The Revenant (5/5 Stars)

This much is true: In 1823 on Captain Henry’s expedition up the Missouri River, Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear. He was severely wounded. His compatriots could not carry him all the way back to the fort. Two young men, Bridger (18) and Fitzgerald (23) stayed behind to wait for help as the rest went ahead. Bridger and Fitzgerald abandoned Hugh Glass without food or supplies. Hugh Glass crawled and stumbled the some 200 miles back to the fort alone.

This much is also true: Right around the time Director Alejandro Innaritu and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki were accepting their respective Oscars for Birdman, an on location film shoot was going on in the frigid winter of Wyoming or South America or some other godforsaken place. The conditions were so terrible that they were starting to leak into the press Apocalypse Now style. “The Revenant” was that movie and watching the movie, it looks like hell froze over on the film shoot. I do not know if this movie will join “Apocalypse Now” and “Fitzcarraldo” in the legendary realms of ridiculously hard film shoots but the affect in the theater is akin to those movies. In other words, this movie does the original true story right. It feels like Leonardo Dicaprio (Hugh Glass) was attacked by a bear, abandoned by his compatriots, and ended up crawling two hundred miles to safety through blizzards and Indian attacks. It is an intense awesome movie.

A main star of the movie (and what separates it from all other Westerns) is the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. He is well known for two things. First are his long takes. There are plenty in this movie but I hardly recognized or paid attention to them. When watching his previous movies like Gravity and Birdman, the long takes were part of the excitement. They are less so here as Lubezki uses them plenty but does seem to feel as if he needs to use them exclusively. That is to say when it makes story sense to not keep on the same shot, he doesn’t. Second is simply the look of the movie that seems to only occur in movie shot by him. For the past decade he has perfected this beautiful look in movies such as The New World, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman. It must be hard to do because it looks so great and yet he seems to be the only one doing it. “The Revenant” was shot entirely in winter using only natural light. The result is a movie that does not look like any other movie. It is a ghostly haunted visual effect of denotes the hardness and coldness of life at that time. Lubezki rightly was awarded the Oscar for the past two years. He may very well win again this year and he would deserve it. He is in the prime of a spurt of aritistic genius.

Leonardo Dicaprio may very well win his first Oscar this year and he too would deserve it. This actor I believe has achieved a certain Meryl Streep-ness or Philip Seymour Hoffman-ness that makes it seem that he is perfect for every role he finds himself in. The secret is a full on commitment to the role and if there ever was anyone committed to a role it is Dicaprio here. Here he is wrestling a bear, swimming through icy rivers, eating raw meat, and fighting hand to hand with Indians. His last role was “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It takes a special actor to be the right choice for both roles.

Playing his antagonist, Fitzgerald, is an actor that was made for rugged terrain, the art house muscle man Tom Hardy. The movie does a good job of setting up his villainy. He has worked painstakingly for the last six months only for an Indian attack to steal all of the wealth of the expedition. He was half-scalped earlier in his life (he has a scar that makes him partly bald) and so does not particularly like or more importantly trust Hugh Glass’s half Pawnee son. He is a desperate angry man. Between the two is Captain Henry played by Domnhall Gleeson, who is good looking enough to be a man with money but odd looking enough to belong in the 19^th century. This guy is everywhere this year and impressively pulls off many different characters.

I am playing with the idea of drawing up a syllabus of American History through movies and “The Revenant” is one of those movies I would love to have in it. What makes it better in historical terms that any old western is the unflinching way it shows the elements and the noble/savage way it treats Native Americans. This is particularly important because we have a tendency to look at history in black and white terms. But that is not how this movie treats the Akirawa tribe. It humanizes them and gives them appropriate motivations but it also does not hide the fact that they are extremely dangerous and have their own tribal prejudices. It also portrays them as losers in their struggle as is noted by a scene in which Fitzgerald and Bridger walk through the remnants of a massacre of an Indian village. This too is important.  Lastly, what other movie do you know takes place in 1823. No other movie. Exactly.