Alejandro González Iñárritu (2015)

The ballyhoo surrounding The Revenant is somewhat reminiscent of old-style Hollywood advertising of gigantic movies – ‘X years in the making – at a cost of Y million dollars ….’   Now, however, the emphasis is on the ordeals endured by the film’s director, star et al to get the picture on the screen.  It may be going too far to say that what’s ended up there is subsidiary to the production backstory.  Even so, and though The Revenant is also being promoted as an(other) ‘immersive’ experience in the cinema,  Alejandro González Iñárritu doesn’t want the audience to forget what he, his cast and his crew put themselves through.  So much for the magic of the movies – but perhaps the magic of twenty-first century movies is partly responsible for the hype.  We’ve got used to assuming that anything technically amazing before our eyes is thanks to CGI.  It’s not surprising if a director is determined to put us right when more extensive craftsmanship and arduous physical effort were actually involved.

The Revenant is the based-on-a-true story of Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a frontiersman and fur trapper who, on a hunting expedition in the wilderness of the Louisiana Purchase in the 1820s, gets mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead.  As the title suggests, Glass comes back – to life and to settle scores with John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who not only makes the decision to abandon Glass but also kills the hero’s half-Native son, Hawk, and commits other nefarious deeds.  The film lasts 156 minutes and nearly everything in it seems to go on much longer than necessary – longer than it takes either to get the point of a scene or to remember the blood, sweat and frostbite that shooting it cost Iñárritu, DiCaprio and their colleagues.  This is true of even the most impressive sequences – like the opening ambush of the trappers by Arikara Native Americans and the grizzly’s attack on Glass (which does, of course, rely largely on a CGI bag of tricks).  You understand the protraction, nevertheless.  It’s the Lawrence of Arabia syndrome:  a director who masters the logistics of film-making on this scale needs to ensure we admire that mastery, as well as demonstrate where some of the production budget went.

His previous film, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), featured some ‘ironic’ supernatural elements and this new one proves that Iñárritu’s gifts include reading my mind.  The first line of the screenplay which he and Mark L Smith have written for The Revenant (adapted from a 2002 novel of the same name by Michael Punke) is, ‘It’s all right, son – I know you want this to be over’.   (This features in a dream that Hugh Glass is having and is delivered in, I guess, Pawnee – with an English subtitle.)  Yet there’s a sort of unspoken pact between the director and the audience for a long-winded survival story of this kind, which the to-hell-and-back publicity for The Revenant can only have enhanced.  Most of those who watch the film will, I expect (and hope), get more out of it than I did.  I suspect, though, that the positive feelings viewers have leaving the cinema will include, as they did for me, a measure of self-satisfaction, mixed in with relief, that they’ve made it.

The audience’s sense that, like Hugh Glass, they have to keep going and see this thing through also helps people to identify with and root for the protagonist. That wasn’t so easy for this viewer.  I’ve mixed feelings about Leonardo DiCaprio winning the Best Actor Oscar for The Revenant, as he surely will.  It’s regrettable that normal service is resumed in this film:  DiCaprio’s previous performance, in The Wolf of Wall Street, was a big improvement on what he’d done before.  But the backlog of his dull, overrated work over the years has left an animus towards him that I find it hard to shake off.  As he’s such a moderate actor, I would rather see DiCaprio rewarded for reasons other than the quality of his acting.   And he will win now (a) because he hasn’t won before and (b) for suffering so much in order to play a role – rather than for what he delivers to the camera.  Hugh Glass suffers – at the hands of other men, wildlife, forces of nature – largely in silence.  This helps DiCaprio, who retches, groans and pants more impressively than he reads lines.  Of course there’s no doubting his physical commitment to what he’s doing (which, in the circumstances, is just as well).  Otherwise, it’s the usual Leonardo DiCaprio – conscientious, straining to be interestingly expressive, failing.

Even in his Oscar-winning performance, we see DiCaprio upstaged – by Tom Hardy, as the dastardly John Fitzgerald.  The role is an obvious one but Hardy has an unpredictability and an ability to hint at emotional complexity that are way beyond the leading man.   There are moments when, no doubt assisted by the camerawork, Hardy’s swift, close-to-the-ground movement even brings to mind the evil-doers in Ingmar Bergman’s great film The Virgin Spring.  It’s true that Hardy’s quality of mystery here is the result partly of its often being hard to work out what he’s saying but he’s a strong, troubling presence.   Will Poulter is good too, in the role of a principled rookie trapper; and Domhnall Gleeson gets across the unavailing decency of the leader of the trapping party – though Gleeson’s acting also involves a degree of DiCaprio-ish forced grimness.  Grace Dove, as the ghost or memory of Glass’s deceased Native American wife, appears several times (often enough to make you realise the film’s title must surely refer to her as well as to Glass).  Although the real Hugh Glass (1783-1833) did marry a Pawnee woman, you feel that if she hadn’t existed it would have been necessary for Iñárritu to invent her, for the sake of political correctness.  It’s a little ironic that, because she and Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) both have a startling pallor, it’s hard not to be reminded, as you look at them, of the use by Native Americans of the term ‘paleface’ in Hollywood Westerns of another century.

In the several dream sequences, the unstressed movement between – in effect, the proximity of – reality and imagination is one of the subtler aspects of this mainly unsubtle film.  There’s no denying, however, that The Revenant is visually impressive. The shifts between movement and stasis are often striking; Stephen Mirrione’s editing is excellent; and Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki create images that are often both awesomely beautiful and dynamic.  The ideas underlying the visual scheme aren’t original:  much of what we see illustrates the violent futility of nature and, particularly, of human activity in nature.  Still, the mingling of blood and snow and shots of small figures in a huge white landscape make for some fine pictures.  A sequence in which, during a blizzard, Glass finds warmth and shelter inside the carcass of a horse that he’s disembowelled gives a new impact to the phrase blood and guts.  Unless you have a monster TV screen at home, The Revenant is a movie that demands to be seen in the cinema, and that’s a good thing; but its spectacular scale is a reminder too of the narrowing range of movies that have to be seen in this way.  Once all the main characters except Glass have been killed, you know that you too have survived.  As indicated above, that’s a good feeling but it didn’t make me think the film amounted to more than supercharged bombast (of which the masochistic accounts of its making are part).  When Iñárritu closes in on Leonardo DiCaprio’s face for a final half-crazed-by-trauma stare (or that’s the idea) to camera, I didn’t want The Revenant to continue but I couldn’t help thinking:  ‘Yes … and?’

19 January 2016