BRAVO, LEO!
(Give the bear an Oscar, too) Visceral, exhausting and utterly brilliant... DiCaprio’s snowy Western is a clear favourite for Oscar success this year
‘A film of extraordinary intensity demonstrating a film-maker at the very top of his creative powers’
On the one hand, you could just regard The
Revenant as a snowy Western in which Leonardo DiCaprio grows a bushy beard, gets nearly eaten by a bear and then embarks on a very long, horribly cold-looking battle for survival that goes on and on and on… until he wins an Oscar. On the other, you could see it for what it is – a work of dazzling creative genius and the standout film of this awards season.
I’ve watched it twice now and enthusiastically subscribe to the latter view. This is film-making of the very highest order, brilliantly combining all the heritage and history of the epic adventure picture with the very latest in movie-making technology. The stunning cinematography is a work of art in its own right, while the visual effects are almost totally invisible. Never mind believing that a man can fly; you’ll come out of this feeling you’ve been mauled by a bear yourself.
It deservedly won three Golden Globes last weekend (Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor for DiCaprio) and there’s every chance it could repeat that success come Oscar time. For its Mexican director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, that would represent an extraordinary and, as far as I know, unprecedented double, given that Best Film and Best Director were just two of the four Oscars that his last film, Birdman, won a mere 11 months ago.
People talk about the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan as showing a cinema audience, for the first time, what landing on a heavily defended beach on D-Day was really like. Something very similar happens early on in The Revenant, after a strange, dreamscape opening (complete with subtitled mutterings in the Pawnee language) and our first glimpse of Leo – as the guide Hugh Glass – splashing through a flooded forest in search of elk.
In the quiet wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, his first and only shot kills the deer but it also attracts the deadly attentions of a hunting party from the Arikara tribe, or Ree as they are referred to by the nervous fur-trapping expedition that Glass and his son, Hawk, are working for. Just as Steven Spielberg did with Private
Ryan, so Iñárritu does here, suddenly and shockingly showing us just how terrifying and confusing an attack by battle-hardened Native Americans must have been, particularly in the early 19th century (the action is set in 1823/4) when, in the time it took you to reload your rifle, you could be pierced by two or three silent but lethally sharp arrows. You’d live just long enough to feel the intense stab of pain as you were scalped. Choreography (horses, terrified trappers and Arikara are running in every direction) and camerawork combine in a dizzying way that leaves you almost gasping for breath as the inexperienced Captain Henry (an excellent Domhnall Gleeson) finds his trapping party of more than 40 reduced to barely a dozen in as many minutes. But those Ree warriors – after both the valuable beaver pelts and the chief ’s missing daughter – aren’t finished yet. And nor is Iñárritu. If anything, Glass’s savaging by a female bear protecting her cubs is even more shocking, capturing the speed, size and amazing strength of the enraged animal. Glass is tossed around like a rag doll. The sequence is a triumph for those who recreated it (a mix of wonderful stunt work, brilliant CGI and maybe an old-fashioned fur-suit) but a viscerally painful and totally exhausting experience for us watching.
Suddenly, it’s clear why the film is called The
Revenant. If Glass survives this – the shock, the blood loss, the risk of infection – he really will have come back from the dead. But what could possibly give a man that sort of burning desire to survive? Revenge. Thanks, however, to Mark L Smith’s cleverly constructed screenplay, where rare acts of kindness are always countered by terrible cruelty,
The Revenant is so much more than that. I’ve already praised the camera work of Iñárritu’s much-garlanded cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (Oscars for Birdman and Gravity), and Rich McBride’s visual-effects team. Only a slightly unconvincing herd of buffalo lets the latter down.
But the richly atmospheric soundtrack is fabulous too, a mix of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s simple but haunting theme (Sakamoto provided the unforgettable score for Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which David Bowie starred) and the rhythmic, more avant-garde material by Alva Noto. The latter inhabits that strange territory halfway between music and sound design quite brilliantly, particularly in the dream sequences when Glass is recalling his Pawnee wife and the son he saved.
We mustn’t, however, forget the actors. DiCaprio may not have a whole lot to say (the bear attack leaves him with a throat wound that makes speech almost impossible) but he’s clearly thrown heart, soul and facial hair into what is an astonishing physical performance. Nominationgrabbingly excellent, too, is Tom Hardy as Fitzgerald, the brutal, constantly complaining frontiersman who believes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but only if it benefits him personally. He is as splendid a baddie as you could care to find.
Marshalling everything, however, is the man with the overall vision, Iñárritu, who – despite the undeniable over-egging of the blood-soaked last lap – delivers a film of extraordinary intensity and demonstrates to cinemagoers and Oscar-voters alike that he really is a film-maker at the very top of his creative powers. The thrilling result is long, gruelling but absolutely unmissable.