In this bloody, frostbitten winter at the movies, at least The Hateful Eight has the luxury of sitting inside by the fire as its carnage unfolds. The Revenant, by comparison, is roughing it. The ravenously beautiful revenge saga from Alejandro González Iñárritu plays like the meanest Jack London short story imaginable. Its thrills chill to the bone.
This is not a movie you attend to feel better about the human condition, or to leave the theater with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Many of the humans are just as ruthless and indifferent as the film's natural world, which overshadows Leonardo DiCaprio as the star of the show. I can't think of a movie that dramatizes more viscerally or lyrically the extremes of winter and the animal instinct to survive.
The year is 1823, and the bickering trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company have seen better days. The movie opens with a stunning combat scene, as a party of the Arikara tribe ambushes the frontiersmen and sets the brutality in motion. From the very start, Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography gets jaws dropping, with swirling but fluid camera movement and a mastery of open space and natural light. Lubezki won the cinematography Oscar last year for Birdman (and the year before that for Gravity). Here his eye is given free rein over some of the most majestic terrain ever captured on film.
Then there's the bear. Basic summaries of The Revenant have gone something like this: DiCaprio (playing the real-life trapper Hugh Glass) endures a grizzly bear mauling, gets left for dead and embarks on a trail of revenge. The mauling itself is one of many "How in the world did they film that?" sequences in The Revenant. It's also surprisingly tender in its depiction of a powerful, graceful mammal defending its young. Which doesn't change the fact that Glass's body is left with ravine-like gashes, claw punctures and crushed bones.
The man who leads the movement to leave Glass behind for the non-human animals is Fitzgerald, a wily brute played by Tom Hardy with a lithesome swagger and Cajun-inflected cadences. Glass has a half-Pawnee son (Forrest Goodluck) and a deceased Pawnee wife. To Fitzgerald, these attributes make him all the more expendable. The Revenant cast boasts several American Indian actors, and Glass can be seen as a variation on Natty Bumppo, the novelist James Fennimore Cooper's prototypical "man who knows Indians."
Based on the novel by Michael Punke, The Revenant is ill-served by a recounting of plot devices; it's a film that envelops you with a shudder. Much has been made of the arduous shoot, most of it in a remote region of the Rocky Mountains near Calgary, all of it done in sequence, to capture the transition from tolerable autumn to deadly winter. None of that would matter if the movie didn't feel both authentic and otherworldly.
As Glass crawls, swims and staggers back to the company's fort, we feel as if we've stumbled upon a lonely edge of the world. Even if The Revenant doesn't have the most human touch, as some have argued, it still commits with absolute conviction to forging a breathtaking movie universe, from first shot to last.
It's purely cinematic, yet as elemental and timeless as an ancient myth.
THE REVENANT (A-)
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. R (strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity). 156 mins. In wide release.
