The Revenant

(Described as: a person who has returned from the dead with their soul and body intact)

Or: Why don’t you just shoot ‘im?

There are two reasons, and only two, to go see Alejandro G. Iñáritu’s The Revenant. The first is the scenery. The wilds of Canada and Argentina in their robes of deep winter, shot by Emmanuel Lubezki in natural light: it’s enough to make you weep, and certainly more than enough to sate you for three hours of otherwise miserable filmgoing. The vastness and serenity of the landscape, the forces of water, wind and fire, going on with their business undeterred by the tiny figures rattling about them, puts the horrendous deeds of humanity in their place. And then we have to zoom in and get reacquainted with them.

Based “in part” on the novel “inspired by” the life and adventures of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) mountain man, tracker, and guide, the story is kicked off by the kidnapping of Powqua (Melaw Nakehk’o) daughter of the Arikara nation, prompting her father Elk Dog (Duane Howard) and friends to ride out bring down vengeance on all the fur trappers of the region. Their raids lead to the decimation of the party guided by Glass and his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck, winner of this year’s nifty name award), which leads to Glass getting mauled, repeatedly, by a bear, which leads to Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) leaving the morally wounded Glass, Hawk, and a callow lad named Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) in the care of the groups malcontent, Hobber, and general skuggan John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), which turns out as well as you might expect, which leads to Glass crawling through miles of wilderness on a very slow and painful rampage of revenge.

Part and parcel of the beauty of the naturalness of the film is its gruesome insistence on showing us every little bloody detail of frontier life. From eating raw fish, to cauterizing wounds with exploding moss, to getting an arrow in the eye, everything is cheerfully exposed for our maximal enjoyment. The sufferings of Glass and his fellows, starts off horrifying slides into laughable flops into “Really?” and finally expires with a decided note of ho-hum-erdome; rape, horse-innards, and severed finger fireworks not withstanding. It’s not even a particularly good western, though I’m happy to report that the Arikara and the Pawnee are well and, as far as I can tell, reasonably and accurately represented. They are neither mindless savages or mystical folks with all life answers tucked away in their robes, but just another family who want their land back and aren’t afraid to brutally murder anyone and everyone who crosses them and their loved ones, just like any good red blooded American folk (exceptpossiblytheQuakers).

I am willing to rush to DiCaprio’s side with laurels aplenty (and more probably possibly a snuggly blanket, hot coco, and several years of therapy) for his valiant and quite possibly torture-induced levels of acting. His suffering would fill worlds. But sadly he is overshadowed by Hardy’s Fitzgerald, a man you love to loath (a loath supreme) as scunneryly a scunner and manipulative a devil as ever walked under the sun. Fitzgerald’s main move over glass and Dicaprio is that he has an affinity for his own voice, his infantile invective and warped world view expressed in disturbingly quaint stories dominate the film more that Glass’s gurgles and not for the better, as their final exchange can attest. But perhaps the saddest part of the Revant isn’t the senseless waste of life and nature but the knowledge that as bad as Fitzgerald is, and he certainly is bad, nobody who populates this hard scrabble world, save for Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud) a samaritan-minded Pawnee, is much better.

I will thank the film for making me glad I live in the awesome west, though very ashamed to be a westerner. I will carry the quiet images of sky and snow, water and rock for a long time. But I must conclude the second and only other reason to go see the Revenant is to walk out of the theater knowing you’ve passed through an ordeal and you never have to see it again.