The “pretentious” movie that bored Quentin Tarantino senseless: “Devoid of entertainment value”
It’s perfectly on-brand for Quentin Tarantino to talk about one movie and then go off on a tangent about another, culminating in him revealing his feelings about a third, which has almost nothing in common with the first two other than how he felt about it compared to its spiritual companions.
Those motormouthed asides have been part of his public persona ever since he first hit the town to promote Reservoir Dogs, revealing himself to be a particularly studious cinephile. Tarantino could talk about cinema for days if nobody stopped him, and once he retires after his tenth and final feature, he’ll have all the time in the world to yammer his gums about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the medium.
Naturally, Tarantino began his stream of consciousness ramblings by reviewing the 1973 exploitation flick I Escaped from Devil’s Island for his New Beverly Cinema before seguing into a spiel about Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman’s Papillon, ultimately directing his ire to an immersive, gruesome historical epic that won his friend an Academy Award.
On the first two counts, they’re at least tangentially connected because the Jim Brown-led Devil’s Island and the star-studded Papillon were released three months apart, with the former specifically rushed into production to beat the latter to the punch. In addition, both stories revolve around daring escapes from prison camps.
However, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant is the odd one out. Tarantino may have worked with ‘Best Actor’ winner Leonardo DiCaprio twice, but he didn’t sound too enthralled by the unflinching period-set thriller that cleared half a billion dollars at the box office and won two more Oscars for its directing and cinematography.
The Pulp Fiction mastermind likes Papillon, which he thinks contains McQueen’s “finest serious acting moment on film,” and he even owns the actor’s personal 35mm print of the film that boasts an extra 20 minutes of footage, which he joked was nothing more than “20 extra minutes of Steve McQueen close-ups.”
Comparing Devil’s Island to Papillon is fair enough when they’re pictures from the same year with similar stories, but it’s in the negatives where The Revenant makes an unexpected appearance, with Tarantino pointing to how the Henri Charrière adaptation maybe takes itself too seriously for its own good.
“The film’s also not a little pretentious, self-consciously arty, unrelentingly grim, extremely gruelling, and except for Dustin Hoffman keeping a bankroll and an extra pair of spectacles up his ass, completely devoid of entertainment value,” he wrote. “Qualities it shares with The Revenant, so much so that Iñárritu’s film could be titled Papillon Part 2.”
The arduous ordeal suffered by DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass isn’t supposed to be a barrel of laughs, but based on the descriptors he used for Papillon and The Revenant, Tarantino would have appreciated even a touch more levity, lightness, excitement, and explosiveness from both films, instead of what he deemed to be a heavy-handed, solemn, self-serious, and portentous approach to their respective narratives.
Maybe he’d have preferred The Revenant if DiCaprio followed Hoffman’s lead and stored keepsakes in his arse for a rainy day, but nobody, not even Tarantino, is obliged to enjoy an Oscar-winning prestige film.
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