Movie Review
The Revenant
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Bear necessity

By Noel Vera

GOT TO ADMIT: not a big fan of Alejandro González Iñárritu. Thought his first feature Amores Perros was a third good movie, a third fairly entertaining episode of The Twilight Zone, a third implausible drama (a homeless hit man?) connected in time by a wincingly violent vehicular collision; thought 21 Grams was more of the same (three stories linked by car accident) only set in the United States; thought Babel was an unholy mess with an accidental shooting as connecting event, its narrative strands scattered all over the world.

Biutiful was an interesting recalibration — instead of several stories united by an incident we have several situations — one more lurid than the next — united by one man’s involvement in all of ’em. If Biutiful doesn’t quite succeed either it isn’t actor Javier Bardem’s fault (he gives a tremendous performance despite the fact that he’s dying and sees dead people) but Iñárritu’s compulsive need to add and adorn and amplify and assault till you want to throw up your hands and say “Back off!”

At this point in Iñárritu’s career you can’t help but wonder what setting could allow for the bizarre behavior he prizes so much in his characters, could account for the multiple story threads he likes to stuff into his narratives, could justify the intense dramaturgy he wields with all the subtlety of a six-pound axe? Turns out there is a venue: the theater stage. Birdman is perhaps the first Iñárritu I’ve really liked, where his love for the metaphysical and the mundane, the demented and despairing is tethered not by a central incident or central character but by a continuous camera shot (achieved by Emmanuel Lubezki) and the insistent tattoo of Antonio Sanchez’s drums — where the filmmaker’s excesses are matched or even dwarfed by the flamboyance of an art form thousands of years old. With this film and a fistful of Oscar victories you might say Iñárritu’s career is flying at an all time high.

Hopefully The Revenant represents a temporary dip. It’s as far as I know his first feature adapted from another source, and first based (loosely — nearly all Hollywood true-life productions are best appended with the adverb “loosely”) on a true story. To suit the story’s needs Iñárritu has abandoned his narrative-jumping, multiple-character schtick to focus on the relatively straight-arrow trajectory of one Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) crawling through the span of South Dakota (actually Alberta, Canada) seeking revenge.

Not that Iñárritu has abandoned all excesses; he begins with an Arikara tribe assault on a band of trappers (again shot in continuous long takes), moves on to Glass’ no-holds-barred wrestling session with a full-grown grizzly. His colleagues deem him too wounded to live long and leave him with two volunteers: fellow trappers John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and his own son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). Fitzgerald panics, convinces Bridger to abandon Glass, inflict various injuries and worse to the man — hence Glass’ long-distance quest for payback.

Initiating the plot’s forward thrust (I guess Iñárritu has his central incident after all) is the attack, with much growling and gnashing of teeth and DiCaprio swung violently from right to left across the mossy forest floor. I found the sequence halfway convincing — yes that’s the Academy Award-nominated (four times a bridesmaid, as of this writing yet to be a bride) actor being dragged through earth and rock and tree bark, clods of soil literally flying. The bear though seemed more Baloo than grizzly with its rippling fur and overarticulated gestures (sometimes effects animation is too careful where reality doesn’t give a…); short of spending months training a real live bear to follow intricate and specific instructions, I can’t see how they could have pulled this off without digital aid — and even then the results are less than persuasive. If this is state of the art (and I suspect it is) then we have some ways to go.

The rest of the film is crawl, crawl, crawl, explosive cauterization, crawl, dive, dog paddle, dog paddle, stagger, stagger, sauna, smolder, fume. Crawl some more. Stagger some more. Smolder incessantly. A little knife-and-axe action, a little gunplay. Quite an ordeal for Glass and the audience (the film clocks in at an attention-stretching two hours and 36 minutes) and on the theory that little suffering helps raise one’s state of consciousness to a relatively higher level (a la A Man Called Horse or its even better sequel, The Return of a Man Called Horse) one might say one leaves the theater a little, well, purified.

If one however thinks that suffering is strictly for the birds (or bears) the film turns into one long gigglefest, with the less reverent viewers pointing out this bit of makeup prosthetic or that strand of greasy unwashed hair. To be fair, Iñárritu cuts back on too-real details: the historical Glass used maggots to clean his infected flesh, allowed friendly natives to sew a bear hide on his back to cover the exposed flesh. Which may have been a mistake — if Iñárritu had gone this far he might as well have gone all the way, at some point forcing us skeptics to choke on our own merriment (not likely but possible).

The film isn’t without its humor-free moments, moments that actually work or touch on the transcendence Iñárritu toils so heavily to achieve, and in my book that’s mostly thanks to Lubezki’s magic. In between sadistic setpieces, when it has time to pause and allow us to drink in the surrounding landscape, The Revenant is an entirely different film. Lubezki’s lens drinks deep of the brilliant cold winter light and allow the spindly trees, the immense mountain ranges, the vast reaches of snow to speak their monumental presence. Then Iñárritu’s film slows down to the pace of our hero’s epic crawl and helps us realize that America (or Alberta, Canada or — more to the point — Iñárritu’s vision of America) is so much more than backdrop to one man’s vengeance drama; then and only then is the film as big as it wants to be.

MTRCB Rating: R-16

Go see this movie

By Richard Roeper

IF YOU LOVE MOVIES, don’t you dare wait to watch The Revenant on any screen you can hold in your hand.

Get up. Stretch your legs. Go to the movies. Please.

The enormously talented Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Birdman) strikes again with this 19th-century American fable, one of the most brutally beautiful movies I’ve ever seen.

Set in the wintry Great Plains of 1823 and filmed with natural light on magnificently unsullied land and waters in Canada and Argentina, The Revenant is a visceral sensation, filled with unforgettable visuals and memorable set pieces.

It’s violent and unforgiving. Rarely has the sight (and sound) of an arrow piercing a man’s flesh and almost instantly ending his life seemed so shockingly authentic. Few films have done such a brilliant job of capturing the harshness of the frontier life of nearly two centuries ago.

Inspired by true events, as they say, and adapted from a 2002 historical novel by Michael Punke, The Revenant showcases Leonardo DiCaprio in one of his most impressive performances as Hugh Glass, a frontiersman who was hired as a scout by the Rocky Mountain Trading Co. to guide a team of fur trappers through a territory that some 60-plus years later would become part of South Dakota.

While guiding the trappers through the unforgiving wilderness, Glass keeps a close watch on his teenage son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), who is half-Pawnee. (Through haunting flashbacks, we learn how Glass’ wife was murdered.)

One morning while Glass is out hunting, a tribe of Arikara springs a surprise attack on the trappers while they’re at campside, relaxed and vulnerable. As Glass joins the fight and protects his son, the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera swoops and swirls and tracks through the horrifyingly violent battle, following one trapper and then another, one Arikara and then another, as man after man falls to his death.

Only a handful of trappers survive the attack, finding temporary escape on a boat but knowing they’ll be open prey for a second attack once the river narrows.

Glass convinces the group they have to abandon the boat and take a land route to headquarters at Fort Kiowa. The official leader of the group, young Capt. Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), is smart enough to know Glass is their only hope for survival.

Which brings us to the bear.

Odds are you’ve heard about the scene in which Glass is attacked by a bear, bitten repeatedly, tossed about like a rag doll and crushed to within inches of his life. It’s all movie magic, of course, but as Glass is squashed and ripped to a pulp, his bones crushed and his skin torn apart, it’s devastatingly realistic.

Somehow Glass survives, but his death seems imminent and inevitable. The trappers create a makeshift stretcher and they try to carry Glass as they slip and slide and slog their way through ice and snow and bitter cold, but finally Captain Henry has to admit none of them will make it if they continue to struggle with carrying Glass.

In order to ensure Glass gets a proper burial, Captain Henry leaves him behind with three men: Glass’ son, Hawk, a young and inexperienced trapper named Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a nasty cuss who wears a bandana over his head to cover up the grotesque scarring from a scalping he endured.

Terrible things happen. Glass winds up alone and left for dead, but when he regains consciousness there is life blazing fiercely in his eyes, and thus begins a journey filled with pain and suffering, interspersed with moments of hope and spirituality.

DiCaprio has maybe 20% as much dialogue as he did in The Wolf of Wall Street, and his classic movie-star looks are buried beneath an icy beard and layers of mud and blood, but it’s a great big performance — powerful and raw and forceful. After five Academy Award nominations without a win, this could be the role that wins DiCaprio the Oscar. It would be well deserved.

I keep saying Tom Hardy is one of the best actors in the world because Tom Hardy IS one of the best actors in the world. His Fitzgerald is a tortured soul who might once have been a good man, with a conscience and a sense of right and wrong — but one look in his eyes and you know those days are long gone. He will send a chill up and down your spine even while delivering a seemingly innocuous piece of dialogue.

The closing confrontation in The Revenant is a bit reminiscent of the gunfight at the end of Robert Altman’s masterful McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It’s darkly poetic and unforgettable — as is the film as a whole. — Chicago Sun-Times/Universal UClick

Rating: 4 stars
MTRCB Rating: R-16

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