Jeremiah Johnson (1972) Review
8/10
A veteran of the Mexican war buys supplies, walks into the Rockies, and attempts to live there. He doesn’t know how. He can’t catch a fish, can’t shoot an elk, and freezes through his first weeks while the mountains take no notice.
The 8 is for a survival film with the patience to show incompetence before competence. The first act is a man failing at everything in sequence, and the film treats each failure as information instead of as comedy.
The first hour of this film is some of my favorite wilderness filmmaking anywhere. Watching Redford fail to catch a fish grips me harder than most gunfights, and I think Pollack knew exactly how much patience an audience would give him and spent every ounce of it well. What holds it short of higher is the last third, where a revenge plot arrives and the picture becomes a series of ambushes. The subject stops being the mountain and starts being a body count.
Failure First
He tries to fish with his hands and gets nothing, and tries to shoot an elk and misses. Food runs out, he has no shelter, and the film spends a long time on a man who’s not equal to the place he’s chosen. That opening is the whole reason the rest works. When he can eventually take game, build a cabin and read a track, the audience has watched him acquire each of those things and knows exactly what it cost.
Bear Claw is the mechanism and Will Geer plays him as somebody who finds the whole situation funny. An old trapper who has been up there for decades, who hunts grizzly with a knife, and who teaches by letting the younger man fail first.
The teaching sequences are the best material in the picture, and Will Geer is a big reason I rate it as high as I do. They’re practical, specific and unsentimental, and the film cares about how you skin an animal and where you site a cabin. I could watch a whole film of Bear Claw being amused by a greenhorn.
The frozen man is the film’s first real lesson and it’s delivered without a word of instruction. Johnson finds a body seated upright in the snow holding a rifle, with a note leaving the weapon to whoever finds it, and the scene tells him and the audience exactly what this place does to people who get it wrong.
Show the protagonist failing at the skill before you show them possessing it, and every later use of that skill carries the failure inside it. Most survival stories begin with competence because it’s faster, and they pay for the speed with a hero the reader can’t measure.
Procedure is characterization when the procedure is hard. What a person is willing to do to eat tells a reader more than any amount of interior monologue.
Give the teacher a temperament instead of a philosophy. Bear Claw is amused, not wise, and the amusement makes the instruction land as practical instead of as a lesson.
Almost Nobody Speaks
Redford has perhaps three hundred lines in a hundred and eight minutes, and long stretches contain no dialogue at all.
Weather, work and distance fill the space where dialogue would go. Sydney Pollack shot on location in Utah in real winter, and the cold in the film is real cold, visible in a way no set can reproduce. I respect him enormously for refusing to fake it, because that cold does more for the survival story than any line of dialogue could.
The family he acquires can’t talk to him either. Caleb is a boy who has stopped speaking after watching his family killed. Swan is a Flathead woman given to him in a trade and neither speaks the other’s language.
That arrangement produces the film’s best stretch. Three people building a life together with no shared language, communicating through work, and the film lets the audience watch them become a household without a single scene declaring it. The cabin goes up across a season and the marriage happens somewhere inside the building of it without anybody in it naming a day for it.
Swan and the Marriage
He’s given a wife by a Flathead chief as part of an exchange he doesn’t fully understand and can’t refuse without insult. That’s an uncomfortable premise, and the film handles it better than it had any obligation to in 1972. Delle Bolton plays Swan as somebody with her own read on the situation, and the marriage becomes real through work instead of romance. I find her wonderful, and the scene where she laughs at him warms me more than a love scene would have.
There’s no scene where they fall in love. There’s a scene where she laughs at him, and a scene where he brings her something, and by the time the cabin is built the audience understands them as a unit.
The film is also honest that he didn’t choose it. He goes to the mountains to have nothing and acquires a wife, a son and a house within a year, and the acquisition is presented as something that happened to him.
What follows is the reason the last act exists. He’s ordered to guide a cavalry party through a Crow burial ground, refuses, is pressed, and does it, and the consequence arrives at his cabin while he’s away.
A relationship built entirely through shared work, with no declaration, is far more convincing than one built through dialogue. The technique requires patience and a reason the characters can’t simply state their feelings. A language barrier is the cleanest available. Let the protagonist acquire what he was avoiding. A man who went to be alone and ends up with a family has an arc that required no decision from him. That’s closer to how most lives really go.
Place the violation in something the protagonist knew was wrong. He’s told what the burial ground is, he says no, and he does it anyway. That means the catastrophe isn’t bad luck.
The Revenge Is the Weakest Part
Crow warriors kill his wife and the boy while he’s guiding the cavalry. He kills the party responsible, and then the Crow send men to kill him one at a time, and he kills each of them.
The structure becomes repetitive by design and the design doesn’t quite work. Each ambush is filmed as an isolated encounter, months apart, and the accumulation is meant to read as a legend forming.
What it loses is the mountain. The first hour is about a place and the last forty minutes are about a feud, and it loses me by never recovering the tone it had when a man was trying to catch a fish. I’d have cut a couple of the ambushes and given that time back to the cabin, the boy and the snow.
The one sequence that survives the shift is the burned cabin. He arrives back, finds what has happened, and the film gives him no scene of grief at all. He does something practical with the bodies and then goes hunting, and the absence of the scene an audience is braced for does considerably more damage than any amount of on-screen grieving could possibly have managed.
The legend material is the interesting residue. Other trappers begin telling stories about him, the stories get larger, and the film ends on him becoming a figure in somebody else’s account instead of a man in a landscape.
Milius wrote the first draft and the mythologizing instinct is his, and Pollack pulled a great deal of it back toward the practical. The tension between those two impulses is visible in the finished film, and the half that survives best is Pollack’s.
The Last Gesture
The final scene is Johnson and a Crow chief on a ridge at distance, and the chief raises a hand, and Johnson raises his, and the film freezes. Nothing is explained. It may be a truce, an acknowledgment, or a salute between two men who have killed a great many of each other’s people and have arrived at some private understanding. I think that final freeze is perfect. Refusing to explain it was the right call, because two men on a mountain who can’t speak to each other, making a gesture, is exactly the tone the whole picture has been working in. What the ending doesn’t do is resolve the feud, restore the family or bring him down from the mountains. He’s still up there, still alone, and the last image is a man who got exactly what he originally asked for.
That final ambiguity is also the answer to the material. The real accounts of the man this is drawn from are contradictory, largely unverifiable and mostly told by other people, and a film that ends on a gesture nobody explains is closer to the record than any resolution would be.
An ending that refuses interpretation works when the whole story has been conducted without explanation. This one justifies the ambiguity because nobody has been explaining anything for a hundred minutes. The failure mode is a work full of exposition that suddenly goes mysterious in the last page.
Grant the protagonist the thing he wanted and let the reader see what it costs. He asked to be alone and he’s alone, and the film doesn’t need to comment.
A gesture is stronger than a line when two characters have no shared language. Find the physical equivalent of what would otherwise be dialogue.
Should you watch Jeremiah Johnson?
Yes, for the first hour especially. It’s an 8 because that hour, a man who can’t catch a fish becoming somebody who can live in mountains, filmed in real winter with almost no dialogue, is as good as survival filmmaking gets, and the family he acquires without ever agreeing to it is the heart of the thing. The revenge half drags it down from there, and I resent those ambushes for eating time the cabin had earned.
