This is maybe the nicest thing about “Ravenous”: only after 80 minutes or so does it start to suggest that its main subject – cannibalism – might be a metaphor for something. I’m not sure for what though – homophobia, slavery, Manifest Destiny, all of the above.
It’s also one of the few films about the Mexican-American War. The protagonist is punished for an act of cowardly courage (you heard me) in that war by being transferred to a forlorn fort in California. He carries with him an obsessive revulsion to meat, cooked or raw. Then the last survivor of a snowed-in trek arrives at the fort and starts talking about how he was forced to eat his fellow travelers.
So you think you know what is going to happen, and then it doesn’t. Which of course is also rather trite, except when it’s not. As the haggard cannibal Robert Carlyle steals the film in a sort of dual role: first as a starved human rat, then as the devil. He looks like an illustration in a first edition of Poe stories – just about the highest praise I can think of.
Being the good auteurist that I am I wanted to write “Antonia Bird’s Ravenous” but apparently that isn’t really true. The film was a troubled production – Bird was hired after the original director Milcho Manchevski was kicked off the project, the released version was re-cut against her will. You can still feel her special sensibility though – like quite a few female directors (Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis) Bird was very good at deconstructing male bonding and machismo. She died last Thursday.
“Ravenous” is almost a Pre-Western. The cannibal has visions of the coming Gold Rush. That makes it a prequel to “Deadwood”, I guess – a show that was all about how the losers of the American Dream end up in the pig troughs of history. I think Michael Althen wrote that. Anyway: What “Ravenous” dares to suggest is that we could actually consider that progress.