Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, about a group of men stalked by wolves after their plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness, is the perfect antidote to Oscar season hype. Though a B-movie to its very bones, it’s got more life in it than any number of achingly middlebrow best picture nominees. And it’s the rare thriller that doesn’t seem to have been shaped via focus group. Carnahan, who wrote the screenplay with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (based on a short story by the latter), makes a number of unexpected choices, especially in the movie’s latter half, and you can bet he had to fight with the studio for every last one of them.
There’s a particular pleasure to be derived from a movie that begins unpromisingly and gets better as it goes, and The Grey is a textbook specimen. In the opening scene, we’re introduced to a hulking sharpshooter named Ottway (Liam Neeson), hired to keep wolves away from the construction of a new oil pipeline. He’s kneeling in the snow, a gun to his mouth, and in voiceover he reads a suicide note he’s written to his wife. It’s a huge hunk of yammering tough-guy poetry about sin and redemption, and it’s so long even his wife would skim. Ottway can’t quite bring himself to pull the trigger, so he heads to the encampment’s makeshift pub, where the other pipeline workers — ex-cons and displaced family men, mostly — celebrate the arrival of vacation and an impending flight home. Initially, none of these guys are more than blue-collar jokers, and I, for one, looked forward to their eventual immolation via plane crash.
Once the plane goes down, however, things begin to look up. Many perish, and the handful of survivors huddle together in the wreckage to hammer out a plan. At one point, Ottway ministers to a fellow who’s clearly bleeding to death, and the moment is unexpectedly touching. Instead of pounding on the man’s chest and giving over to macho histrionics, Ottway simply lets him know he’s dying. “Who do you love?” he asks, his face filled with tenderness, and the scared man shuts his eyes and tries to picture those people. The scene is nothing special in and of itself, but it makes you sit up and take notice. Could this be the rare thriller in which death is actually supposed to mean something?
Soon enough, the wolves — big, almost supernatural suckers with an unusual appetite for humans — arrive to polish off the survivors, and it quickly becomes clear that, yes, death means something here. None of the men are treated as mere wolf bait; Carnahan makes you feel each loss. (He also comes up with a memorable way to mark each passing: an ever-growing collection of wallets, retrieved for the benefit of family members.) There’s the occasional bit of gore, but the movie is rarely gruesome; most of the death scenes are rather poetic. There’s an extraordinarily well-shot one about midway through, when the men are caught in a blizzard on the open tundra and a straggler gets picked off. The other men hear his cries and turn back to help, but the snow is too thick. By the time they get to him, the wolves are gone and all that’s left is a red-on-white stain.
The wolves are reportedly a mix of animatronics, CGI, and real animals. In at least two shots, the CGI isn’t quite up to par, but Carnahan wisely keeps the creatures hidden from view most of the time. (I have no idea if this was an aesthetic choice or a budgetary choice, but either way, it works.) When they make their first appearance, surrounding the wreckage of the plane, they’re nothing but glowing, beady eyes staring out of the darkness. Later, after the men set up camp in a forest clearing, they gather just beyond the trees, and all we see is their hot breath rising through the cold night air. Like the shark in Jaws, these animal avengers loom larger in the mind than they do on the screen.
As the film progresses, Carnahan defies our expectations. Instead of ramping up the carnage, he allows Ottway and the others several quiet moments to talk about life and death and the existence of God, which could’ve been brutal based on that opening voiceover, but by this point feels earned. The conversations are all boilerplate manly-man talk, but they add shape and weight to the proceedings. (In a movie of this sort, we don’t really want anything more sophisticated; best to keep things simple.) And they serve a practical function, too: they provide much-needed breaks in the action, and they give the picture a sense of pace and structure.
The Grey is Carnahan’s fourth directorial effort. His first, the 2002 crime thriller Narc, had some of the same hardboiled existentialism, but it was much harder to accept when set in an everyday urban environment. There’s something about The Grey‘s hostile, snow-blanketed environs that almost demands it. Part of the credit has to go to cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior, Promises Written in Water), who makes the frozen surroundings both beautiful and terrifying. Fittingly, there are more vivid, distinct shades of grey in this picture than I’ve ever seen in a colour film before. In one aerial shot, the men walk single-file through the woods at night, their torches crackling and sputtering, and the myriad greys turn into a flickering canvas of silvers, ambers, and golds.
In the end, though, the bulk of the credit goes to Neeson, who brings instant gravitas to the proceedings. I’ve heard people bemoan Neeson’s late-career move into action territory, but the truth is he’s great in these sorts of roles, which require soulfulness more than anything. There are some hard-to-ignore parallels here to the recent death of his wife, Natasha Richardson, but the movie doesn’t exploit them so much as channel them. One look into Neeson’s dark, haunted eyes and all that hokum on the page suddenly seems deep as a well.
Scott MacDonald is Toronto Standard’s film critic and his editor still hasn’t forgiven him for what he said about Meryl Streep.
