Review: THE REVENANT

THE REVENANT

(ADVENTURE-THRILLER/WESTERN)
2 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domnhall Gleeson, Forrest Goodluck, Duane Howard, Arthur RedCloud, Lukas Haas, Fabrice Adde
Rated R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity.
156 minutes
Verdict: Visually sumptuous, occasionally thrilling and exceptionally violent, THE REVENANT's technical prowess and a handful of good performances make most of its parts into many little masterpieces, but writer/director Alejandro Inarritu's failure to imbue the story with thematic weight or emotional resonance leave a hollow sum, not helped by an absurd length and questionable casting of the lead role.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN THE REVENANT IF YOU LIKED:
MAN IN THE WILDERNESS  (1971)
JEREMIAH JOHNSON  (1972)
THE GREY  (2011)
TRUE GRIT  (2010)
APOCALYPTO  (2006)
[The first paragraph of this review recounts the historical view of the events depicted in the film THE REVENANT, but because of the heavily fictionalized version of events as shown in the film, I do not believe this historical view constitutes a "spoiler".]
By all accounts, early 19th-century frontiersman Hugh Glass must have been one of the most absurdly manly men who ever walked this earth.  A lot of elements of his life story are unclear and the veracity of some accounts in question, however, he was believed to have been born around the year 1780 in Pennsylvania.  He told tales of being pressed into service as a pirate under the notorious Jean Lafitte, before escaping off the shore of Texas and living with a community of Pawnee people for several years and taking one as his wife.  That's pretty badass already, but things got really crazy in 1822, when Glass joined up with a fur-trapping expedition going up the Missouri River in what was then largely uncharted North America.  Mr. Glass was scouting ahead when he accidentally surprised a mama grizzly bear which tore him well to shreds, Passion of the Christ-style, taking plenty of his skin in wounds that exposed his ribs along with many other deep lacerations, and breaking his leg and other bones.  He then killed that bear.  By all rights, Glass should have died, and unable to take him with them, but unwilling to euthanize him either, Glass's company left two men behind to wait until death took him and then give him a proper burial.  Impatient and worried about nearby hostile native people, the men hastily buried a still-breathing Glass in a shallow grave, took his gun and knife and other belongings and moved on.  But for all the skin that bear took off of Glass, it didn't lay a claw on his undoubtedly massive balls, because he dug himself up and crawled/stumbled over 200 miles to the nearest American fort, stopping along the way to lay in rotten logs full of maggots to eat away at his gangrened flesh, stole a dead bison from a couple of wolves and ate it raw, and got a skin graft of damn bear skin over his exposed ribs by some helpful native people.  Naturally, he was a little upset about that being buried alive and left for dead thing, so he met back up with those jerks, but let one live because he decided he'd been only a foolish boy, and the other guy had joined the U.S. Army and decided it wasn't worth the penalty of murdering a soldier.

Quite loosely adapting these events by way of Michael Punke's book of the same name, Academy Award-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's latest film, THE REVENANT, is a heavily self-indulgent, overlong, self-aggrandizing, visually-breathtaking, occasionally very thrilling, improbable and impractical mixed bag.  Over a 156-minute running time that is far too long by 40 minutes at least, the movie runs in fits and starts, frequently pausing for masturbatory, artsy-fartsy dream moments of soliloquy in the vein of Terrence Malick (like Inarritu, another dreadfully overrated, art house narcissist with misguided talent), but it occasionally grabs hold of truly thrilling and even terrifying sequences in the beautiful but menacing wilderness setting.  Among its cast there are also a few magnetic presences who enliven the movie whenever they get the chance, but unfortunately, the much-touted lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass is not one of them.  It's not for lack of trying (although as Devin Faraci at Birth.Movies.Death wisely summed up, "Movies should be more than prestige episodes of JACKASS," in response to the film's hype revolving around DiCaprio's highly unpleasant experience of filming that included a eating raw bison liver and crawling inside a horse carcass), but the character of Glass is written so dull and devoid of emotion, that the role is basically Jesus out of a Passion play, enduring endless physical suffering that looks gruesome, but is emotionally distant.  In addition, while there's no doubting DiCaprio's fierce commitment and talent, he lacks the weathered, rugged quality crucial to the 19th-century mountain man.  Glass is also given a fictional half-Pawnee son in the film, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), whose death further motivates Glass' desire for vengeance, because being buried alive and left for dead is apparently not enough.
Tom Hardy plays the part of the principal antagonist, John Fitzgerald, a fur trapper who's a real douche and not much else, but affecting a thick drawl and chewing the scenery as just a real bastard, he's always fun to watch.  His character is introduced in the middle of a piss, which tells you a fair bit right of the bat, but he becomes cartoonishly more villainous as the film goes on.  In the more morally conflicted department is Will Poulter as the famed mountain man Jim Bridger when he's still a snot-nosed whelp, reluctantly persuaded by Fitzgerald to leave the dying Glass in the dirt, but unaware that Fitzgerald has also murdered his Hawk hours before.  Hardy's and Poulter's shared scenes are the dramatic highlight of the film and far more interesting than DiCaprio's central torture trek, as Bridger struggles with his conscience against the gruff and grizzled Fitzgerald's apparently total lack of one.

Outside of these scenes, THE REVENANT features a few extremely impressive and exceptionally violent action scenes, most notably an Arikara raid on the fur-trapping expedition at the beginning of the film where arrows fly from seemingly all directions and pierce bodies with startling ferocity, as the camera tracks through the bloody mayhem from character to character and the trappers hurry to pack up as many pelts as they can and get back on the river.  This particular sequence is incredibly vicious, dropping the viewer into this kill-or-be-killed environment with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN levels of bodily destruction and random but pervasive carnage.  Other exciting moments are dispersed throughout the film, but nothing quite again on this level.  THE REVENANT is insanely gruesome for a mainstream non-horror movie, and not for the faint of heart, but the novelty of hard R-rated action on this scale is exciting.  Unfortunately, by the time comes for the film's climactic action, the one-on-one combat, while plenty bloody, is silly, and the script's resolution is so clumsy that it devolves into an idiotic and wholly unearned moment of morality identified aloud by a character.  There are more than a few moments of THE REVENANT that play unintentionally as comedy.
The element of the movie which does live up to the hype is Emmanuel Lubezki's photography, which captures awe-inspiring natural environments (filmed in Canada, set in what is modern day South Dakota) in gorgeous natural lighting (gorgeous, but wildly impractical).  It does make one wonder whether there were any run-of-the-mill landscapes that didn't look like a tourist destination national park back in the day.  Taken in its individual moments, it's a sumptuously crafted film, but in context, it's often confused and hollow.  It's also the kind of movie that, by all rights, should not have been made.  For all its beauty, it's full of "hard to watch" moments of cruelty and suffering, runs a thoroughly unjustified two-and-a-half hours, comes a hard R rating, is kind of artsy-fartsy, and racked up a $135 million bill, more than doubling its original budget of $60 million.  Inarritu, who won Oscars for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for his Best Picture-winning 2014 film BIRDMAN OR: (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) (a decently entertaining, if pretentious, film that seems like one of the weakest Best Picture winners, but 2014 was a very weak year for film), reportedly went a little power-mad.  If the majority of the press and publicity for this movie is to be believed, it was one motherf***** of a thing to shoot.

The sum of its parts do not add up to a lot though.  It starts very strong, before commencing to an erratic rhythm of sluggish pondering and bursts of thrilling violence, always lacking a commitment to themes or purposeful thought.  Toward the final third or so of the film, it feels completely disconnected from the earlier events as it clumsily attempts to rectify this absence of purpose, but the quest for vengeance and brief moralizing that accompanies it is awkward and hokey.  There's a lot of hinting toward interesting moral issues, such as the displacement of the native peoples and their interactions with the European descendants, or the life-and-death struggle between Glass and a bear which leaves her cubs helpless, but in terms of story, Inarritu has little substantive insight to had to these events.  It's a technically impressive film, but it's a shame that its creators have failed to imbue it with satisfactory weight.  If it were about half has long, it would at least be a bit of great thrill-based entertainment, but as it is, it's a bloated epic with unfulfilled delusions of grandeur, many little masterpieces taken in piecemeal, but a mess as the sum of its parts.

Images via 20th Century Fox