Sweet Smell of Success - Film Review: The Grey

January 26, 2012

Dir. Joe Carnahan
Score: 5.4

Clearly, the short stories of Jack London still retain a powerful hold on the collective male consciousness in Hollywood. Something about the primal inhumanity of London’s best known works, which generally involve a lone man against the elements under harsh conditions, affixes to the adolescent brain, man v. nature reduced to a simplified core of savage logic. Part of the appeal is no doubt the essential drama of a life and death struggle, but the rest involves a complicated relationship to our younger selves and our daydream fantasies of heroism and courage in the face of an evil and uncaring natural world.

The latest entry in this genre involves a pitiless account of a group of Alaskan oil workers who survive a brutal plane crash only to find the remote area in which they’ve landed beset by a pack of bloodthirsty wolves (the “grey” of the title might well refer to moral ambiguity or the relentlessly colorless mountains upon which the survivors make their way, but I suppose we’re meant to assume it’s for the wolves themselves). Liam Neeson plays a man named Ottway, a wolf-sniper, as it happens, who takes on the chore of leading the remaining survivors through the open fields and into possible safety in the woods off in the distance. Ottway has various problems of his own, including suicidal tendencies, but when the chips are down, he immediately takes the Alpha position amongst the others, to the badgering dismay of Ruiz (Frank Grillo), an ex-con with a bad attitude. The others, including a sweet, bespectacled father (Dermot Mulroney), a loose cannon (Joe Anderson) and a philosophical man of strong faith (James Badge Dale), we assume, are more or less primed to die one way or another before the credits roll.

And die they do. Carnahan’s vision of the project takes some peculiar risks, some of which work surprisingly well (the airplane crash, for one thing, which eschews exterior shots entirely, creates a palpable, claustrophobic tension) and others not so much (the wolves themselves, with glowing devil eyes and snarling sabretooth roars, are like something out of Lord of the Rings, and betray the film’s otherwise naturalist pretensions). What we end up with is a rare bedfellow; a would-be adventure yarn for the art house crowd. Appreciative as we may be of Carnahan’s ambitiousness, it’s still a lot to ask of the actual material, with the screenplay’s easy emotional manipulations and surface characters: You’ll long tire of the Breakfast Club-like device of characters endlessly revealing themselves while huddled around the campfire. The film is at its best when it sticks to the basics, wounded and fearful men, trapped in an unrelentingly oppressive environment, when it strives to do more, as well-placed as its intentions might be, it declaws itself.