Em for Movies - The Revenant

Inspired by true events.



Prepare to be mauled!

When I see that tag line on a movie poster, I prepare myself for strife. Why? Well I’ve learned that for every heartwarming Rudy or Cool Runnings, there are a dozen emotionally ravaging films like The Finest Hours, Everest, The 33, and Spotlight. So when a movie takes its inspiration from the real survival story of a trapper who was mauled by a bear and left for dead, you expect to see a certain degree of human suffering. Well, if that’s the goal, The Revenant had it in spades. I felt exhausted just watching it.

With all the awards buzz that The Revenant is getting, and talk of Leonardo DiCaprio finally winning an Oscar after decades of empty nominations, I had to see it for myself. What I saw was a mixed bag of triumphantly beautiful cinematography, some solid acting and an awful lot of blood and toil.

DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a scout who comes across as taciturn and capable, softened only a little by the love he has for his son, conveyed almost entirely without words. Essentially a love-song to macho frontiersmen without any personality. I suspect the Oscar buzz was mostly generated by the physical demands of the role, which included a lot of crawling, muffled manly screaming, heavy breathing, eating gross things and looking desperate.

Totally worthy of his own Oscar nomination, Tom Hardy was fantastically repugnant as the villainous survivalist John Fitzgerald. For those who may have struggled to connect with DiCaprio’s wounded, silenced protagonist, Hardy gave us another reason to stay invested through the two-and-a-half hour uphill slog: by rooting against the rat bastard bad guy. Crude, but effective. With probably the most dialogue and backstory of any character on screen, Hardy carried the weight of the conflict with confidence.
 

Beware of forthcoming opinions and non-essential plot points. And bears. Always beware of bears.
 

The great American wilderness (á la Canada and Argentina) depicted in The Revenant is surprisingly densely populated by wandering Pawnee, self-righteously vicious Arikara, French fur traders, and besieged trappers. It seems you can’t shoot an arrow without hitting someone. In an artery. Not to worry though, the odds of hitting a redeemable character are slim, because there’s maybe only one out there. It doesn’t take long to confirm the film’s inherent message that “On est tous des sauvages” (We are all savages).

And yet for all of the myriad dangers of spending much time alone in the wintery wild with all of those evil men running amok trying, for various reasons, to kill one another, unless you’re the frontier version of the Star Trek Redshirt, it’s practically impossible to die. Brutal bear attack? You’ll be fine. You can have your leg reset, cauterize your gaping neck wounds with gunpowder, avoid sepsis by wearing the same filthy scraps of fabric you were attacked in. Totally sound. Hypothermia? Not a big deal, you can take a tumble down a roaring icy river with open wounds and just curl up in your sodden bear fur on an icy riverbank. Your extremities will still be there when you wake up. Oh, and that’s just the first hour. There’s another, even unlikelier hour-and-a-half to survive after that. But you can handle it. Man up, grunt a little and you’ll be fine.

 

The true story of Hugh Glass’s survival is an incredible tale. This film, however, is a harrowing, beautiful waste of time. I give it a prairie fire. It has merits, but I'm never going through it again.

Em