"THE GREY"
Based upon the short story Ghost Walker by Ian MacKenzie Jeffers
Screenplay Written by Joe Carnahan and Ian MacKenzie Jeffers
Directed by Joe Carnahan
***1/2 (three and a half stars)
By now the face you can see in the attached film still is more than familiar. Not just because it is Liam Neeson. But because this is Liam Neeson possessed within the throes of full boiled rage.
For the past couple of years, Liam Neeson not only re-invented himself as a new action hero with films like "Taken" (2008) and "Unknown" (2011), but it is through those film and the upcoming "Taken 2," that he has almost created a sub-genre tailor made for himself. In and of itself, I don't feel that I would happen to have any complaints about this new stage in the career of Liam Neeson. But as he makes career choices of this sort, along with some very questionable choices like the "Clash Of The Titans" (2010) remake and this year's sequel "Wrath Of The Titans," "The A-Team" (2010), plus the recent behemoth budget summer 2012 box office bomb "Battleship," I must say that I am beginning to worry. In my recent review of "Safe House," I explained that I was also beginning to worry about the career of Denzel Washington, one of our finest actors, as he seems to be progressively taking roles to maintain his box office cache instead of continuing to challenge and grow as an artist. This is the exact same worry that I am finding myself having about Liam Neeson. While I certainly would not begrudge his desire to make action films, I just don't' want for him to end up like say...Nicholas Cage, one of our once riskiest actors who is now existing as an increasingly unfunny cinematic joke.
When the survival thriller "The Grey" was first released this past Spring, I felt trepidatious about seeing it as I feared that this was one more step into a certain tepid predictability with just one more entry in the "Liam Neeson Gets Mad" saga. But now having finally seen the film, I am curious if perhaps this film along with a couple of his recent choices may be slightly more provocative and perhaps even subversive than I had originally thought. I'll explain that a bit more later but as it stands, "The Grey," from Director Joe Carnahan, blindsided me happily as he and his collaborator Ian MacKenzie Jeffers smartly and creatively realized that not only could this film exist as more than a run of the mill thriller but that it should exist as much more. Powerfully, the film succeeds and if you have not seen the film as of yet, place it into your movie renting cue as this film is a white knuckle, pulse pounder that just may rattle your soul as well as your nerves.
From a plot standpoint, "The Grey" is cleanly structured and straightforward. Liam Neeson stars as John Ottway, an intensely haunted and suicidal widower who works for an oil company hunting down and killing the wolves who threaten the members of an oil drilling team. On the way home from a completed job in Alaska, Ottway and his companions experience a horrifying plane crash, killing most of the passengers and stranding seven men, including Ottway, in the barren, brutally cold Alaskan wilderness. Even worse, the men are now being hunted and killed by a pack of hungry wolves and it is entirely up to Ottway and his extensive knowledge about the nature of wolves, to try and lead the group to its potential survival.
On the surface, "The Grey" is a highly effective thriller that is made up from familiar themes that we have seen from William Golding's Lord Of the Flies and it also reminded me very much of films like John Boorman's "Deliverance" (1972), Walter Hill's "Southern Comfort" (1981), John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982), Lee Tamahori's The Edge" (1997) and even aspects of television's "Lost." But, rest assured, and aside from its "And Then There Were None" structure, this is no copycat presentation as Carnahan ensured through his controlled and intensely patient direction that "The Grey" would not only work as a visceral thriller but that it would also exist as a film that was not solely about a growing body count.
I have to admit that as the film began, I found myself immediately shifting a bit in my seat as we were quickly introduced to Ottway through a barrage of cliched and unintentionally laughable pseudo hard-boiled narration that we have heard one thousand times before. But "The Grey" did begin to pick up once Ottway and his traveling companions boarded the plane. After the terrifyingly staged place crash and the first moment of Ottway discovering the crash survivors, there came a moment where the tenor of the film transformed into something profoundly deeper and alerted me that perhaps "The Grey" would be a bit different than what I first thought that it would be. As Ottway makes his way to the plane to check for potential survivors, he comes across the mortally injured Lewenden (James Badge Dale), who is obviously mere moments from immanent death. Ottway joins Lewenden and tells him, calmly and gently, that he is indeed about to die and then, he begins to compassionately guide Lewenden towards his passing. "It slides over you," says Ottway tenderly. The scene continues for more moments, quietly and tensely, yet filled with a sorrowful sense of warmth. Lewenden dies and the scene lingers, allowing the characters and the audience to take in this time of a man's life ending.
I described that sequence to you because what Carnahan delivered was something unlike the norm in a film such as this one, where people are picked off one by one, their lives are meaningless and they are never thought of again. Then, I began to wonder if those unintentionally laughable opening scenes were indeed completely intentional. Perhaps Carnahan was lulling the audience into thinking we would see one type of film and what he actually delivered transcended the genre a bit and became an experience that was decidedly more thoughtful and ultimately, more artful.
"The Grey" does indeed plunge us deeply into our most primal emotions through its ferocious plot and battle between man, nature and beast. Most importantly, the film is surprisingly philosophical, cerebral, and even existential as the film as a whole is essentially a rumination on the inevitability of death, the possibility that we all exist in a meaningless, cold, unforgiving universe and our need for survival regardless. Essentially, this film completely embraces that very concept that I have consistently championed on Savage Cinema and that, of course, is "humanity."
Yes, "The Grey" is extremely violent but not gratuitously so. Yes, "The Grey" is riveting and exciting but not in an exploitative way. From the plane crash to its conclusion, I loved how Carnahan and Jeffers found ways to inject some much needed humanity into the piece so that it resonated much more powerfully than it really had any need to. For instance, I enjoyed how Ottway instructs his companions to retrieve all of the wallets from their deceased travelers for the purpose of alerting the families if they are indeed rescued. That tactic, thankfully, is not one moment never to be seen or felt again. It is a recurring theme, especially as the survivors gradually meet their respective ends. Another sequence has Ottway and two other men, the bespectacled Talget (a surprisingly rock solid Dermot Mulroney, who is usually one of our most wooden actors) and the belligerent Diaz (an excellent Frank Grillo), discuss and debate the possible or impossible existence of God. Another sequence has Carnahan deflate the testosterone balloon of this specialized film genre by having Ottway declare to the other men that he is indeed "terrified." I also loved how Carnahan did not make the wolves exist as monsters but as formidable creatures which Ottway respects and understands, and who are trying to fight for their survival as equally as the humans. All of those elements, and more, made "The Grey" a feature that burrowed under my skin as it became a disturbing experience that illustrated mercilessly how death can be swift, sudden, unrepentant, uncompromising and non-discriminatory. Certainly not what you would expect from a mere "action movie."
Carnahan's sense of realism is also greatly aided by Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi's gritty lensing, which gives the "The Grey" a completely authentic feel of being lost in the bitter, brutal cold so effective that I actually found myself occasionally shivering, even as I sat in the comfortable space of my home--during a Midwestern heat wave at that!
It was then that I began to wonder, perhaps unrealistically but a thought nonetheless, that maybe Neeson is working through his personal struggles in some of his film choices. In "Taken," he portrays a man fighting all odds to save the life of his daughter and in "Unknown," he portrays a man desperately attempting to regain his life and wife after a coma induced accident. And now, we arrive at "The Grey," during which he seems to be waging war against the very thing we cannot ever win against-our own inevitable termination. Now, as I look over the chronology of film releases, "Taken" was released a full year before Richardson's passing so maybe my theory doesn't really work at all. But somehow, Neeson's furious, awesome anger in "The Grey," as well as the film as a whole, reached me in a deeply primal place, where my own fears and inability to reconcile myself with the nature of mortality uncomfortably reside. Dear readers, I simply do not ever want to know if death contains a warmth and feels as if it is slipping over over, as if you were just falling asleep for the evening. I do not want to know these sorts of things because I just do not ever want to fathom the time when my existence will not be. By the same token, I suppose I do want to know these things so I can possibly prepare myself. But regardless of my wants, I desire to know the unknowable and death will arrive whenever it chooses to and I will most likely never be "ready" for it.
"The Grey," with its humans versus wolves in the frozen wild touches upon those precise emotions so explicitly and I was thankful that Carnahan decided to treat the cycle of life and death very seriously and not just as mindless entertainment fodder. Having Liam Neeson in the lead, whether subversively or not, proved to make the experience of this film profoundly haunting as well as thrillingly relentless.
In a cinematic year filled with strong surprises, "The Grey" was a high point. And also one strong and compelling enough where I don't have to be concerned for the acting career of Liam Neeson just yet.
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