Review

Pain of perseverance

The Revenant is ugly, brutal and utterly memorable

The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Birdman, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a 19th-century American frontiersman who must battle the elements to survive a harsh winter.
The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Birdman, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a 19th-century American frontiersman who must battle the elements to survive a harsh winter.

Immediate, intuitive reactions ought to count for something, so let me confess that I came out of the preview screening for The Revenant sputtering hyperbole. I told the studio representative waiting to register my reaction that it might be the best Western since John Ford's The Searchers. I told him it reminded me of Erich Von Stroheim's exhilarating silent classic Greed, a movie that even in abridged form (Von Stroheim's original cut, long lost, was nearly nine hours) is an uncompromising, visceral experiment in naturalism.

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The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Birdman, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a 19th-century American frontiersman who must battle the elements to survive a harsh winter.

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After he’s buried in a shallow grave, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his fellow trappers in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s savage The Revenant.

That was nearly a month ago. I've calmed down a bit. Now I think that maybe The Revenant isn't even the best movie I saw in 2015. But I still believe it is the 2015 movie people will remember in 50 years or 100 years. It is a movie people are going to write books about.

The Revenant

92 Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Forrest Goodluck, Will Poulter, Lukas Haas

Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Rating: R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity

Running time: 156 minutes

Mostly this is because of its technical virtues, the mastery of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who shot the film almost exclusively in available natural light, and the way director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu manages to wholly immerse us to a foreign time and place. You don't watch The Revenant, you survive it. You escape from it, exhausted, trembling and grateful to have been born in the age of central heat and nanotech gloves.

It is set in inchoate Montana and South Dakota in the 1820s, a cold and raw wilderness where life is provisional and tenuous, where there's no hope of relief from physical and emotional pain short of death. While it may be possible to stand outside Inarritu's frame and observe that it's just Leonardo DiCaprio and other actors (among them, somewhere, not really emerging as an individual until after we've absorbed a couple of remarkable scenes of violence, the chameleon Tom Hardy) enduring the punishment, the salient property of the movie is an almost perverse, brutal realism rendered in grim but beautiful shades of blue, white and gray.

The story is simple, based on an actual incident in which fur trapper Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) is mauled by a bear and abandoned for dead by the fur-trapping expedition that employed him as a scout. The real-life Glass allegedly crawled and stumbled more than 200 miles to reach Fort Kiowa. The story inspired the 1971 movie Man in the Wilderness, which starred Richard Harris as Zach Bass, and Michael Punke's novel The Revenant, which Inarritu and Mark L. Smith adapted into the film's screenplay.

A tone is set early as a band of fur trappers is ambushed by a band of American Indians. Arrows whiz through space from various angles as Lubezki's camera reels, picking up one combatant and investing the audience's empathy with him until he falls, then transferring it to the man who brought him down, as the trappers try to work their way back to the river and onto a crude raft (the scene plays a little like the Normandy landing portrayed in Saving Private Ryan in reverse). Filmed (either actually or apparently, like Inarritu's last film, Oscar-winning Birdman) in one unbroken shot, it's both dazzling and disconcerting, like being dropped down into the maelstrom.

In the brief lull after the battle, we pick up a little exposition: The Indians are searching for the daughter of a chief, apparently kidnapped by white men. And there is dissension among the men of the expedition. After the attack the leader, Gen. Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), has decided the prudent play is to return to their base, but John Fitzgerald (Hardy) is reluctant to leave behind the pelts they've collected. Fitzgerald -- like Glass and Henry, a historical figure -- doesn't bother to disguise his contempt for Henry or his distaste for Glass. The latter probably has something to do with the fact that Fitzgerald survived a scalping while Glass is the father of a half-Indian son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), also a member of the expedition.

While the plans are being hashed out, Glass, on patrol away from the camp, inadvertently comes between a mother grizzly bear and her cubs. The ensuing sequence is one of the most remarkable scenes I've ever seen on film, a harrowing, excruciating few moments where admiration for the magic act performed on screen -- like the initial attack sequence, it's filmed in a single unbroken shot -- melts into genuine terror: This must be what it's like to be mauled by a bear.

Horrifically, the attack isn't quick -- at one point, the bear seems almost rueful. She stops, and her huge head dips to Glass. She licks blood from his face almost tenderly. She walks off. We think it's over. It isn't.

At the end of it, she's dead, a Bowie knife buried in her neck, and beneath her Glass is dying. There's not much to be done for him, but he's still alive. After some terrible negotiations, Fitzgerald is promised a small fortune if he stays behind to look after Glass. He's joined by Hawk and Bridger (Will Poulter), a teenage member of the company. (Who is also a historical figure -- he grows up to be fabled mountain man Jim Bridger.)

But Fitzgerald is too pragmatic to attend a living corpse for long; he's got better things to do than watch Glass die. So when Bridger leaves to collect wood for a fire, he murders Hawk before helpless Glass, then drags the body away. That night, he wakes Bridger to tell him he's seen more Indians. They dump Glass in a shallow grave and run off.

But he's not quite dead. And the rest of the film follows Glass as he rises and begins to stalk the men who left him.

DiCaprio delivers a performance that would deserve to be called courageous, even if you didn't know that was real, raw bison liver he's biting into. He endures a lot for his art (one of the books that will be written about The Revenant will be about the legendary difficulty of the shoot, about the conditions the cast and crew endured and how Inarritu seemed as mad as Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo or Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now), but the most impressive acting is Hardy's transformation into the amoral, mercury-tongued Fitzgerald.

Not that The Revenant is a perfect movie -- the attempts to inject Glass with a deeper interior life via flashbacks and hallucinations feel stapled on, and his relationship with Hawk is never quite convincing. The 156-minute running time feels excessive, maybe even a little punitive, as though Inarritu wants the audience to experience mild discomfort to measure against Glass' agony. Or maybe he just feels he is due the running length, having worked so hard to get here.

But in the long run, those are quibbles. Most of The Revenant -- that part of it that focuses on Glass' determination to stay alive even when death might seem like a relief -- is simply mesmerizing. Like Greed, like The Searchers, this is an urgent, occasionally ugly film about primal drives and base urges. Like its protagonist, it perseveres.

MovieStyle on 01/08/2016

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