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Yes. When are we seeing this?

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Eric Schwerin <eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
> Sent from my iPhone