Review: "The Grey"

Picture a movie where members of a group of characters are picked off one by one. You already know how it will go, don’t you? The viewers will grow to identify with one or more characters, and those ones will probably make it through the movie. Surely, in any case, they won't all die. That’s just depressing, and people don’t like depressing movies, so they don't often get made.


On the other hand, sometimes movies come out that deliberately subvert that expectation. Surprise! Everybody dies! Take that, audience!  Often these films feel a bit uppity, as if they are more daring that regular movies because they take an unusual path, or have the "courage" to defy audience expectations. I don't agree.  As I have written before, our culture’s weird esteem for being original for the sole sake of being original is odd and tiresome (not to mention that the “surprise, everyone dies” trick is not actually original, only uncommon).  Further, contrary to what some people believe, punishing the audience is easy to do and does not make art good (although it does supply a cheap “Emperor’s New Clothes” style defence to negative criticism: that the critic “didn’t get it” or “couldn’t handle it.”)

Of course there's no denying that in real life bad things happen to good people all the time. But the point of art is not to mirror real life. A newspaper or a documentary can do that. Heck, I can watch real life any time I like. I’m doing it right now, and so are you. I suppose artists in favour of "bad things happening to good people" can claim to be subverting the expectations of the audience, or making some meta-critique of artistic conventions, but the former is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and the second is some seriously boring shit.

I am reminded of a dialogue between the film critic Roger Ebert and the makers of a horror film called Chaos. Chaos is about a horrendous gang that murders and rapes a bunch of young women. Ebert gave it zero stars. The director of Chaos essentially argued that the point of the film was that pure evil exists, without reason or excuses, and that often good does not triumph over evil. Ebert pointed out that that is a starting position for great art, not a final conclusion.

So what is a writer to do? Do you go for the worn formula in the first paragraph? Or do you go with the (deservedly) underused tactics in paragraph two?


This is not a new problem; it was noted thousands of years ago by Aristotle in the Poetics, who pointed out that stories where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people are bland, while stories where bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people are perverse. He endorsed, instead, "tragic" stories: where a mostly good person is led to a bad end by a tragic flaw. The audience then experiences pathos towards the hero, and learns a lesson.


Obviously this is a great observation but it can't account for everything.  There are no fixed things a movie has to do to be good. It can have a happy ending or a sad one. It can be realistic, but it doesn’t have to be (as long as it doesn’t jerk the viewer out of the experience of watching the movie). It also doesn’t need to be particularly original (the recent Ryan Gosling movie Drive, for instance, was excellent, a film of the year, but was not especially original).

Roger Ebert has pointed to the emotion of “Elevation” – the feeling of being deeply moved by another person’s goodness (generosity, courage, or hope). I am not quite sure that does it, but it will lead nicely into my review of The Grey (which will contain spoilers).

The main character of The Grey (played by Liam Neeson) works in an oil installation in the Arctic Circle. His job is to shoot wolves, and he is depressed. His wife (seen only in flashbacks) has left him, and he feels that he has nothing to live for. At the beginning of the film, he is about to kill himself, but stopped when he hears the howling of wolves far away on the wind.

The next day his plane crashes on the way back to Anchorage. Seven men survive, after one noisily bleeds to death. That night they are attacked by wolves.

Here the screenplay unfortunately breaks down. Neeson’s character advises the survivors to leave the wreckage of the plane and head for the trees. I confess this logic was completely lost to me.  A murky reason was provided for why they would "never be found."  I actually laughed out-loud when one character suggested the company didn’t care about them because if they were never found it would “save the payroll.” Save money on a plane crash! Oh, Hollywood, haven’t you heard of lawyers?

The real reason the men need to head for the trees is because being hunted by wolves makes for a cool movie, and shivering in a plane does not. This is the bad kind of un-realism, that reminds you what you are witnessing is staged (as is the rather convenient behavior of the wolves, who appear whenever the plot requires and vanish whenever the characters need some time to philosophize).

But the movie gathers strength as it goes along. You will have realized by this point that there is nothing particularly original about the premise of this movie, and will have surmised that its strength lies in its execution. You would be correct. Things seem to have weight, in The Grey. We feel Neeson's character's emotional pain.  The plane crash and the interactions between the men are handled superbly.  And their reactions to their horrible situation are spot-on.  Everyone wants so badly to live, at least at first, but it is so dreadfully cold, and the wolves so endlessly hostile. The men, and the audience, keep telling themselves the same thing: that surely there must be some hope. The audience because they are watching a movie, the men because they believe the universe is essentially benign place. 

This illusion is eventually stripped away from them both. When Neeson’s character screams up at the sky for some kind of a sign, not later, but now, right now, of course he doesn't get anything. The universe is not a kind place, we have only made our corner of it so, and God is either dead, busy or unconcerned, unless He never existed in the first place. 

A lesser movie, like Chaos, would be ready to call it a day. But The Grey does not end with the unpleasant and banal truism that bad things can happen to good people. Instead, it is a starting point for its characters. Because when Neeson doesn't get the sign he asks for, he clenches his jaw, blinks back his tears, and mutters: "Fine.  I'll do it myself."

All of the characters in The Grey grow when faced with death.  Most of them choose to fight to the end, but even those that don't are oddly enobled by accepting of their fate. One by one they pass away, eventually leaving Neeson to grieve over their wallets. When the wolves finally come in for the kill, we’re shown something in a flashback that changes our perception of what Neeson is (and is not) fighting for. And it became clear to us that Neeson is much more courageous than we thought (hence the Elevation).

The question you may be wondering is: do the wolves get him? But that’s not the point, is it? Whether or not Neeson survives, The Grey is a tragedy, not in the Aristotelian sense, but the Orwellian: “A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph, but man is perceived as nobler than the forces that destroy him.”  We all know bad things can happen to good people.  We don't need art to teach us that, or to teach us anything.  We have pamphlets and textbooks to do that.  The Grey is not a mesage piece.  Nor is it about the ultimate fate of its characters, but about their nature.  Oddly, The Grey is not a depressing movie, but an uplifting one.  By seeing the courage of the men fighting for our lives, we are awakened to the courage in all of our lives, that we often miss.

Because we are all a little like the unfortunate men in The Grey.  The wolves are circling all of us, following us wherever we go. Our lives are comfortable, and mostly the wolves are out of our sight, and we can forget they are there.  But they will get every one of us in the end. One day our lives will end, that is for sure, and what matters is how we carry ourselves before they do. That’s the only thing that’s up to us, but the message of the film, as much as it has one, is that it’s enough.