Movie Review: The Revenant
Rating: 4 Stars
Revenant: one that returns after death or a long absence (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
If you want to be funny, picture every character in the film that’s not Leonardo DiCaprio as the “Academy” (definitely including the bear), and imagine that Leo is figuratively and literally crawling his way to an Oscar.
How timely of me to watch The Revenant, a movie picked to possibly sweep major Oscar categories tomorrow. I’m a firm non-believer in award shows, but they’re always fun to speculate. Does Leo’s performance in The Revenant as Hugh Glass deserve a nod? (Probably) I don’t really care.
Did Leonardo DiCaprio do a hell of a job as Hugh Glass in The Revenant? He sure damn well did.
Only now as I look at the official poster for The Revenant am I reminded that the film is, “based on true events”. And I would wager it was based on the fact that there were Americans, there were Frenchmen, and there were Native Americans, and they were all trying to kill each other. There’s no friends out in the frontier wilderness.
After this review I’ll likely thumb through the synopsis to remind myself of how inaccurate I perceived character interactions in the film to be, because there’s a lot of context, and a lot of dialogue and characters I couldn’t understand. I needed English subtitles throughout the film, primarily for the words, but not the moans and groans of Hugh Glass.
The reason I mention historical contexts going over my head is because I was so locked into the revenge/survival story arc, that the Native American subplot was sort of a distraction. As I said before, I’ll need a synopsis or a second viewing with full subtitles to really catch the subplot.
The story of revenge and survival was fantastic. The cinematography was breathtaking, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy played excellent leads, and where The Revenant really got over with me was in its pacing. If you’re impatient, you won’t enjoy The Revenant. Imagine a James Bond or Indiana Jones, heck even Star Wars with pacing as drawn out as it was in The Revenant, but still being completely effective at drawing you further and further in.
As wide landscape shots provide a full spectrum of the beauty of nature, a somber orchestral melody would play the background. If it wasn’t the orchestra, it was the ambient sounds of fire, breathing, the elements of nature. It sounds cliche when you write about it, but when you see it done with such a level of authenticity, it engulfs you in the moment. You could play this movie in a theater of 10,000 and the audience would be dead silent, I guarantee it. As soon as the film finished there was a 10-second reflection period from the 15 or so of us in the theater as we considered the final scene.
Hugh Glass is a frontiersman trapping furs with a company of men set in the 1820’s somewhere in Western America. The group of men are assaulted by Native Americans who overtake the company with bow and arrow as the hunters and their mere rifles are forced to retreat. The group is cut down to about 10 who are searching for a settlement and follow Glass’s lead to navigate the wooded tundra.
Life goes from bad to near death when Glass is viciously assaulted by a grizzly bear in an unfathomably putrid scene to watch, and I say that in high praise. Glass manages to shoot and stab the bear, then slide down a short cliff with it until the bear is dead, leaving Glass barely alive. Glass’s team finds him and attempts to bring him along until it becomes too unrealistic to carry a corpse up a mountain.
Three members of the team stay behind with Glass. Glass’s son Hawk whom is Native American, another young teen Bridger, and Tom Hardy’s sinister John Fitzgerald. The three agree to stay back and provide Glass with a proper burial if circumstances come to pass, with a hefty sum of money waiting for them at the settlement. Fitzgerald attempts to kill Glass himself but is thwarted by Hawk, who Fitzgerald stabs and kills in front of Glass. Fitzgerald convinces Bridger to leave Glass behind to die.
This leads Glass in a fight to survive, and on a mission to hunt down Fitzgerald and enact his revenge.
As each sequence comes to pass, and each scene is transitioned by a wide shot featuring vast plains, high snowy mountains, and frigid rivers, you consider the characters, the events that have transpired, and the fragility yet will of human life.
Leonardo DiCaprio owns the Glass character by transposing these thoughts and feelings from brutal beginning to brutal end. There’s a lot of wisdom in the Fitzgerald character, but it’s all ruthlessness, and as much as I tried to sympathize, Fitzgerald is an inherently an evil antagonist that can’t be reconciled with. But frontier justice is in the hands of God, as is said in the film.
There’s another simple reason why I give The Revenant my high marks. I know over time that whether it be a few months from now, or a few years, The Revenant is a film I would enjoy seeing again.
