Liam Neeson plays plane-crash survivor Ottway in The Grey.
Adventure-thriller The Grey reveals its gutsy story like a clockwork onion. A propulsive tale of plane-crash survivors fighting for their lives in the Alaskan wilds, the movie strips its characters of their bravado and exposes their souls layer by layer, one brush with death or honest moment of brotherhood at a time.
And ultimately, tears might flow.
The movie stars Liam Neeson in a gripping performance as a man called Ottway, a hired killer of wolves at an Alaskan oil outpost. Desperately missing his wife, he works with a rifle and a sense of grim determination, plugging the wild canines to keep his roughneck colleagues safe.
When a plane shuttling workers back from a remote site encounters turbulence, the tough guys on board joke at first. Then things get harrowing fast as the movie plunges its characters into a Call of the Wild-style survival adventure riddled with bracing blasts of raw emotion. Just like the pack of wolves that menaces them, the men settle into a loose hierarchy, with Ottway’s alpha status being questioned as he attempts to lead the group to safety.
It’s a man-versus-nature tale of what happens when technology fails us completely and we’re left with nothing but our wits, and our comrades, to survive. And it’s enough to make some reviewers cry — in a good way.
“One, if you can get a guy to cry, and then, two, if you can get a guy to admit that he cried, then I think the film has really done its job,” director Joe Carnahan told Wired.com. “In the same way that it happens to the characters [in The Grey], the veneer of whatever you think is macho or [a] false sense of bravado … the very active nature of this movie strips that all away so you’re only left with, ‘OK here’s how I really feel, and this is me, kinda laid bare and vulnerable.’”
Find yourself bitching when your cellphone drops out or you get stuck in traffic? Compare your minor modern annoyances with the predicament faced by the men in The Grey. Throughout the R-rated film, which opens Friday, the seven survivors of the crash find themselves facing extreme arctic weather, the ever-present danger of a wolf attack and other lethal situations. In between, they bond like soldiers in a trench. They slowly open up about faith, fate and the things they hold dear, slowly becoming brothers of a sort as they huddle around a campfire or face a withering new challenge.
Brutal scenes aside, it’s a far more complex and emotionally moving piece of storytelling than one might glean from The Grey‘s trailers, which have led to the joke that it’s a “wolf-punching movie.” Still, Carnahan and actor Frank Grillo, who plays Ottway’s aggressive challenger Diaz, say they made a conscious effort to avoid melodrama.
“I don’t think we went to sentiment easily,” Carnahan said. “And that was deliberate…. I wanted there to be, within the framework of this film, which is, you know, essentially a plotless endeavor, this idea of you start here and you’re gonna try to get there and you’re gonna either make it or you’re not — that you could incorporate these kind of nuances in it of character and these kind of interpersonal things that are meaningful to me, and hopefully more meaningful to the people that see the film.”
“And in a conversational way,” Grillo added. “Not with like rising violins in the background to kind of emphasize that this is a serious moment. You really got a sense that it was a bunch of guys in trouble that were taking a breather and having a conversation.”
Carnahan, whose most recent film The A-Team delivered outlandish action of an entirely different sort, said he overrode an initial impulse to underscore one particularly devastating early scene in The Grey where a character succumbs to injuries.
“The way to make [the death scene] very stark and memorable is to strip all that away so the audience has nothing to lean on,” Carnahan said. “They have nothing of a safety net or a source of comfort where they can go, ‘Oh, OK, well the music is going to tell me how to feel.’ It’s like, ‘No, you’re just going to hear this guy breathe out and his clothes rustle and that kind of stuff.’ And I thought making those choices very early on set the tone for the film to follow.”
Co-Starring: Bad Weather
Extreme weather during shooting in British Columbia adds to the film’s heavy atmosphere. Temperatures hit 40 below during filming, and you can almost feel the cold in the theater as you watch the men struggle through snowstorms and big drifts. With few tools beyond a little bit of scavenged jet fuel and some almost useless ammunition, the survivors face nature.
The cold helped elicit believable performances: While shooting one scene, actor Ben Bray couldn’t get warm, and Carnahan said you can witness his growing desperation in the film.
“I was watching the distress take over his performance,” Carnahan said. “And it was real distress. He was just simply like, ‘I gotta get the fuck out of here.’ At some point, the primordial part of your brain kicks in and goes, ‘You’re gonna die.’”
The cold also looks great on the screen.
“All the weather you saw when they were around the plane crash, all the stuff when they were trudging across the tundra, that was all real,” Carnahan said. “We couldn’t’ve faked that. There wasn’t enough mechanical ritter fans, there’s not a mechanical process big enough that you can go up there and fake that. And you know, listen, I’ll say this: As much as it was a son of a bitch to shoot in, from a filmic standpoint, from a dramatic standpoint — lights-out brilliant. That was exactly what we needed, and that was exactly what we got.”
Ottway (played by Liam Neeson, left) and Diaz (Frank Grillo) share a moment around a campfire in The Grey.
Photos: Kimberley French/Open Road Films
The blizzard, the wolves and the difficult terrain add up to a cruel and beautiful opponent that the men must face.
“Those are all component parts, to me, of the same thing — nature,” Carnahan said. “The beauty of it, which is absolutely real and the splendor of nature, and the hostility, and the merciless quality of nature. It’s the yin-yang. One can’t be without the other.
The Grey hits you hard with stunning, steely cinematography and riveting performances from Neeson, Grillo and the rest of the cast. But it’s also exquisitely crafted, expertly scripted and edited almost to the point of being manipulative. And it’s as remarkable for what the filmmakers leave out as for what they put in. Muscular and memorable, The Grey is the kind of film that leaves a haunting impression.
At an early test screening of The Grey, Carnahan said, some audience members quizzed after the film expressed disappointment and even outrage when an anticipated fight scene didn’t transpire. But when the pollsters conducting the screening asked the angry viewers if they would be talking about the movie in coming days, the answer was an unequivocal “yes.”
Another miracle of omission occurs at the end of one of Neeson’s most powerful scenes. No need to spoil the moment, but let’s just say there’s a fairly obvious way that the filmmakers could have muffed the shot — and probably ruined the movie in the process.
When asked about the scene, Carnahan said, “My initial thinking is like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s how sideways films have gone.’”
“Right, it’s a testament to being cheated on so many times,” Grillo added.
“What an epic betrayal of your time and faith in the movie that would represent, to do that in that moment,” Carnahan said. And yet several reviewers have mentioned the exact same scene and the way in which The Grey could have been perverted by a poor decision.
The line of questioning leads Grillo to the conclusion that a sad parade of weak cinematic choices has left viewers conditioned to accept the vanilla Hollywood ending.
“We’ve been cheated in films most of our lives,” Grillo said. “And you know, a lot of people are programmed, you know, to believe that, ‘This is the way it’s supposed to happen…. How dare you [stray from the formula]?’ Maybe not even realizing that that’s not what they want to see, and it’s just that’s something that they believe that they’re owed, ’cause that’s been the algorithm of films.”
Add it all up and The Grey is much more than your standard action-thriller. It’s a moving ode to faith, redemption and the power of standing with your brothers in the face of daunting adversity. Stay to the bitter end, and don’t be afraid to cry.
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