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Yet again, Alejandro González Iñárritu creates a film that is artistically daring, but emotionally hollow, a simple-minded revenge film that ends in two men beating each other bloody in the snow. That is the entirety of the film, a simple revenge story that is lacquered with gorgeous cinematography and two great central performances, but like many of Iñárritu’s films, there’s very little that’s actually there.
As a punishing endurance test for the audience, The Revenant can’t be beat. Ever wanted to watch a handsome leading man cut open a horse and climb inside for warmth? Well, here is your chance. Ever wanted to watch another typically handsome leading man walk around with a bald spot from an unsuccessful scalping attempt? Well, this film has got you covered for that too. Eating raw bison liver, moments of beautifully executed violence, and the quiet contemplation of a Terrence Malick film without his poetic soul can all be found here.
There is no heart or emotionally gripping content here, and passages that try for it feel portentous and unearned. Iñárritu’s work is much better when he relaxes into just filming the disturbing decathlon that Hugh Glass goes through to get his revenge. There’s no poetry here, no soul, just ugly uber-masculine chest-pounding and enormous amounts of bloodshed. Outside of its impressive technique and sheer audacity, it’s cold, calculating, and yet another overly-long misery-fest from its director.
Yet even this can’t sustain The Revenant for its nearly three hour running time. Without deeper hooks to grab onto, this just begins to feel shallow, a series of pretty pictures and tortured faces without much thematic content to wrestle with. What is the bigger aim here? I said that Iñárritu was contemptuous of his audience with Birdman, thinking them too stupid to understand his points, so he instead loudly yelled them at their face replete with exclamation points and bolded text. The Revenant is not so different, with every beat played at eleven.
The Revenant still has some quality moments of film-making, and unlike Birdman, I didn’t outright hate it. I admired its bravado more than I enjoyed it. Across the board, the acting is high-quality work, with much of it resting upon Leonardo DiCaprio. He commits himself to the blood, spit, and insanity of the part to the point where I wondered if he left a piece of his soul out in the woods when filming was wrapped. He cranks himself into the self-possessed and beaten down frenzy of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, he’s just doing it in service of a much lesser work.
Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, and Forrest Goodluck all turn in fine work in various supporting roles. Hardy, one of our more under-appreciated actors, has had quite a year in films exploring uber-masculinity’s destructive nature, but Mad Max: Fury Road, for all of its bluster and high-octane thrills, was a smarter, brainier movie with much more to say between explosions. His work here is another strange, body and voice morphing grotesque, and he excels at every turn.
Gleeson has had a year of nothing but strong supporting performances. He’s underutilized here, but he works as something of the film’s moral compass, so it’s no great shock when he’s sidelined and written out of the piece for large chunks of time. And Poulter, primarily known for his comedic work in We’re the Millers, shows how capable a dramatic performer he can be.
Yet it’s the heavy presence of so many Native actors that impressed me the most in The Revenant. Granted, the female characters are mere wisps, dead wives and kidnapped daughters who exists to torment and drive our characters to acts of violence. It’s still nice to see so many faces on-screen that are too often ignored in representation, and all of them do credible to magnificent work with the material. It’s a shame that they’re only ever brought out for historical periods, solidifying the vague impression that they’re relics of the past, frozen in amber, but maybe the presence of them in such a big-budget and box-office dominating piece will lead to more stories with them in major roles? Maybe I’m being something of a Pollyanna, but I want to believe that a lesson about diversity is being learned here.
By this point saying that Emmanuel Lubezki is one of the greatest cinematographers currently work should be meant with a resounding, “Well, duh!” but the sentiment still holds true. Lubezki uses natural light to craft some resoundingly beautiful shots of nature, or man’s struggle to survive in them. The stark, harsh shots of DiCaprio staring out in a panicked state are so immaculate that they could be framed and displayed as photographic art. He’s on something of a roll with awards these past three years, winning Oscars for Gravity and Birdman, and it appears that he’s on track to pick up his third straight win. He deserves it, just like he deserved the other two, and a few others before them.
Hopefully, coherence and editing will soon make their way into Iñárritu’s work. The Revenant becomes overburdened by indulgences, keeping up with the auteur theory in a sense. His voice is loud, aggressively so, but what exactly does he want to say and do with it? Oh well, at least there’s heavenly visuals to distract from the sinking feeling of “Is that all there is, my friend?”
