Movie Review: THE REVENANT

Iñárritu’s latest is gorgeous, ambitious, empty

In 2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu ascended to lofty heights with his divisive, Academy Award-winning film, “Birdman.” With bristling performances and eyeball-melting execution, “Birdman” amounted to a sea change for the Mexican writer/director, who built the first phase of his career on miserablist dramas like “Amores Perros,” “Babel” and “Biutiful”—ambitious, crushingly downbeat films that beg a palate cleanse of frolicking puppy YouTube videos, lest you succumb to the films’ relentless depictions of life as a meaningless exercise in pain, disappointment, betrayal and ignominious death. “Birdman,” by contrast, at least possessed a previously unnoticed, playfully sarcastic sense of humor.

It was a brief flirtation. Iñárritu clearly has no use for lighthearted shit in his latest, “The Revenant.”

It’s 1823 and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a fur trapper and guide leading a military band of hunters out of the wilderness after they’re attacked and nearly decimated by an Arikara Indian raiding party.

After Glass is mauled by a bear, the platoon’s leader Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) leaves their near-dead guide with two trappers, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (Will Poulter) with instructions to give Glass a proper burial when he inevitably succumbs to his wounds. That takes longer than expected. Betrayed by a murderer and left for dead, Glass, fueled by vengeance, discovers the will to survive.

“The Revenant” is stunning film craft, make no mistake. Iñárritu, perhaps hubristically, chose to shoot the sprawling period epic in inhospitable conditions, on large format digital video (the film was among the first to use the Alexa 65 camera) with only natural light, often shooting scenes for a mere hour a day.

The stories from the set made this film legendary before anyone had seen it: a megalomaniacal director driving his cast and crew to endure minus-40 degree temperatures in uncompromising wilderness, DiCaprio eating raw bison (he really wants an Oscar), schedule overruns that caused actors to drop out of other films, accusations of negligence concerning safety, and a ballooning budget, all of which had Iñárritu doing damage control in the press months before release.

But it’s all up there. “The Revenant” is meant for a theater, and it capitalizes on that acreage with 156 minutes of haunting, brutal imagery. The aforementioned bear attack is terrible in its realism. The chaos of the battles with the Arikara is kinetic and intense. Glass’s Homeric quest to survive, mortally wounded and defying the dispassionate, gloomy solitude of the wilderness, is nothing short of transportive.

Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography captures the splendor of this cruel netherworld, often in the sweeping single takes that electrified “Birdman.” But instead of the warren-like tunnels of a Broadway theater, this kingdom of purgatory is weighted by impassively etched peaks, cobalt skies, shrouded eldritch forests, and desolate tundra. The vastness of the images only lacks a blast chiller in the theater to complete the illusion of living through the frozen hell in which these characters are trapped.

But the perceived shortcomings of “Birdman”—a visual tour de force combined with great performances that ultimately feels empty—manifest themselves here again. The themes of loyalty, family, vengeance, colonialism, and spirituality are gathered together like guests at an upscale dinner party, introducing themselves and mingling in a dream-like fugue, their emotional weight scattering into the half-remembered (albeit gale force) winds once the night is over. Like Herzog’s gritty “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” which shares a similarly batshit creative aesthetic, “The Revenant” is a campaign film, whose quality is practically validated by the difficulties and realism of its own making. But unlike Herzog’s poetic masterwork, Iñárritu’s vision is basically just a conventional adventure story, if an incredibly ambitious one.

Tom Hardy’s Fitzgerald winds up being a more interesting character than our protagonist, Glass. DiCaprio is great, and his role is the heart of the film. But like the entire endeavor his character is conventional, if incredibly ambitious. DiCaprio’s suffering will make you feel awe. Like, “Jesus Christ, now what?”

He spends most of the film suffering and unable to speak, conveying an array of emotions with just his face and physicality (and grunts). He is utterly convincing at playing through the pain, though the catalyst for that pain—the severed relationship with his son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck)—feels more like a plot device than anything real.   

Hardy, on the other hand, is given a much more nuanced and complicated character—or at least he brings that much life to Fitz. Sure, he’s the asshole we’re not supposed to be rooting for, but it’s an assholery based in pragmatism. He just wants to survive, too, and his motivations are perfectly understandable. He does what he must, even when it’s appalling. Hardy ironically winds up stealing the show, his depth a secret weapon that brings some much-needed sincerity to the artifice.

Like a gorgeously wrapped gift with nothing but bloody meat inside of it, “The Revenant” is a lot less thoughtful than it thinks it is.  

For more opinions from Joe, check out his reviews of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Hateful Eight.