The Revenant

At this point, if Leonardo DiCaprio is in a movie, you know you’re in for a strong performance. If Emmanuel Lubezki is doing cinematography, you know there will be some awesome long takes, taking the audience from the most intimate view of the action to expansive shots of the whole canvas, and then back again. And if Alejandro G. Iñárritu is in the director’s chair, you can expect a film of heavy subject matter with artful touches of the surreal. The Revenant is probably Iñárritu’s most straightforward picture, despite some attempts to insert a deeper meaning into what’s, at its base, a simple man-in-the-wilderness story. Still, holy hell! Even by the standards of these three major talents, the film is a transcendent masterwork.

The movie opens in 1823 in the untamed Dakota territory, where a fur trapping expedition is suddenly ambushed by an Arikara war party. It’s an incredible sequence, practically equal to the famous Omaha Beach assault in Saving Private Ryan in both scope and the feeling of being in the battle, not merely watching. It sets the tone well: this a bloody, unforgiving frontier, one where tropes of the pioneer genre aren’t so much subverted as ripped to shreds. It’s also positively stunning in its beauty. The film has the odd effect of making the gore (of which there is quite a bit) not off-putting, but just another color in a lush, rustic palette.

Among the survivors of the opening attack is Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), a guide hired to lead the company through the harsh wilderness. While scouting ahead of the group, he accidentally strays too close to some grizzly cubs and is attacked by their mother, and wounded seemingly mortally. While the rest of the party moves on, a fellow explorer (Tom Hardy) is charged with guarding Glass until he succumbs to his injuries, but instead leaves him for dead and murders his half-Pawnee son (Forrest Goodluck). And yet, Glass manages to recover enough from his wounds and survive the brutal winter with no supplies and the Arikara on his trail.

The best compliment one can pay DiCaprio’s performance is that eating real raw animal flesh might be the least impressive (or rather, insane) thing he does in the movie. He’s far beyond merely convincing; it’s hard to tell how much he’s really in anguish and braving the elements, and what’s just acting. On at least two occasions, he turns a blueish hue and looks like he’s about to expire for real. And Lubezki’s camera follows every excruciating detail with such closeness that the viewer nearly feels it, too.

On the other end of the spectrum, Lubezki’s signature unbroken shots augment one thrilling sequence after another. The bear attack is absolutely petrifying, with such an intimacy that you can feel the animal’s breath on your neck. Even short, fleeting escapes are meticulous works of editing and constructed chaos. And while the inevitable final chase and showdown at first seems tacked-on and superfluous, it’s revealed in execution to be perfect in its brutality and catharsis.

The picture often moves quite slowly between its impressive peril and bloodshed (to a literal crawl in a few cases). But this seems less like a loose grasp of pacing than a conscious choice to pause and take in the incredible Alberta scenery. And that’s just fine. Nearly every single frame is absolutely gorgeous, always a sight to behold even when not much is happening on the screen (this, more so than The Hateful Eight, would be something see on 70 mm).

A few of the more mystical sequences the film could have taken or left. Some are somewhat haunting and pretty to look at. Some are just trying to be haunting and artistic and weird, but come off as passé. None of these do harm to the final product, but honestly, omitting them would have resulted in a leaner picture of no lower quality. The portions spent in the real earthbound realm, whether breakneck and ruthless or leisurely and awed, more than suffice.