‘Revenant’ a testament to the human spirit Leonardo DiCaprio stars as legendary 19th-century frontiersman Hugh Glass in The Revenant.
No doubt The Revenant will garner many prestigious awards. Leonardo DiCaprio is authentically arresting as a driven survivor. The cinematography is stunning.
But the soul of the movie is the story itself, a subject that drills down to the deepest corner of human nature. Watching
The Revenant, we are swept into a gripping world of suffering. And survival. And will.
This is a story based on true events, the almost unimaginable ordeal of 19th-century trapper Hugh Glass, who was viciously mauled by a bear on the American frontier. Driven by an emotional swirl of retribution, family love and the pure will to live, DiCaprio portrays Glass’ painful crawl from the literal edge of death.
As a matter of fact, the term “revenant,” from the French, means not only a person who has returned, but infers such dire effort to return that the person has come back from the dead.
The odds were slim for Hugh Glass. And that’s an understatement. The wounds from the bear attack were deep. There was no morphine. No surgery. He couldn’t walk. Couldn’t talk. We don’t know whether he would have refused to drift away for the sake of living alone, but we do discover that both desertion by his own men and an unbearable crime against his family, as he lay there motionless and helpless, fired whatever ounces of courage he had within to lift himself up and out of that forsaken wilderness.
On one hand, as an endurance swimmer, I never compare my suffering through the 35-year quest of training for, attempting four times, and finally succeeding in swimming the 111 miles between Cuba and Florida, to true life-and-death survival. I didn’t lose a limb to a shark and then swim for days to save my life.
On the other hand, the Cuba swim was undeniably a supreme test of the human spirit, and my drive to explore the limits of the human will are well-documented.
For that matter, for most of us, life is replete with hardship and struggles. We know loss. We know rejection. Most of us find a way through our troubles to the other side, by virtue of hard work and discipline and resilience. True, few will ever go to the wall of pain as did Hugh Glass. But the themes of pain, physical or emotional, and how we summon the will to carry on are universal.
Soldiers return from war, then battle their way through depression, lost limbs, posttraumatic stress syndrome. Every day, brave people find their way through cancer and loss of loved ones and a long list of adversities. Truth is, there are courageous Hugh Glass types in every one of our urban and suburban neighborhoods.
I have often said that the body is pathetic, compared with the mettle each of us has inside. The first words I spoke on that Florida beach were: Never Ever Give Up.
The Revenant is a brilliant reminder that all of us have the potential to rise above our trials and tribulations through the power of the human spirit.