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by thewire
Thu Dec 24, 2015 7:35 pm
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: The Revenant (2015)
Replies: 1
Views: 2032

The Revenant (2015)

Less than a year after winning the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography – as well as numerous other awards – for Birdman (2014), director Alejandro González Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (“Chivo”) are somehow already back with an even more daring, experimental, and immersive experience, The Revenant.

Based in part on the true survival tale of Hugh Glass and the subsequent fictionalization by Michael Punke, The Revenant is a film that takes on and operates in many forms, meaning that it is a revenge yarn, revisionist Western, and meditation on man versus nature all pooled into one mesmerizing picture. Someone may wonder – how exactly can all of those aspects work in a cohesive manner?

Through a breathtaking opening sequence, the audience is introduced to a grim collection of characters: frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), his “half-breed” son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), criminal John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), and fur-trapper Jim Bridger (Will Poulter).

At the end of a six-month hunting party, the men are finishing their pelts when they are ambushed by a Pawnee war party that is also searching for their leader, Elk Dog’s (Duane Howard) daughter, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). Through lengthy takes, the impact of unforgiving violence and desecration of the environment is exhibited in full-force. Immediately, Iñárritu has immersed his audience into the frozen Hell that he has created.

The importance of this sequence cannot be stressed enough. Besides serving as an introduction to the characters, the audience is pulled into the film’s landscape. An environment of two distinct realms: the physical and the spiritual. As previously stated, the fur-trappers are ambushed by the war party, and at the end of the sequence, there is a sweeping 180-degree pan from the hunting party escaping on the boat, back to the village they ran from, and up to the sky which is being pummeled by heavy smoke.

This camera motion feels like a religious movement, as if existence has just been captured in a single swooping take. The way in which the clouds embrace the smoke feel reminiscent of the conclusive lamentation from Beowulf, “Heaven swallowed the smoke.” By burning up the world they live in, the destruction so grand, these physical beings have seeped their hatred and violence into the spiritual world as well. A moment such as this is so rarely achieved in film, that thanks must be dealt to all those involved.

Following the hunting party’s escape, the men attempt to find their way home with the help of Hugh Glass. However, during a seemingly routine scavenging mission, Glass is brutally mauled by a bear and as a result, is left invalid. Brutality and conflict are non-exclusive entities in The Revenant and this battle between man and beast suggests that co-existence – had it ever even existed before – is a far-fetched thought.

After the bear attack, Henry states that any man who elects himself to stay back and attend to Glass’ recovery will earn themselves a hefty pay. With altruistic spirit, Bridger is the first to volunteer, followed by a disgruntled and nefarious Fitzgerald. In a sense, this is where the story of The Revenant ends and the journey begins – as the narrative evolves into an arduous and ethereal poetic encapsulation of man and nature.

There is a definite Malickian influence on the film, as its visuals of unflinching violence are met with tree tops slowly swaying in the wind. This distilled beauty within madness is as effective as ever through Chivo’s lens, and The Revenant quickly feels like a spiritual successor – or perhaps, precursor, if chronologically speaking – to Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998). Men fight each other and destroy all that is around them, and for what? Each film has their reasons and in The Revenant it ranges from fur to family.

Featuring a universal sense of cruelty, a sign mounted on a lynched Native American reads, “On est tous des savages (We are all savages).” If reparations are paid in the film to those wronged, it is in measures of barbarity. The phrase, “Violence begets violence,” rings throughout the picture, because if there is any reciprocity that can be counted on, it is not the exchanging of goods, but rather vicious reaction.

The Revenant is a mirage of a film. As probably understood through this review, it’s hard to pinpoint the film’s soul – that is, what it wants to say. The textual importance of revenge diminishes over the duration, and as one of the men Glass encounters, Hikuc (Arthur RedCloud), states, “My heart bleeds, but revenge is in the creator’s hands.” This notion of simply leaving justice in the hands of fate is an implausible idea to some, as other filmmaker’s such as Gaspar Noé have posited revenge as a human right. Yet what is human right? Is it not just purported ownership over something one has no right over, as a means of justification?

Towards the end of the film, Glass remarks, “I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I’d done it already.” Perhaps what the audience witnesses in The Revenant then is not the tale of a man’s survival, but rather a spiritual rebirth – reincarnation, if you will. Meaning that, when Glass escapes his shallow grave – nature’s womb – he spends a significant time crawling, and then learning how to walk again. We witness Glass pick up a wooden stick, and with childlike imagination, pretends to shoot a moose with it. He feeds, slowly though, as if for the first time.

Through this rebirth, Glass is able to truly enact revenge as he is able to give it up to fate. He becomes less concerned with the man-made - the physical - and begins to find solace in the eternal once he lets go. This is supplemented with his deceased wife standing atop a hill, smiling at him (she herself perhaps reborn, as a prior image displays a bird crawling from a bullet wound in her chest). As in the beginning of the film, Earth’s smoke filled the Heavens, and now the Heavens have returned to the Earth. It is a resonant and lasting image that, within a film of such visceral savagery, is pure.

The photography by Chivo is, again, some of the best of the year (which at this point, may just be his norm). Critics have stated that for such a rough film, it is far too polished – yet the immersion could not have existed without such refinement. Narratively and emotionally, The Revenant is largely impenetrable and rightfully such. As Chivo himself stated, “That was the other reason to shoot digital instead of film. I didn’t want to have grain, I didn’t want it to feel like a representation of the experience of Glass. I wanted to feel as if you are walking with him. I wanted it to be visceral, I wanted you to feel his breath and see his sweat, the tears coming out of his eyes.”

Within DiCaprio’s portrayal of Hugh Glass, all of the aforementioned is experienced. It is a career defining performance, one that is – albeit largely silent – so deftly calculated, that not a single beat is missed. Equally matched are his supporting cast members, each with their own distinctive moment that plays elegiacally. The Revenant is a crushing film about those returned from the dead as much as those who have been living as such.

Certainly this has already gone on for too long, so perhaps it is not my words which can sum up the cinematic bravado that is on display in The Revenant. In fact, I feel as if the words of Edward Train (John Dee Smith) from Malick’s Thin Red Line are the perfect summation of the world, characters, and soul of The Revenant: “This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?”

As much of an endurance test as it is life-affirming filmmaking, The Revenant is an unflinching take on man and nature and the ways in which they conflict, and is done so in a fashion that not everyone will find catharsis in its imagery, which will no doubt lead to both adulation and condemnation. Through the direction Iñárritu, lens of Chivo, and performances from the cast, what could have easily been a soulless revenge yarn, is instead elevated to a powerful reminder of the way in which film can distill the human spirit. The Revenant, then, is a synthesis of the living and the dead, the ways in which cinema itself is an everlasting power that never truly exists.

For more reviews, Cryptic Celluloid.