Film review: “The Revenant”

At last Sunday’s Golden Globe ceremony, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s macho
survival tale, “The Revenant,” took home awards for Best Picture, drama;
Director; and Actor, drama. While it remains to be seen whether that will
translate to Oscar gold (Academy Award nominations are announced Thursday), the
Globes generally have a spotty record for predicting which way the Oscar winds
will blow — and these prizes seemed more a way to make up for not rewarding the
director for “Birdman” last year. It’s a dumb reason to award a film, made more
so because while “The Revenant” is gorgeous to look at, it’s absolutely
miserable to watch.

“The Revenant” is inspired “in part” by the real-life story
of fur trader Hugh Glass (a disheveled Leonardo DiCaprio), who survived being
mauled by a bear and left for dead by the men he was hired to guide through the
wilderness. After the attack, expedition leader Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, having a hell of a year) decides that his
men will split up. Most will forge ahead to Fort Kiowa, but John Fitzgerald
(Tom Hardy, quite good in the latest in his series of marble-mouthed heavies)
and a young man named Bridger (Will Poulter, giving
one of the film’s strongest performances) will stay behind with the gravely
wounded Glass and his half-Native American son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). Concluding that being slowed down is too big of
a risk, Fitzgerald instead murders Hawk and essentially buries Glass alive,
leaving the now rather ticked-off man alone to crawl out of his grave and make
his way 200 miles across the stark wilderness on his quest for vengeance.

There’s much to admire in “The Revenant”: it’s astonishing to
look at, with some stunning sequences captured by cinematographer Emmanuel
Lubezki. Things start off strong with a startling raid on the expedition’s camp
by a tribe of Arikara, who we later learn were searching
for the chief’s kidnapped daughter (the only roles for women in this tale are
as a ghost or a rape victim). And the bear attack is terrifyingly intense.
Filmed entirely in natural light, there’s a primordial beauty to the film’s
landscape that’s incredibly striking. But while the scenes that take place in
it are impeccably staged, they feel just that: staged. At one point in the
film, a character exhales and the camera lens fogs up. It’s a simple, but extremely strange moment since it seems entirely at odds
with the gritty realism that Iñárritu is ostensibly
after. It reminds us that what we’re watching is only a film, and Iñárritu is right there behind the lens.

Over the past few months, the media has been filled with
stories about how difficult this film was to make and the hardships its cast
and crew had to suffer through for the sake of art. But art shouldn’t be an
endurance test. There’s no questioning DiCaprio’s commitment; no doubt he
worked hard to get into the mindset of such a physical character, but we never
burrow any deeper into Glass’ character than his capabilities as a survivor.
He’s not helped by the fact that Glass personifies the well-worn cliché of the
spiritual white man gifted with the abilities of the indigenous people who
raised him.

If this is the role for which DiCaprio finally wins an Oscar,
I fear it will be based less on the merits of this particular performance than
out of that obnoxious sense that an actor is “due” for a win. He was infinitely
more deserving for his nominated turns in “Django Unchained” and “The Wolf of
Wall Street.” We’ve all heard how the actor ate raw bison liver for a scene,
though watching DiCaprio literally gagging down raw meat, I’m not the first to
point out that when it happens, he’s literally a foot
away from a fire. Even a tough guy like Glass might have taken a minute to, you
know, cook the damn thing first.

At a certain point, the amount of misfortunes inflicted on
our hero tip into the comical; by the time he’s being swept over a waterfall
like the grimmest of Looney Toons characters, I had to laugh. Birth.Movies.Death. critic Devin Faraci
described the film as “a prestige episode of Jackass,” and that’s pretty spot
on. When the climax comes around, with two characters rolling around in the
snow, grunting, stabbing, and biting off bits of each other, it all feels a
little silly — made all the more so by the fact that in real life, that confrontation
never even happened.

The film makes occasional grasps at profundity, dabbling at
becoming a meditation on the morality of revenge. During the opening attack,
there’s a shot — beginning with a man getting killed, then following the native
who kills him, then the man who kills the native, and so on — which has more
meaning behind it than the following two-and-a-half hours combined.

Iñárritu’s previous film,
“Birdman,” took home Best Picture at last year’s
Oscars. At the time I couldn’t help sensing that the film thought it was much cleverer
than it actually was, and “The Revenant” provides no evidence to make me feel I
misjudged it. I respect the technical craft and skill that went into creating
this world, but the experience was empty, dissipating the second I left the
theater. Maybe it’s because Justin Kurzel’s lovely
“Macbeth” adaptation is still fresh in my mind, but as the credits rolled, what
immediately popped into my head was the mad king’s lament at being trapped in a
tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2016.