in bright white contrast and idyllic in the eyes of the viewer." I'm baffled by this comparison as I am by much of the language, analysis and thinking by academic elites these days.
Ms. Dove's journal entries, however, do give us a real sense of her dedicated work as an actress - knowing, as she puts it - "there will always be something to complain about."
We should be proud of this local artist and her achievements, in a movie despite its possible shortcomings, is beautifully filmed in the natural "golden light" of remote and challenging landscapes.
Barry McKinnon
