The Revenant threatens to be one of those films where everything surrounding it is a bit more interesting than the film itself. Everyone wanted to make it clear that it was shot in the REAL Alaskan wilderness, that Leonardo DiCaprio ate a REAL buffalo liver, that it was only shot in the REAL one hour of daylight the crew had each day (they presumably spent the rest of their time playing Scrabble and catching hypothermia). It's already storming awards season, DiCaprio's name being engraved in a gold statuette as we speak, and it's been obsessively written about - from Ray Mears fact-checking the film's narrative, to Carole Cadwalladr's (stupid) argument that it's just meaningless "pain porn", to the surfacing of a photo of stunt double Glenn Ennis, looking like a particularly vicious Smurf in his CGI-friendly bear suit. Oh, and then there was that bizarre rumour about a non-consensual relationship between DiCaprio and his animal adversary, with the studio having to clarify that their star - six-time Oscar nominee and bankable star of one of the biggest blockbusters of all time - was not, in fact, raped by a bear.
Why bother seeing the film itself, right? Well, you'd be doing yourself a disservice, because The Revenant - while hardly revelatory - is a solidly visceral and atmospheric revenge thriller, one that paints the formation of America as a relentlessly brutal affair that left few unscarred. The year is 1823, and the hero is Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), a trapper hunting for pelts in the unsettled Louisiana wilderness. After his party narrowly escape a Native American ambush, Glass, walking alone through the forest, comes across two bear cubs. He barely hears the twigs breaking behind him before boom, he's being
A perfectly plan, were Glass not such a resilient son-of-a-bitch. He proceeds to drag himself through blood, shit, and snow to get his revenge on Fitzgerald. On the way, he cauterises a wound with gunpowder; he falls down a waterfall; he rides his horse off a cliff, then hollows out the animal and climbs inside for a night's sleep. It's easy to see why DiCaprio is being honoured. Whenever he suffers in this film, you can sort of see a big "acting" lightbulb flash on-and-off, just to wake up any Academy members who might have drifted off. Though this isn't to undermine his performance; DiCaprio disappears into the role, a scraggly beard and messy locks masking his naturally boyish looks, and he expresses little by way of dialogue, instead favouring spittle flecks and grunts.
While the sequences of survival in the snow can get a bit monotonous (it's hard to convey "cold" in a film, especially when you're watching it while wrapped in a blanket) there are some action sequences that, in the synthesis between Emmanuel Lubezki's photography and Alejandro Iñárritu's direction, really are spectacular. The aforementioned bear
But when you make this comparison, you realise where the film falls down. Once you strip away the style, the excitement, the DiCaprio, you realise you have what is, in essence, an overlong revisionist Western. The plot is really simple - a guy goes out to get revenge on the guy who killed his son - and it's got a bunch of really pretentious tendencies; namely, a recurring vision of Glass' dead wife, whose two lines of dialogue make her the best (and only) female role in the film. And the depiction of Native Americans is a bit questionable, too. They're all shown as being quite friendly, really, their leader's noble desire to find his kidnapped daughter standing in stark contrast to the Americans' desire for money; you can't help but think that, back then, it was a bit more complicated than that. One cringeworthy moment comes when DiCaprio meets a Native American hunting for buffalo, and they bond over memories of their families, the music swelling up like something out of a Robert Zemeckis film. In Blood Meridian, everyone descended to an equally bloodthirsty level, but in The Revenant, the view of human nature is, ultimately, quite rosy.
Again, it's very well-made, and worth seeing just for the sequence where Leonardo DiCaprio and a bear
★★★½
