Was marketing as 'Liam Neeson, wolf puncher' an accurate portrait of The Grey?

 

In trying to tap into Liam Neeson's newfound action man persona, did the marketing for The Grey mislead potential cinemagoers?

I recently had quite a pleasant surprise. After months of seeing trailers and posters for The Grey, knowing all that I did about Liam Neeson's recent body of work, I was thoroughly prepared for the film itself to be another silly and violent slice of vaguely jingoistic action from one of the unexpected blockbuster stars of the last few years. Instead, I saw the best, most intense film I've seen in the cinema since The Dark Knight.

Over the last three years or so, Neeson has had a line of successes at the box office that, aside from reminding audiences of his roots in films like Darkman and Rob Roy, has actually put his hit rate above that of many established A-list actors. With bankability comes certain audience expectations, which, in this case, have been built by the sleeper success of Taken and the slightly same-y Unknown.
So, basically, I went into The Grey expecting to see Liam Neeson, Wolf Puncher. Perhaps those wolves would kidnap his loved ones, and he'd have to go around fighting, killing and torturing them until one of them gave him the information he needed. That's exaggerating my expectations slightly, but nevertheless, I didn't expect anything serious.

But the trailers for The Grey were very separate from the trend of making a piece of crap look better by deliberately misleading audiences- enough articles have been written about that initial Alien 3 teaser, with its “On Earth, everyone can hear you scream” tagline. While you can't, and shouldn't convey all the best parts of a film in its trailer, there's an odd trend towards trailers that are commercial, and yet make the film look like less than it actually is.
Take In Bruges, which looks like a knockabout crime comedy and yet, similarly to The Grey, was actually about answering philosophical questions within the conventions of that genre, with terrific characters and dirty-as-hell humour. More recently, Cyrus was a film I didn't like, but critics liked it, while it left the fratboy audiences, enticed by the trailers, feeling less enthused.
Isn't it churlish, to complain that something is better than the trailers? Obviously, some viewers of The Grey had the same misapprehension as myself, and complained that the movie was rubbish, precisely because it wasn't what they had expected from the marketing.
Notably, a woman from Michigan, Sarah Deming, sued the makers of Drive, because she thought it would be like Fast & Furious. That's something like suing McDonalds, because you expected a regular Coke and got a bottle of Dom Perignon '52 instead. The Grey is somewhat similar to Drive in other regards- each film takes the tropes of bygone genre filmmaking and utilises them in a way that might even appeal to the prestige film lover.

What really makes The Grey so excellent is that it's actually comparable to Jaws, and not only in the way that its creature menace gets relatively little screen time. It's a man vs. nature movie, but with far more pessimism than Spielberg's film ever had. Seven men who don't like each other much are confronted with death when they're the sole survivors of a plane crash, stranded in Alaskan wolf territory with no choice other than to keep walking and hope to find help.
The film is basically an essay on death, and how men, specifically each of these different personalities, react to death. It also happens to have some cool action scenes and more than its fair share of horror movie jolts. Taken, it ain't, but in hindsight, I'm not sure that the marketing entirely suggested it would be.
When you go back and watch the trailer, it's certainly been edited to look like an action movie, yes. But it feels like most of what I thought I knew about the film in advance was extrapolated from Neeson's recent career, making meaning out of what I already know about the actor's films. This was something like the Kuleshov effect, the name given  to a viewer's instinctive attempts to create meaning from the contrast between two apparently unrelated shots.
The construction of such contrasts is called creative geography, and seeing as how movie trailers are built from clips of a longer movie, often arranged out of sequence, editors sometimes use creative geography to give an impression of a film that is different from the reality of the finished product. Sarah Deming saw fast cars, and expected Fast & Furious.

But directors aren't responsible for the marketing of their films, and so trailers are very open to whims of studios, who primarily want the film to make money in cinemas. If the studio's editors miss a film's intended audience in the trailer that they cut, the home entertainment market will always be there to catch up- that's where movies make most of their money these days, anyway.
The reason why the marketing of The Grey was particularly commercially poised may have been that it was released in January, which is historically either a quiet month or a dumping ground for shelved studio fare. Everyone else is looking at the Oscars, and awards season, so January has become the time to clear the shelves, in the US at least.
Despite the film's box office success, I would say that the film's scheduling was more of a mistake than its marketing. It's good enough that had it been released a few months back, towards the end of 2011, it might have been completely ignored by the Academy, but loved by a much broader audience in the same way as many unappreciated gems. The film has made money, but thanks to the marketing, I don't think its audience have found it yet.
Looking at local cinema listings, The Grey is set to leave the megaplexes and make way for much less interesting fare come Friday, and it deserves a much longer run. It will surely build a better reputation in posterity, but it shows that, sometimes, relying upon marketing misleads the wrong people into seeing and forgetting it after opening weekend, while many more who would've enjoyed it have to wait until later.