The Revenant

THE REVENANT

Director : Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Year : 2016
Genre : Thriller
Rating : ***1/2

After being snubbed time and time again by the increasingly fickle Academy, Leonardo DiCaprio has finally galvanized his chances of winning his first Oscar thanks to his viscerally charged and physically demanding central performance in 'The Revenant' -Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's beautiful yet markedly soulless epic that much like his 2015 Best Picture champion 'Birdman : Or The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance' boasts consistently breathtaking cinematography and fabulously innovative direction but bears little in the way of character development or emotional gravitas.

Based on Michael Punke's 2002 best-seller 'The Revenant : A Novel Of Revenge', the film tells the astonishing story of Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), a 19th century pelt-hunter who, after being savagely attacked by a grizzly bear, was left for dead by his fellow hunstmen. As has been evident down the years, Academy members like to see actors in pain and turmoil and on this basis alone, Leonardo DiCaprio is a dead lock for a long overdue Best Actor Oscar. Crawling through the frozen earth, eating freshly eviscerated bison organs and crawling inside the still warm carcass of a recently deceased horse to keep warm are just some of the things he gets up to throughout the overlong running time of 'The Revenant' and while some critics have complained about the gratuitous nature of these scenes, in my opinion, they never feel overly exploitative or incongruous to the story. 'The Revenant' is meant to be an endurance test both thematically and literally and in this respect, both DiCaprio and Inarritu have succeeded spectacularly.

Shot in wonderfully evocative natural light, Inarritu and master director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki captures both the serene majesterial beauty and relentless savagery of the frozen American landscape with awe inspiring presicion. Dragging us along with DiCaprio through the icy wilderness, Innaritu forces us to the feel the roar of the relentless elements just as much just as his wounded protagonist. In comparison to 'The Revenant', Quentin Tarantino's similarly snow-set saga 'The Hateful Eight' feels positively cosy. 

It is into this blissfully agoraphobic setting that Inarittu stages the many thrilling and often wince-inducing set pieces that 'The Revenant' will be remembered for - an explosively visceral overture between Native Americans and our far from home hunters, vicious psychological struggles between friend and foe and of course, the unending fight for survival between man and nature. But that's the problem with the film. Much like the aforementioned 'Birdman', it is a movie of moments and set pieces rather than a fully comprehensive and cohesive narrative. At times, it trails off into frankly ridiculous flights of narratively convenient spiritualistic fancy, with Glass being haunted by the ghosts of his wife and recently deceased son while other elements of the story such as a rival French hunting group feel somewhat tacked on.

However despite it's flaws, what cannot be denied about 'The Revenant' is its outstanding beauty and its raw, unflinching, predatory brutality. DiCaprio and his co-stars Domnhall Gleeson, Will Poulter and a fearsome (if not excessive) Tom Hardy all do great work here but much like every other Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, the real star of the 'The Revenant' is Inarritu himself, with all of his trademark idiosyncrasies, ideologies and pretentious sensibilities remaining firmly intact.