The Returns of “The Revenant”

Alejandro González Iñárritu seems to have finally been ‘found’ by mainstream film critics and commentators. Riding high on the massive success (including multiple sweeps) at last year’s awards season of his film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (which, in my opinion, was completely the wrong choice over Richard Linklater’s Boyhood), Iñárritu’s latest offering is The Revenant, a film which, with its theatrical trailer itself, had created awards season buzz. This was only helped further by it casting Leonardo DiCaprio, a man who seems to have made few bad choices in his film career. In the film, DiCaprio and several others (including Tom Hardy and Domhnall Gleeson, who too appear to be following in DiCaprio’s footsteps in terms of being in all the right movies and always giving well-received performances) are frontiersmen, braving hostile Indians and an unforgiving, uncharted, wintery forest landscape in order to get back to safety. A brutal attack by a bear makes Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) the dead weight on the team, and Tom Hardy’s character John Fitzgerald ensures that he is left for dead, injured as fuck and also having witnessed the murder of his Indian son by Fitzgerald. The story then shows Glass getting back on his feet and braving the elements to return to Fitzgerald and exact his revenge.

The result is fantastic, satisfying cinema. However, there is a problem. In the end, The Revenant seemed to me a great film more in terms of simply what I was seeing than what it stood for. The distinction is simple, and often important to dramatic storytelling, at least for me. Any dramatic film worth its salt or even one with a dramatic theme/strand among other tones/themes it’s going for, always results in observations about the human condition or the million facets of our collective experiences of life, and raises or even answers some philosophical question that hounds us naïve human shits all the time but only becomes the subject of our active mental reflection once presented in a good story told well on film. The events, visuals, sounds, shots and overall fact of the subject matter is one thing, while the deeper questions it raises or even alludes to is another. I thoroughly enjoyed The Revenant, but felt that was more due to a fantastic portrayal of a tale of survival and revenge, rather than how much it moved me or made me think, in which respect it came up short for me.

The major underlined themes of survival against insurmountable odds and seeking revenge after losing it all seemed to run almost exclusively in two separate portions of the film. After Glass is left for dead with no food, no water, no limbs that currently support walking, and no living son, roughly an entire hour of the narrative is all about him trying to return to the frontiersmen’s barracks while also trying to heal and stay alive. So this part is ALL about survival. This is followed by the last half an hour or so of the film, which is ALL about revenge. A big indicator of this division is how there is more dialogue and even actual expression of motivations by DiCaprio’s character after he has returned to the barracks and is raring to kill Fitzgerald, as compared to the (natural) near-complete absence of dialogue from him during his long walk back to the barracks. Thus, the major chunk of the movie ends up being just the more visual depiction of Glass’s survival and how he tries to fend for himself. This is almost all based on the fact of what is happening, rather than really taking the viewer elsewhere into exploring something more. Granted, the whole survival story is just downright brilliantly shot and acted, but what I felt was my thoughts never moving beyond the visuals of unforgiving nature to ‘wonder’ about, or even ‘note’ something. Even in the latter part where he exacts revenge, the only real deeper point is the one spelt out in the short exchange between Fitzgerald and Glass during the climactic combat – about how “taking revenge is not going to bring back the dead” and “whether or not man gets revenge is decided only by our maker”. The focus again was more on the fact of the physical struggle and the stabbings and Glass’s rage (again, all very well done) than throwing open larger questions about the nature or possible futility of revenge.

Even ancillary themes seemed to be thrown up in isolated instances, which wouldn’t be a problem (they are ancillary themes after all) if not for how the general absence of deeper meaning in the narrative made these ancillary themes too sporadic occasions for me to really introspect. Some of these were:

• Hugh Glass’s constant surreal visions of the family he has lost. Particularly powerful in driving home the pain and sense of loss he feels, they are unfortunately the only isolated instances in the narrative communicating these feelings of Glass. That said, again, beautifully shot and a joy to watch.
• The rather interesting moment where Glass sees a huge horde of buffaloes running around in a stampede and doesn’t panic, but as soon as he sees a human being next to a buffalo carcass, his first instinct is to surrender. Man is less scared of savage animals than fellow human beings possessing the potential to be civilized. Stray little incident in the survival journey back to the barracks.

One exception, though, was the damning impact of the prevailing political instability of the time, reflected mostly in the rape of the Indian girl by the French man and the destruction of Indian villages depicted in Glass’s visions, Fitzgerald and his younger partner’s journey back home, and the words of the Indian leader searching for an Indian woman abducted from his destroyed village. A consistent presence in the narrative, this theme became a consistent presence in my thoughts too, as I watched.

My point is not to say that the characters were empty or vague. No, the motivations and personalities of all four in the main cast was quite clear – especially Fitzgerald’s inner moral code (Tom Hardy was brilliant; more on that a little later) and Captain Henry’s struggle to make the fairest decisions. Equally, my point may also be just the result of me being royally ignorant of how to watch a ‘western’. My only exposure is Quentin Tarantino’s works, and I know those too are Tarantino’s take on and homage to the western genre. But, subject to these caveats, The Revenant does seem to me to be more a visual epic than one trying to do something more as, according to me, the best films do.

This is also inconsistent with Iñárritu’s previous works, which showed complete thematic fidelity in their narratives pretty much throughout their lengths. Amores perros and Babel seemed to explicitly be written to always tightly revolve around the respective central themes of “Love’s a bitch” and the ‘chaos’ that are human relationships in the modern, globalized world. 21 Grams stuck to the ‘death/suicide’ theme (from what I vaguely recall; need to watch that one again; Sean Penn was my first ‘favorite actor’ in life). And Birdman is constantly throwing up stuff for audiences to think about as they watch rather dazedly the shit each of the eccentric fucks in that dark comedy were doing on screen.

That being so, let me also give the movie its due for what it does do.

The visuals are breathtaking and succeed a fair bit in transporting you to the physical context of the film. The dark, grayish color scheme, Emmanuel Lubezki’s beautiful cinematography (The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman; what else would I expect) and Iñárritu’s camera movements all make for a very satisfying unfolding on screen of the story. The ambush at the beginning, Glass’s attack on the French camp, and the final fight were all very well-choreographed and shot – respectively chaotic, sleuth-like and savage, as required.

Among the performances, Leonardo DiCaprio is, unsurprisingly, perfect. It’s an immensely physically taxing performance, and also one relying a lot on Glass’s facial expressions (not much dialogue or human interaction for him in the script), and Leo nails it all. That said, at least some of what he has done here, namely the ferocity and savageness, has already been done by him (in a very different context) in The Wolf of Wall Street, a performance he absolutely had to have been on actual drugs to deliver. The bigger acting takeaway for me here, though, was Tom Hardy, who, quite like in his incredible performances as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises and Max in this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, gives a totally unique tone, pace and pitch to his speech. In the part with the maximum speaking in The Revenant, he enhances the deconstruction of the character of the criminal Fitzgerald with how he chooses to have the character communicate his thoughts and convictions to people around him.

A special mention here also for the ending of the film; for me, the biggest “deeper” question thrown in the entire story. Leonardo DiCaprio’s direct, hard look right into the camera can either be seen to be perplexed, or terrorized, or both. For me, this was because, revenge exacted but having lost everything, he now wonders what the hell he has left to live for – and apparently is asking us this question. Powerful.

I don’t imagine too many Oscars being taken home by this one, despite what are sure to be a bunch of nominations. Lubezki and Hardy deserve recognition in their departments, though, and pending viewing of the other frontrunners, my bet is that this is – FINALLY – gonna be Leo’s year for winning the Academy Award for Best Actor.