USA TODAY International Edition
THE REVENANT ( DEC. 25)
Leonardo DiCaprio has played some icons in his day, but never quite like Hugh Glass in the drama directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu ( last year’s best- director winner for Birdman). In 1823, the fur trapper was mauled by a bear, left for dead and then embarked on a 200- mile trek to find the man who killed his son.
“He’s almost become this kind of Paul Bunyan character” in American history, says DiCaprio, who weathered days of crawling through ice and snow, eating raw bison meat and sleeping in animal carcasses. “We wanted to really put ourselves in a situation where we present somebody who has lost absolutely everything.”
He sees it as much more than a revenge film, however. “It becomes a story of something much more profound than that — his connection with the natural world and what life means takes on a new meaning,” DiCaprio says. “He needs to ask himself, when all the chips are against him, why does he still move on? It’s interesting to explore in a movie, especially in this day and age.”
In director Todd Haynes’ adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, a young Manhattan photographer named Therese ( Rooney Mara) falls for the older Carol ( Cate Blanchett) in 1952 — a story that’s filled with drama, especially for a romance among lesbians at a time when “representation was even more absent from the world and more mysterious and unknown,” Haynes says.
He adds that Carol is dealing with a failing marriage and custody battle for her daughter while Therese is just beginning her career and finding her footing in the big city. “There’s such a dynamic of differences between them and the actresses just bring such a nuanced understanding to their performances,” he says.
But Haynes also loves that it’s about falling in love at its heart. “When you’re in Therese’s position and you’re in the dark and you’re trying to discern every gesture for what it means,” he says, “everybody’s felt that way regardless of their sexual orientation and their sex. There was something really wonderful about how familiar that is.”