The Revenant (2015)

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The Revenant (2015)

Post by MmzHrrdb »

A proverb by Confucious states, "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." This is a proverb embodied by the perilous journey undertaken in Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant, a powerful, gorgeous, sorrowful portrait of man against man, against nature, and against the elements.

Leonardo DiCaprio pushes himself physically, emotionally and spiritually in ways he never has before in his visceral work as Hugh Glass, an early 1800s frontiersman and guide working for a fur-trapping company in the icy, snow-entrenched Louisiana Purchase (with Alberta, Argentina and Montana locations filling in). He travels with his half-Pawnee Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and a team of men including the young, conscientious Bridger (Will Poulter) and the big, hulking, impatient and (turns out) nefarious Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), all under the watchful eye of Captain Andrew Henry (Domnhall Gleeson, himself recently a nefarious villain in Star Wars: Episode VII).

When Glass is mauled by a bear and nearly doesn't survive, Captain Henry asks for volunteers to wait with him until he dies and give him a proper burial. Hawk, Bridger and Fitzgerald, of course, volunteer. It's not long before Fitzgerald attempts to suffocate Glass, putting him out of his misery, only to be interrupted by Hawk, whom he kills in front of a restrained Glass out of sight from young Mr. Bridger, whom he flat out lies to to assuage his conscience.

But Hugh Glass is tough. He survives a brutal bear mauling (essentially twice), near-suffocation and a live (albeit shallow) burial at the hands of his treacherous colleague, and being shot at by arrows both on foot at the film's beginning and again later on horseback in pursuit from Arikara Indians. That results in his horse being hit, and him flying off a snowy cliff, which he survives by stripping naked, cutting the horse's corpse open, and hollowing it out to crawl inside for warmth. Then there's the inevitable final showdown with a cowardly Fitzgerald in rough hand-to-hand combat, knife versus hatchet. This is, in case you missed the implications before, a very brutal film to watch.

But it's also a beautiful experience, with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, a master of light and winner of the two previous Oscars in his category (for Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity and Inarritu's Birdman last year) shooting in natural light and in chronological sequence (two very difficult tasks in and of themselves, material be damned). Inarritu doesn't try to simulate one long unbroken take (as they did in Birdman), nor does he go for the gritty, hyper-real style of previous films Amores Perros (2001), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006) or Biutiful (2010). Instead, he adopts a wide, epic canvas to compare and contrast his locations' wide-open snowy mountain vistas with an intimate, almost fly-on-the-wall approach (if these people had walls), wherein sometimes the camera gets bumped by the props and actors, sometimes there's snow, dirt, foggy breath, or even blood spatter on the lens, and occasionally we're right there on horseback with them, as when DiCaprio goes flying head first off that cliff. The result is a strikingly visceral and stunning experience, to rival and compliment DiCaprio's own.

DiCaprio, meanwhile, gives the performance of his life here, quiet, occasionally speaking in native tongues (with subtitles) to his son, whom the men generally seem to accept (with Fitzgerald being the obvious exception), going through long sequences without speaking any dialogue at all, and his sounds rather limited to grunts and squeals of pain, one lone man howling out to a Creator unseen and, seemingly, unmoved.

But his resolve is strong, and it is his own, with his revenge-fueled journey supplanting the will to survive just for survival's sake, out of a need to avenge his son's death and punish the evil of his former colleague. As he says at one point, "I ain't afraid to die no more...I done it already." So when Inarritu reaches his final conclusion, there is a kind of perfect, almost black-comic logic to it, recalling in a way the final showdown DiCaprio took part in in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002), where his hatred and passionate desire for familial revenge was dwarfed by larger forces (namely, in that case, the Civil War). Here, DiCaprio (and Inarritu), wisely realize that the biggest punishment a man like Fitzgerald can receive is that of being himself.

Note: The true events of Glass' remarkable near-death and survival were chronicled in Michael Punke's 2003 novel, adapted here in part after several false starts in development from the likes of Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Samuel L. Jackson (!) and John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and Christian Bale before taking its current incarnation, having previously been told in the 1971 film Man in the Wilderness.

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