BONE-CHILLING
Leonardo DiCaprio’s wilderness revenge epic, The Revenant, seeps into your soul.
The Revenant
(out of 4) Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter. Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu. At GTA theatres. 156 minutes. 14A The Revenant seeps into the soul, like the coldest chill ever experienced.
This wilderness revenge epic, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy in Oscar-worthy performances as mortal combatants across the frozen American frontier, doesn’t require a giant-sized or 3D-enhanced screen to make an impact.
An extra sweater might help, though, since you feel this most elemental of films as much as watch it. Alejandro G. Inarritu ( Birdman) directs with brutal grace, using phases of the moon to mark the passage of time on a screen that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki fills with trees, snow, blood and the tortured progress of a man presumed dead.
This is the wildest west of 1823, long before the cowboys and before maps and laws claimed total control of the land and its native inhabitants. White men are a minority on these Great Plains (B.C., Alberta and Argentina supply the onscreen vistas). They are mostly fur trappers like Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) and John Fitzgerald (Hardy), who risk death from the elements or Arikara tribe arrows to collect the pelts they sell to European traders.
This latter threat jolt-starts the narrative, which Inarritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith loosely base on historical fact and Michael Punke’s 2002 novel of the same name. Arikara warriors ambush a hunting party along the Upper Missouri River led by Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), whose belief in civilization seems at odds with his environment and this bloody assault, which greatly reduces his ranks.
The survivors include two clean-shaven rookies: Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the teenage son Glass had with a Pawnee wife (Grace Dove, seen in Malickian flashbacks), and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), another teen whose loyalties will be tested.
The land favours the bearded and the brusque, men like seasoned woodsman Glass and greedy grifter Fitzgerald, whom DiCaprio and Hardy invest with a realism born of raw skill and a gruelling film shoot.
These two men warily share the com- mon capitalist cause until Glass is left near death by a grizzly bear defending her cubs, in a forest attack that makes for astonishing (and excruciating) viewing.
Here the revenge part of the story begins and plot summation must cease, but so must our standard definition of “savages,” the epithet the white men hurl at the rightful inhabitants of the land.
Who are the real barbarians: the men defending their homes and families or the ones stripping the land for heedless profit? An icy wind howls the answer across the blood-soaked plain.