Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)
Originality, On Ice
Stripped down to its essentials, the basic action movie is quite simple. You chase your hero up a tree and then try to watch him climb back down again. So far this year we’ve seen Ben Affleck chasing down a neo-Nazi plot in the ruins of Baltimore, Matt Damon losing his memory while on the run from the CIA, Mel Gibson in the Valley of the Shadow of Death in Vietnam, Harrison Ford on a submarine with a runaway nuclear reactor, Tom Hanks on the run from the Mob, Mike Myers chasing through the streets of Tokyo in a Mini, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones contending with a horribly lame script… you get the idea.
Wimps, all of them.
Try this on for size, guys. Your hero is in the Arctic. No big deal, he lives there and is used to it. He is ambushed by his brother-in-law and his two friends, who tear down his tent, kill his brother, and are poised to kill him as well. The attackers are distracted for a moment, allowing our hero to make a run for it. There is just one little problem. Our hero is butt-naked.
It gets worse. As I said, butt-naked, which implies barefoot. Only two routes of escape. Back the way the pursuers came, except that it’s absolutely covered with little jagged rocks. The only smooth way is over the ice. Our hero takes off, running as fast as he bloody can — which, given that the ice is slippery and that it is also a little thin, is not that fast. The good news is that his feet get very numb very fast, the bad news is that he doesn’t then notice how bloody they are. And when he falls, invariably he falls in very cold water. And then there is the ice sheet itself, which is phenomenally empty, no place at all to hide, no weapons but snowballs. (The would-be murderers have pointy wooden sticks, and you think for a minute, Wood? Where the hell are the trees?) And the bad guys just keep coming; they may be slow, but they keep up, for what seems like hours.
And then, the truly awful realization; the actor is probably working for scale.
Forget about it. The most ruthless actor in Hollywood, the kind of person that would eat raw human flesh for a bad part in a bad movie, wouldn’t take this on. If Hollywood ever made this movie — “Dances with Caribou”, let’s say — they’d shoot it in some studio and use a blue screen; the biggest indignity the hero would have might be slow room service at the hotel.
The best thing about Atanarjuat is that it is real. Atanarjuat is a retelling of an ancient Inuit myth. It’s a pre-Columbian setting, there isn’t a word of English spoken. All the principals live out in igloos or tents, depending on the weather. (It is something of a shock to see igloos looking more or less the way they do in the old Warner Bros. cartoons.) They hunt and eat raw or very undercooked meat. (Vegetarians in general and animal rights activists in particular are advised to see Lilo and Stitch or some such instead.) Women are not treated very well at all. (The climactic scene, which involves an old woman speaking her mind, is a jolt.) It is a very real and honest portrayal of how the Inuit lived their lives, alone on their frozen tundra; it’s like a Discovery Channel special but with a better script.
There are enough good and extraordinary things about the production values that it is hard to knock Atanarjuat. It is a lovely, wild movie, with some quite good performances by Inuit actors, and everyone involved should be encouraged to continue in their craft. It would be unkind of me not to say as many good things about the movie as possible. And if it were for just one thing, I think that I could wholeheartedly recommend it.
Unfortunately, I can’t. Atanarjuat is the name of our hero, an Inuit name meaning “The Fast Runner”. Unfortunately, Atanarjuat the movie, however, is anything but fast. It clocks in at just over three hours, an immense length of time for anything other than a huge epic. It has a slow-moving, almost ponderous plot. (Atanarjuat is occasionally described as being “Shakesperian”, which is true, if you can imagine, say, Romeo just punching Tybalt out instead of killing him, marrying Juliet, going off to Venice for a business trip, and coming back with another wife in tow.) It requires a lot of concentration to keep the different characters straight; they all dress the same way, the women all have the same patterns tattooed on their faces, and the names are just impossible.
There’s nothing wrong with Atanarjuat, at least not anything that a good session in the editing room couldn’t cure. It is a very high-quality arthouse movie, and people who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing that they like. But the casual moviegoer needs to know that this is a very long movie, dull in stretches, with entirely too much focus on meal preparation and igloo construction.
But still, there is that one incredible scene, and it may be worth the price of admission all by itself. Atanarjuat is, at least, the only movie out this summer where you can honestly say that it’s not derivative; you’ve literally never seen anything like it before.