The Revenant

 

You know that person in your life who you respect but don’t really like? He’s really good at what he does, she knows a lot about a lot of things, but when it comes right down to it, you would rather not spend any time with them because you just don’t like them? Yeah, if the movie The Revenant was a person, that’s the person it would be. I can respect it and recognize its technical achievement and even admire certain things about it without liking it much at all. 

The film is very loosely inspired by real events and people. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a real-life trapper and tracker working for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. He guides a group of men collecting animal pelts during the just barely post-Lewis and Clark days of continental exploration.

Glass gets mauled by a grizzly bear when he accidentally gets between it and her cubs. Thanks to a world class special effects team, we get an excruciatingly  believable and detailed view of what it would be like to be attacked by one of the largest and most deadly land mammals on earth.

The conflict of the film lies in that, despite his injuries, Glass doesn’t die. The men are surrounded by natives who want to kill them, and it’s too far and he’s too wounded to be carried out to safety. Three men are left behind to watch over Glass until he expires. But one of them, the villainous Fitzgerald, kills Glass’s son and convinces the other man to flee to safety with him and lie about what happened.

But the word “revenant” means one who returns from the dead and that’s basically what Glass does. He drags himself out of the shallow grave Fitzgerald leaves him in and then crawls, walks, swims, or rides over hundreds of miles of snowy, treacherous, native-filled territory to exact his revenge.

On a technical level, the film is amazing. Some of the elaborate shots and sequences the director, Alejandro Inarritu, pulls off are really impressive. One shot filmed backwards from the mouth of a crashing waterfall and the chase sequence that ends with Hugh Glass and a horse galloping full-blast off a sheer cliff in particular are standouts. Notably, Inarritu shot the whole film using only natural light which is almost unheard of, and he supposedly filmed the whole movie in sequence, meaning they filmed in the order that the events in the film take place. In-sequence filming is notoriously expensive and might explain some of why the film’s budget went from 60 million dollars originally to 135 million dollars by the end.

The film’s technical polish doesn’t compensate for its emotional coldness. It’s hard to care about what happens to the characters really. Innarritu is a remarkably cerebral director and so his films usually elicit “Oh that’s interesting” rather than “I loved it so much.” Plus the film is spiritually bleak. Basically, it suggests we’re all just grubby, sick loners wandering through a hazy wasteland with nothing  more to do than to kill or be killed. There’s no hope, no salvation, not even any satisfaction when Glass finally has his showdown with Fitzgerald. It’s all just more of the same. 

 

DiCaprio does give a very good performance, but it’s mostly successful because of what he doesn’t do which is talk for most of the film. Glass’s throat is slashed and so he can’t speak. This frees Dicaprio from having to use his nasal, adolescent-sounding voice and it allows viewers to focus on his physical performance, which actually works better.

Innarritu makes films for grad students to write about, not really for audiences to enjoy. The film becomes an intellectual game of “spot the resurrection symbol” after a while. Glass emerges from a grave, multiple rivers, a sweat lodge, and even the carcass of a dead horse at one point. I get it, Alejandro. I respect it. I just don’t like it.