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‘The Revenant,’ Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Is the Most Breathtakingly
Beautiful Film of the Year - The Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/04/the-revenant-starring-leonardo-dicaprio-is-the-most-breathtakingly-beautiful-film-of-the-year.html

‘The Revenant,’ Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Is The Most Breathtakingly
Beautiful Film Of The Year

Don’t judge a film by its production problems—a lesson established years
ago by James Cameron’s *Titanic* and reconfirmed now by another
big-budget Leonardo
DiCaprio
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/12/why-leonardo-dicaprio-who-wows-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-deserves-to-finally-win-an-oscar.html>
project, *The Revenant*.

Writer/director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s follow-up to his Best
Picture-winning *Birdman *is an old-school western that arrives on
Christmas Day upon a wave of ominous press about its torturous production.
Those difficulties reportedly included
<http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-leonardo-dicaprios-revenant-shoot-810290>
a budget that spiraled from $95 million to a supposed $165 million; a shoot
complicated by Iñárritu’s desire to make the film sequentially and to use
only natural light; and incessant weather-related delays that necessitated
a relocation from Canada to Argentina, and forced co-star Tom Hardy
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/17/tom-hardy-opens-up-about-celebrities-right-to-privacy-and-rehearsing-in-front-of-his-dogs.html>
to drop out of his subsequent role in *Suicide Squad*. From the sound of
it, *The Revenant* was an arduous chore to make. And as the final product
proves, it was definitely worth the trouble.

Inspired by Michael Punke’s 2002 based-on-real-events novel, Iñárritu’s
latest is, on the surface, a straightforward revenge film.

It concerns 1820s explorer and fur trapper Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), who’s
mauled by a ferocious grizzly bear in the American wilderness and then left
for dead by his comrade John Fitzgerald (a captivatingly cold-eyed Tom
Hardy)—albeit not before Fitzgerald, more interested in self-preservation
than loyalty or honor, kills Hugh’s half-Native American son Hawk (Forrest
Goodluck) in plain view of the crippled Glass. It’s an especially brutal
blow to Glass, who, as seen in surreal flashbacks, already lost his Native
American wife to American soldiers, one of whom he killed in order to
protect his adolescent offspring.

Though horrifically clawed to pieces, Glass literally rises from his own
grave (the first in a series of resurrections) and sets out across the
harsh land in search of Fitzgerald. His subsequent mission plays out with
few plot twists, as Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith’s script, devoid of the
intertwined-strand message-making that plagued the filmmaker’s *Babel*,
proceeds like a single-minded B-picture about one man’s unrelenting quest
for the vengeance he craves, and deserves.

That resolutely one-way trajectory makes *The Revenant*, in a basic sense,
a throwback to old school pulp fictions—especially the
back-from-the-dead *Point
Blank* and *The Limey*. While the director doesn’t complicate his familiar
genre tale, he does embellish it in ways that both enhance its visceral
thrills, and deepen its themes.

Working with famed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (an Oscar winner each
of the past two years, for *Gravity* and *Birdman*), Iñárritu delivers one
breathtaking snapshot of suffering and tenacity after another, in the
process making *The Revenant* the most awe-inspiringly beautiful film of
the year. The duo’s camera begins by gliding in and out of a chaotic battle
with fluid ferocity, moving in to close-up and out to grand, expansive
panoramas (and back again) with a masterful grasp of spatial dynamics. Such
aesthetic virtuosity is ever-present, with Iñárritu and Lubezki crafting a
bevy of prolonged single-take centerpieces that vacillate between intense
intimacy and large-scale wonder and terror, all of them shot with a
naturalistic splendor—the majesty of forests coated in fresh snow, the
formidable iciness of roaring rivers, the gnarliness of torn-to-shreds
human and animal carcasses—that has a rugged, tactile quality to it.

In other words, you can just about feel the grit, grime, spittle, blood,
and tears coating everyone—and everything—in *The Revenant*, which conveys
precisely what it would be like to exist in Glass’s weathered shoes.
Despite its A-list pedigree, Iñárritu’s film is an out-there experiential
work that situates viewers in a very particular time and place, fighting
through the elemental forces—external and internal—preying upon Glass. In
that regard, it has something in common with Gus Van Sant’s *Gerry* and
*Elephant*, experimental indies that articulated unspoken ideas through
atmospherics.

Iñárritu’s many breathtaking compositions, meanwhile—gazing up at swaying
treetops, at lone figures amidst barren landscapes, at heavenly sunrises
and sunsets, and at rushing water (not to mention a canteen decorated with
a spiral-circle design)—are all directly modeled after the work of auteur
Terrence Malick, as are the hushed voiceovers from unseen characters and
oblique flashbacks to moments of bliss and desolation.

Such sights invariably come across as borderline plagiaristic, just as
Iñárritu’s single-take shots resonate as *Birdman*-ish look-at-me gestures.
In *The Revenant*, however, Iñárritu’s brazenly showy tendencies are
justified by his imposing formal artistry, and by the way his visuals work
in tandem with his story’s weightier concerns. Be it the
up-close-and-frighteningly-personal bear attack that leaves Glass at
death’s door, a sequence where Glass takes shelter from a storm by
disemboweling a dead horse and climbing inside its hollow body cavity, or a
magnificent flight from Native American attackers in which the camera
mounts up alongside Glass on horseback, and then hovers over the gorge he
plummets off of, the film captures the harsh, unforgiving exquisiteness of
the untamed American wild. It also, crucially, gets at the grueling nature
of survival: how persevering requires suffering; how physical pain can be
dwarfed (and negated) by emotional agony; and how God cares little for
pleas of help and salvation, if He even exists at all (other than in the
next morsel of meat tasted by a famished tongue).

Bolstered by a cracked-lip, mouth-foaming performance of anguish and fury
by DiCaprio, in a physical role that often requires him to go long, silent
stretches crawling about the ragged earth like a newborn (re)learning to
walk, *The Revenant* is laced with protective-father undercurrents but, at
heart, is about the primal impulse to endure. Glass dons the fur coat of
his bear attacker but eventually becomes an animal in man’s clothing. That
ironic twist speaks to the film’s portrait of survival as an instinct
shared by all living creatures, and which, as seen in the actions of Glass,
Fitzgerald, or a Native American chief looking for his kidnapped daughter,
supersedes notions of morality, fairness, or decency.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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