Apocalypto
You know about Mel Gibson’s drunken incident (and anti-Semetic rant) back in July, I know about Mel Gibson’s drunken incident (and anti-Semetic rant) back in July. That’s all that needs to be or will be said about it in this review. My concern is for the film, Gibson’s fourth as a director and first since “The Passion of the Christ.” Leaving the film, I was unsure as to why critics seemed to have seen a different movie than I did. They were describing a film- told within a personal journey- about the last days of the ancient Mayan civilization- just as Western civilization was coming to the Americas- that contained parallels with the current American political environment. OK, I’ll admit that when I saw the film opening day I did have a hard time keeping my eyes open midway into the film- one of many reasons fueling my desire to see it again- but that was (I think) for only 2-3 minutes of the film’s tightly-edited 138 minutes (“Passion” editor John Wright keeps the film moving). In the body of the film as a whole, I didn’t really see that.
What I did see in “Apocalypto”- written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia- was the gradually-engrossing tale of Mayan hunter Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, making a charismatic man-of-action for Gibson to focus on), whose village is ransacked by warriors of the more-civilized members of the culture (which is to say they’re more advanced in the way they live), looking for victims to sacrifice to their gods. During the brutal attack, Jaguar Paw manages to get his pregnant wife and young son in hiding before he himself is captured. He eventually manages to escape, but must outrun his pursuers to get back to his family.
That’s the story. On the one hand, you must commend Gibson for finding an original setting to tell such an archetypal story. On the other hand, you’re left questioning why Gibson chose such an original setting to tell such an archetypal story. That he chose to tell it in the ancient Mayan language with subtitles- similar to “Passion’s” Latin and Aramaic- isn’t a decision you’ll find yourself questioning; like with “Passion,” the foreign language brings added authenticity and mystique to the film. It feels natural to the onscreen universe Gibson creates.
But Gibson’s storytelling instincts- some of the sharpest in recent memory, as evidenced in “Passion,” the Oscar-winning “Braveheart,” and “The Man Without a Face”- feel off in this movie. The opening scene, for example, is an attempt at humor that is too-contemporary for the setting and story, which are meant to feel mythic. It’s also out of place compared to the dramatic weight in the rest of the film. In his earlier films, Gibson was able to weave in humor- even the smallest amount (“Passion” had some levity in an early flashback with Christ and his mother Mary)- effortlessly; in “Apocalypto,” he isn’t able to as easily, and seems to give up entirely after this initial attempt (although a few subtitles are campily anachronistic). It doesn’t help, either, that the story’s emotional investment for the audience isn’t immediately felt. By the time the village is attacked, we should be invested in these people’s lives. I wasn’t; attributable, I think, to the fact that while we’re given glimpses into life in the village, we’re not given much chance to get to know them. Again, Gibson was able to do this brilliantly in his earlier films as a director (even “Passion”); but even with 138 minutes to do so in “Apocalypto” (and personally, given the circumstances, even that’s too few- the film moves so briskly one thinks it could stand to be 10-15 minutes longer for character development), one doesn’t really feel emotionally invested in the story until halfway in.
Unmatched, however, is Gibson’s energy and imagination at staging action; as a visual director, he remains one of the best in town. The setting inspires Gibson and cinematographer Dean Selmer- utilizing a digital camera which captures the brightest sun, the dampest rain, the most open clearing and the densest jungle with equal clarity- during the action scenes to try interesting shots and angles to add to the sequence’s dramatic pull. It’s during scenes like the climactic chase and the Mayan warriors leading their captured to the city (built with a keen eye and evocative beauty by production designer Tom Sanders and his team) where Gibson’s live-wire gifts as a storyteller come alive, and bring to mind not just Kurosawa (whom he’s been compared to in the past, though not always favorably) but also the German master Werner Herzog, whose hypnotic jungle epic “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” no doubt inspired Gibson here. As for the film’s almost unrelenting violence, Gibson continues to push the envelope in the blood-and-gore department and find original tactics with which to depict it, leading this critic to ask- after the vicious brutality in “Braveheart” and “Passion,” what were people expecting? And as ever with Gibson, the end always (or never) justifies the means, depending on how you look at it- he pushes in horror, not perverse glee, of the violence he’s depicting.
Even during Gibson’s narrative lapses, however, James Horner’s score never manages to go with it. And that’s indeed high praise. Working with Gibson as director for the first time since being nominated for an Oscar- and inspiring this critic’s direction in his life- for “Braveheart” (John Debney composed “Passion’s” Oscar-nominated score), Horner dips into his grab-bag of traditional musical tricks as per usual (no composer could win more copyright infringement lawsuits against himself, just to illustrate how polarizing he is with film music fans), but such moments are fleeting and almost irrelevant. This is Horner’s most invigorating and imaginative score musically and dramatically in years, as he continues to think outside-the-box of what we’ve come to expect from him (he did similarly-striking work on Terrence Malick’s “The New World,” another uniquely visual period epic). Most of his work in the past 10 years has had moments or real inspiration within the most obvious cliches of his writing (scores like “The Mask of Zorro,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “The New World,” and the Oscar-winning “Titanic” were welcome departures from complete immersion in tired formula), but that only illustrated how obvious he had become as a composer. It’s fitting, perhaps, that in a year where so many of the best scores have been composed within unorthodox instrumentations, one of Hollywood’s most popular and prolific- which even some of his fans (myself included) have come to see as predictable- has come in late with a score that stands to shake an already-intriguing Oscar race up further. I’m sure a lot of people- myself included- expected “Apocalypto” to do the same (and I’d still look for it in the technical categories such as costume design, makeup, and cinematography, among others), but for all its’ ambition and vision, it falls somewhat short of doing so as a whole.
