Films > Film Reviews

The Revenant

18/01/16

"Turns out God was a squirrel," says Tom Hardy's Fitzgerald, "and I shot the son of a bitch." There is no God in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant; or at least not the white man's God. This is a film in which the unsettled landscape of the American frontier resides over all, and characters are subject to its brutality and beauty through the swinging camera work of Birdman cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.

A revenant: a revival, someone returned seemingly from the dead. Leonardo DiCaprio's Hugh Glass is a fur trapper, part of a group of frontiersmen in 1820s South Dakota hunting for animal pelts in the snowbound forests. The opening scene evokes Saving Private Ryan, a single shot of a creek-side ambush by an Arikara tribe, and without stopping to breathe, Glass is attacked by a bear in one of the film's more intense scenes. Lying mortally wounded on a stretcher he witnesses the murder of his Pawnee son Hawk at the hands of Fitzgerald, and as the rest of the team head off Glass is left for dead in a shallow grave.

Images of rebirth are present throughout as Glass emerges from snowdrifts, frozen rivers and the gore of a horse carcass, creating a kind of spiritualism in the landscape. Before the burial a symbol is carved onto a water canteen and placed on his chest, and later a meteor pierces the skyline overhead. Even the silent grazing of elks or a bonfire in the snow feels otherworldly. DiCaprio's performance is purely physical: he drags his rotting body up mountainsides and into blizzards and of the few lines he has the majority are in the Pawnee dialect, a language of natural metaphor and poetry.

With this, and another recent western - Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight - it seems as though the heroic gunslingers of the old ‘wild west’ are fading into obscurity; there are no ‘good guys' in these frontier narratives, only suffering and greed. The film is an exercise in capitalism, the extracting of resources from the environment at the expense of Native lives. “You have stolen everything from us,” says an Arikara chief to French trappers. “Everything! The land, the animals.” Whether or not the stories from the set are true (DiCaprio eating bison liver, Hardy throttling Iñárritu, only a couple of hours shooting time a day) the result is almost as exhausting for the audience as it clearly was for the crew – a gripping, unflinching tale from the director of Babel and Birdman. The Revenant is an unparalleled portrayal of survival and revenge that deserves to be experienced on the big screen.

 9/10