The first great film of last year was Birdman, directed by Alejandro G. Inarittu, and the filmmaker takes line honours again this year with his pelting frontier epic, THE REVENANT.
THE REVENANT is a story of relentlessness – resilience, retribution and revenge.
The movie opens with a relentless battle, as a bunch of European pelt-hunters are pelted with a punishing rain of arrows from a pissed off posse of Pawnee. These pale faced fur hunters have not only plundered the beaver and deer bounty of the indigenous but someone of their race has raced off with a female of the tribe and rescue is paramount.
This scene is brutal, bloody, adrenaline pumping and sets the tone for the savagery that pervades the film.
The small pack of pelt pillagers who survive are relying on experienced frontiersman, Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio to guide them out of their predicament. But Glass, has an unfortunate encounter with a ferocious bear who extracts an ironic retribution.
His severe injuries retard the party’s progress forward home and so it is decided that he be left in the care of his son and two others while the rest continue with a promise to return. The son is killed and Glass left for dead by the others, and so the quest for self preservation fueled by revenge begins.
Revenant by definition is a person who has returned from the dead, and it’s interesting to note that the credited screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, a horror hack with a string of credits like Seance, The Hole and Vacancy.
Luckily, Inarritu has come on board and taken a screenwriting credit as well. He’s less concerned with words, however, because t’aint much talking really, what with the protagonist having his throat ripped open by a Grizzly bear, the antagonist a mumbling murderous son of a bitch, and non English speaking French and Pawnee thrown into the mix.
There’s none of the delight in elegant vocabulary and structure that was exalted in another recent nineteenth century epic starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Django Unchained. THE REVENANT is more concerned with the pictorial, in particular in its essaying of nature and man, man’s nature, his place in the wilderness, and the wilderness of the human psyche.
Inarritu has had the great good sense and good fortune to have cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, back on board after their stunning collaboration on Birdman. With back to back Oscar wins for the past two years, Birdman and Gravity, it won’t be a surprise to see a hattrick for the uber lenser, Lubezki.
It is the look of THE REVENANT that is its great strength, a visceral vision of raw nature – flora, fauna, landscape, surging rivers, brutal blizzard.
A gruelling two and a half hours of terrible beauty, human tenacity and vile treachery.