The Revenant

            The Revenant seemed tailor made for the Oscars. Fresh off his Academy Award win for Birdman, Alejandro González Iñárritu telling a story of revenge set in the early American West? Leonardo DiCaprio left for dead and hunting down Tom Hardy across the snow covered plains? A troubled production that had to decamp for South America when Canada failed to provide the appropriate weather for the film’s finale? Despite all the effort striving for cinematic achievement, The Revenant doesn’t actually achieve anything.

            For all the acting talent assembled for the movie, no one plays anything resembling an actual human being. DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass, a seasoned trapper, gets mauled by a bear, survives, watches his son get murdered in front of him, is rescued and chased by various groups of Native Americans, kills an evil Frenchman, and finally tracks down and kills Tom Hardy. His ostensible motivation is revenge, spurred by the memory of his dead wife, but Glass spends much of the film crawling, limping, and slowly walking towards revenge. He wears the grueling pain of every moment on his frost covered face. DiCaprio makes you feel every last bit of Glass’s pain. As he drags himself across the frozen landscape, Glass is a less a person and more a relentless survival machine.

Tom Hardy plays Fitzgerald, the child killing, Glass abandoning trapper, who similarly just wants to make it out of this frozen hell alive. His motivations are the easiest to understand as he articulates a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” philosophy in leaving a crippled Glass for dead. Every one of us had an ancestor like Fitzgerald and that’s why we’re here today. The problem is he’s the villain of the film and we’re supposed to root for Glass to kill him. Fitzgerald may be greedy and self-interested, but at least he’s something. The rest of the film is populated by unscrupulous French traders, an idealistic trapping company captain (Domhall Gleason), who unsurprisingly gets himself killed, and an Indian chief on a reverse The Searchers. The film also has two female characters. Glass’s wife appears in flashbacks and spurs him to live. The other is the Indian chief’s daughter who gets raped. 

           

            Knowing that Iñárritu filmed The Revenant solely in natural light to accomplish to capture the brutal nature of the American West is an impressive technical achievement. This devotion to the technique has to be in service of something greater than itself. It’s like a chef who has fallen in love with technical gimmickry over things like flavor. Technique is all well and fine, but the food has to taste good. In The Revenant, there’s graphic violence, a bear attack, snow, ice, cold, suffering, and Leonardo DiCaprio Han Soloing on a horse. And it’s all very impressive, but the film’s relentless devotion to this realism devolves into boredom. At the two hour mark, I checked my watch and leaned over to see if my wife was asleep.  

            The film is also unrelentingly masculine in its themes. Strength and the purity of spirit and character win out. The Indian chief in search of his daughter finishes Fitzgerald off after stumbling upon Fitzgerald and Glass in the last stages of their fight to the death. The film, however, is such a slog to get to that point that it’s nearly impossible to recommend actually watching it. For all of the effort put into The Revenant to make an award winning movie, you just wish Iñárritu had tried to make a good one.