FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Film by Cynthia Amsden RAVENOUS As movies like Turbulence will never be shown on an airplane, Ravenous, a film that broaches the subject of cannibalism, is not the movie to see after taking a date out for dinner. In fact, when Fox brought the press to Los Angeles to see Ravenous, those wacky movie people thought it would be fun to serve beef stew at the lunch. No one touched it. Several days after the press screening, I was served spare ribs (I kid you not), and not only could I not eat the food, I couldn’t even watch the others eat it. I literally got up and left the room. Cannibalism aside, the story has its own bite [stop that, Cynthia]. It’s about Captain John Boyd (Guy Pearce) a hero of the Spanish-American wars, who is moved to a tiny army outpost high in the icy Sierra Nevada mountains in California. There he encounters a half-starved Scottish stranger, Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle of The Full Monty), who tells an anguished story of travel, starvation and cannibalism. Colqhoun’s tale goes further than the eating of human flesh just to survive; he talks of an old Indian myth of Weendigo in which a man who eats the flesh of another steals their strength, spirit and very essence. The hunger becomes a craving, the craving becomes a moral dilemma and the dilemma becomes a movie plot. Dine on, MacDuff. As a theme, cannibalism appears on very few menus [this has got to stop], such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Alive; Dead Man (fleeting reference); Eating Raoul; Fried Green Tomatoes; Night of the Living Dead; Silence of the Lambs; and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series. Usually, it’s a nuanced part of the script because there is a built-in liability to making a full-meal-deal of the subject. Once you start eating the players, an ensemble cast can quickly turn into a one-man show. Ravenous is different, which is kind of an idiot understatement. Aside from it being a period flick – 1847, to be precise – and the Weendigo myth which picks up where Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer left off (meaning the shrouded mystery has some draw) – it’s a comedy. Guy Pearce (the good looking cop from L.A. Confidential and one of the drag queens from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) plays Boyd, who wrestles with the eat or be eaten quandary. He arrives for the interview looking much better fed than he appears in the film, so I choose to do to him what the filmmakers have been doing to me since arriving, and grill him on the less appetizing side of the film. Did you ever wonder what human flesh might taste like? "I get the impression it would be really bitter for some reason." (And I figured he’d say it would be like chicken.) Are you a vegetarian? "I try to be." How do you like your steak? "Medium to well. Gone off the raw." Why do you think your character resisted the cannibalism and the power that it brought? "I think the torment is about fighting nature. I really believe that his time is up, that’s what this is about for this guy, and he somehow avoids that. Then this opportunity comes along for him to live forever, which is also an odd way of fighting nature. And as he says, ‘It’s just not right.’ It’s particularly not right to eat people and it’s just not right to keep living forever. It doesn’t make sense to him." You’d seriously think there would be some kind of smirking about this film, but to the last, Pearce (an Australian), Carlyle (a Scot) and Antonia Bird, the British director, were very serious. Ravenous, they say, is a morality tale about the American obsession with youth and eternal life. They found irony in all the plastic surgery in California now and the fountain of youth cannibalism brings. I wasn’t biting. That’s too cute, too tidy. This movie is about the absolute, undeniable greed of Americans – their Territorial Imperative propelling them across the continent with the divine right of conquerors, their Manifest Destiny entitling them to consume everything in their path and giving them absolution to burp afterwards. But there I go, getting all serious about a cannibalism flick when I really should just say that cannibals aren’t vegetarians, they’re humanitarians, and leave it at that. |
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