Coastal View News
“The Revenant” may be the movie of the year. It has 12 Oscar
nominations—more than any other movie—including for Best Actor (Leonardo
DiCaprio), Best Director (Alejandro G. Inarritu), Best Supporting Actor (Tom
Hardy), and of course, Best Picture. Inarritu is looking for back-to-back
homeruns, after crushing the Oscars last year with “Birdman”. All in all, it
has been a good year for Inarritu, DiCaprio, and company.
I assure you the same cannot be said for this movie’s main
character. He has a decidedly bad year.
This movie is based on the true story of Hugh Glass, a frontiersman and fur
trader. It all starts when Indians attack Glass’ (DiCaprio) hunting team. Arrows
skewer a good many of the team; most of the rest get beat to death, scalped, or
worse. Glass, on the other hand, gets out of the melee relatively unscathed.
So you might be thinking, “Oh, lucky him, he survived.”
Not so fast. A little later, while hunting, Glass gets mauled
by a grizzly bear. It’s pretty brutal. He gets clawed, stomped, bitten, thrown,
and dragged in a terribly violent, awful way. And yet somehow Glass is able to
fight the bear and win (well, let’s call it a draw).
So you might be thinking, “Oh good, he fought off the bear.
And at least he didn’t die like so many of the others.”
Hold on a second. As Glass lies there—a bloody, broken bag
of meat and bones—he looks up at the tall, menacing trees around him (a
frequently reoccurring shot), which are swaying frenetically with the cold,
bitter wind, promising to crash down all around and on him in an nefarious
assault from above. And as Glass is further beaten and abused, buried alive,
dropped off cliffs, burned, drowned, shot, slashed, stabbed, starved, and, as
his son—the only thing left he loves—is ripped from him, we see that Glass is no
lottery winner. On the contrary, at times—perhaps most of the time—his
continued survival, his every single breathe, feels as merciless and cruel as
anything else. Just let him die. Let it end!
But Glass, tougher than any kind of nails, pushes on. It is his
will to survive, or vengeance, or … I don’t know exactly what it is fuelling
him. But, one way or another, he viciously defends every last breath.
“The Revenant” has been compared to Terrence Malick films
like “The Tree of Life” and “The New World”. The comparison is apt in a lot of
ways (for one thing, these movies share brilliant cinematographer, Emmanuel
Lubezki). But some have also pointed out that, whereas Malick has a generally
romantic, “in-awe-of-nature” sort of vision, Inarratu’s vision—at least in this
movie—seems cold, harsh, and bleak. Nature is no comfort to Glass’; it is his
menace—his waking nightmare.
I’m not completely sure. It is true that there are plenty of
important differences between Inarritu’s and Malick’s visions. But now I am
reminded of a line in Malick’s World War II epic, “The Thin Red Line”, when, in
the heat of a battle, we see a shot of a wounded bird; then a voiceover says,
“One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered
pain—that death’s got the final word, it’s laughing at him. Another man sees
that same bird, feels the glory, feels somethin’ smiling through.” It may be
tough to see anything smiling through Glass. But there is absolutely something
glorious, sublime, and penetrating about his fight, his will, his ferocious
struggle.
Whatever the right way to see Glass’ struggle is, one thing
I am sure of is “The Revenant” is an extremely impressive achievement. It is
beautifully shot—in sequence, and only using natural light. Everything about
this movie, from the cinematography, to the score, to the screenplay, to the
editing, is beautifully composed. In all of the technical ways that a movie
like this ought to make us feel the
struggle, the mood, the despair, the pain, it absolutely does. It is a huge
technical success.
Now, I am normally tepid about DiCaprio. But he nails this
one. And the same goes for Hardy (though I’ve always liked him).
Sometimes I wonder about Inarritu. I wonder whether his evocative
imagery really does evoke anything, or whether it is symbolism for symbolism’s
sake. Whether it is a dream in a broken down church filled with icons of Christ
crucified, or the many striking visions of a lost love urging Glass on, or a
gruesome image of rebirth, or any of Inarritu’s other cinematic departures from
“reality”, it looks like Inarritu is telling (or showing) us something. In other
of his movies I doubt he really is. But in this one I think he may have
something to say.
