Review: The Revenant
It happens some thirty minutes into the film. The bear attack, though attack seems too weak a description for the savage mauling inflicted upon Leonardo DiCaprio's Hugh Glass. Flesh is clawed, bitten into and torn off. Glass' body is mercilessly thrashed and thrown about. The bear wanders off now and again, only to return, sniff at and drool upon her victim, pawing at him as if he were mere plaything. The sequence lasts for a few minutes, but it feels like a lifetime. Delivered in a single, unrelenting shot, it contains an extraordinary execution of naturalistic CGI and practical effects, and its visceral and emotional impact is nothing short of devastating.
The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu's follow-up to his Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, brims with such brutalities. Set in the early 1800s in a hostile and unforgiving land, the film focuses on a group of trappers working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. The men are busy cleaning and packing up their haul when they suddenly find themselves raided by the Arikara Indian tribe. Surrounded on all sides, they grab what they can of the pelts and make their way to their ship. The panic and confusion, the unending rainfall of arrows, not to mention the brute force of skin being pierced by bullets or scalped by knives, is all too vividly captured.
The raid establishes the degree of barbaric realism that dominates the film's time period; its aftermath lays the groundwork for the personal conflicts that will drive much of the narrative. Their ranks decimated, Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) must now decide the best route to return to the company's base of operation. Glass, as the expedition's head tracker, recommends ditching the ship, hiding the pelts and finding a path that will get them to their destination without placing them in further harm. Henry is respectful of Glass's knowledge of the territory as Glass is a white man who married a Pawnee woman (Grace Dove). John Fitzgerald (DiCaprio's Inception co-star, Tom Hardy), on the other hand, is not so trusting. He believes leaving the pelts behind is a terrible idea - he didn't spend months working only to endanger his pay. And, perhaps most importantly, the man who bears the scars of a scalping, doesn't trust a man who once lived amongst the so-called savages and learned their ways.
Fitzgerald's mercenary and ruthless nature become a looming threat once Henry and the group find Glass, who is nearly lifeless after the bear attack. Glass can barely move or speak (his throat was gashed), and he is but two breaths away from certain death, but the honourable Henry insists that Glass not be left behind. When the difficulty of carrying Glass' body over the rocky, snow-covered terrain becomes impossible to ignore, Henry decides that the majority of the group will move forward whilst Fitzgerald, young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and Glass' half-Pawnee son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), will remain with Glass to bestow upon him a proper burial when he dies.
Henry and the group are hardly out of sight before Fitzgerald's true colours are unleashed. He kills Hawk in full view of the anguished Glass, lies to the naive Jim about an imminent Indian attack, and convinces him to ditch Glass in a shallow grave and leave. Fueled by a desire to avenge his son's death, Glass manages to claw his way out of the dirt, crawl across the harsh land, scavenge for food and water, take shelter where he can (including the hollowed out belly of a newly dead horse), and stay alive long enough for his wounds to heal so he can hunt down his son's killer.
To say that DiCaprio suffers mightily is an understatement. This is undoubtedly the most physically grueling performance of his career but, that aside, it is also the most emotionally taxing. Stripped of speech, he can only express his character's internal journey through a series of grunts and laboured exhalations of breath. His eyes convey volcanoes of pain and rage; there are times when one fears for the actor's mental state, so completely and wrenchingly does he inhabit Glass.
The Revenant may nod to the visual poetry of Terrence Malick's films and the stark clarity of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but its prime dealings are not for the faint of heart. In addition to the Arikara incursion and the grizzly attack, there is a no-holds-barred showdown between Glass and Fitzgerald as well as a breathtaking, did-that-just-happen shot of a horse going over a cliff. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki once again achieves spellbinding work, often filming the action in long, unbroken takes and getting so close as to see the whites of the actors' eyes...and the blood splatter and the breath fog the lens. These moments that break the fourth wall are an interesting touch, if only because Iñárritu is so meticulous a director that one wonders if these were deliberate or "accidents" left in due to budgetary or time constraints. One moment is surely intended - DiCaprio stares down the lens, searing viewers with the intensity of all that he has endured.
At a sprawling 2 hours and 36 minutes, The Revenant can be indulgent, perhaps ceaselessly unflinching in its horrors, and simplistic in its characterisations, especially those of Native Americans. Yet its power cannot be denied. Glass' tale served as loose basis for the 1971 film Man in the Wilderness, but its re-telling in The Revenant is closer in spirit to 1972's Jeremiah Johnson, which is a symphony of rhythm and moods navigated by solitary figures. The chords may be more ferocious, but The Revenant nevertheless sings a compelling tune of survival, vengeance, forgiveness, and feral beauty.
The Revenant
Directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mark L. Smith; based in part on the novel by Michael Punke
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Grace Dove, Paul Anderson, Lukas Haas, Brendan Fletcher
