The
Revenant
(2015)
(SPOILERS) Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s latest Oscar contender is a
gruelling, man-against-the-elements – and mauling grizzlies – gore-fest, a technically astonishing piece of
work with quite incredible cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki amid the blood,
bile and phlegm. The Revenant also
features a deeply committed performance from Oscar contender Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio.
Such an adherent to his art is he, he even ingests, and regurgitates, a piece
of raw bison liver. What the picture lacks, though, is a profound engagement in
his character’s plight, a plight that extends from the visceral to the
ridiculous as unfortunate incident after unfortunate incident piles upon him.
Indeed, on
several occasions I wondered if I hadn’t wandered in on a slightly soberer,
better lensed version of The Naked Gun,
one focussing on O.J. Simpson’s hapless officer Nordberg, such is the crescendo
of disaster that dogs Our Leo at every turn. Mauled and stamped on by an
enormous animatronic bear (twice – how unlucky is that?), Leo’s shit-hot hunter
Hugh Glass is left in a state of extreme disrepair and, with the Louisiana
Purchase wilds ill-disposed towards his colleagues (he’s their tracker/guide),
it’s decided to leave him to his inevitable demise. Glass’ Native American son
(Forrest Goodluck), young lad Bridger (Will Poulter) and disreputable mercenary
Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) stay behind to see him off and provide a decent burial. Unfortunately
for Fitzgerald, however, Glass just won’t die, dammit, so the former takes it
upon himself to curtail his suffering, at which point the son intervenes and Fitzgerald
kills him. From whence, Glass is abandoned buried alive, Fitzgerald persuading
a reluctant Poulter that the fearsome Arikira Indians are poised to descend
upon them. Glass, of course, wants revenge for his dead son, and nothing’s
going to stop him!
And when I
say nothing, I mean nothing. Not an inability to walk (he’ll just drag himself
across the wilderness), not an inability to breathe (he’ll just burn that gaping
hole in his throat shut), not what must surely be a fatal case of blood
poisoning (constantly sodden, all his wounds are infected in no time at all, as
one might expect), not what one would reasonably expect to be the loss of any
number of extremities through frostbite, not a series of encounters with the
aforementioned scalp-happy Arikira (these include Leo surfing rapids – why not,
it’s evidently the way to travel if you can’t walk – riding a horse off a cliff,
and then embedding himself in said horse for a cosy night’s sleep, or a homage
to The Empire Strikes Back, I’m not
sure which). That Glass is a remarkably resilient fellow.
This is a
basic, simple story, one with minimal dialogue for much of the proceedings (Glass
can’t even speak for much of the time), and as such it’s a showcase for Iñárritu’s filmmaking prowess. Which is undeniably virtuoso, from the incredible
brutal opening raid, in which the camera moves to and fro from attacker to
attacked, staying with some characters until their sudden deaths, leaving
others and returning to them, to Glass’s horrific bear bludgeoning, to his beyond-determined
crawl, where you feel every clawed inch and reverberating cough.
But we
don’t really have much investment in this character. We’re invested in him
because Leo is playing him, not because we care about Glass. His love for his
son is told rather than felt, no matter how many rather ham-fisted flashbacks Iñárritu provides (and lets not forget his rather risible embrace of the
metaphysical, with Glass on the brink of death, hearing his dead wife’s voice,
even seeing her floating above him in an unintentionally funny moment).
Somewhere between this absence and the ludicrousness of Glass’ unfeasible
survival, the picture began to lose me. While I was continually re-engaged whenever
Iñárritu pulled out the stops with another giddily compelling sequence, I
was left with that slightly distasteful feeling one gets from an especially
gory horror movie, where the purpose is purely to gross the audience out rather
than to relay an overarching idea or theme. Too often in The Revenant, it feels like Iñárritu’s craft is
wagging the movie dog.
As the
ostensible thematic content goes, though, despite delivering a prodigiously
unlikeable character, one can see Fitzgerald’s point of view. Iñárritu has painted a harsh, inhospitable environment, and it would be
more of a surprise to pay a second thought to leaving Our Leo to die when death
is accustomed to delivering daily greetings cards and you have an entirely
reasonable dread of being scalped again. Hardy fully embraces his character’s grungy
self-preservation instinct along with a typically curious cadence, and Poulter
and Gleeson are equally strong as the innocent and morally earnest leader
respectively. As with the technical specs, this isn’t a picture one can fault
for performances. Leo may have been more impressive in earlier roles, but one
wouldn’t begrudge him what looks like an inevitable Oscar for his hirsute
wilderness man.
Still,
though, one is left wondering what Iñárritu really wanted to glean from
this material, to immerse himself in such a slog of freezing entrails. If the
point is an existential one, it’s rather lost in that, rather than finding resonant
the pointlessness of Glass’ quest for revenge (which FItzgerald even goes and spells
out right at the end; it didn’t need two and a half hours of etching it in the
landscape to then have it wrapped in a bow, compounded by its dovetailing with
the parallel revenge plot of the Arikira chief rescuing his daughter; it’s so
neat, it’s an OCD nightmare), one is left shrugging. Was it worth eating all
that bison liver and getting hypothermic? Well, it makes for good dinner party
tales and awards acceptance speeches.
And surely,
if the idea was to hone Glass’ quest down to its essentials (a bit like a mangled
version of Walker in Point Blank),
the encumbrances of his wife and son would have been discarded at the script
stage (so aligning the film more closely to the account of the real Glass); for
all that The Revenant presents an
unretconned vision of its Arikara antagonists, you can be quite sure Glass’ family
situation comes from exactly that process of nervousness over depiction and
content, such that he’s a thoroughly tolerant, modern-thinking man (bar his festering
bent for vengeance) and is even helped by Arthur RedCloud’s friendly Pawnee
(Kevin Costner would be proud).
I liked Birdman, albeit I don’t think it deserved
Best Picture Oscar, but I liked the ensemble and found it frequently very
funny. Probably the latter aspect ensured its philosophical pretensions didn’t
become a drag (indeed, it seemed quite self-aware in that regard). Here there’s
no such insulation. Iñárritu has fashioned an endurance
test for audience (it’s loooong) and
his actors, and appears to be striving for something affecting and profound,
but he’s no Terrence Malick, for whom the relationship between the searching soul
and the profundity of the natural world are second nature. On The Revenant’s evidence, Iñárritu doesn’t really have anything he passionately wants to say, so we
end up with an amazing piece of filmmaking it’s difficult to care much about.
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