The Revenant is, in a word, stunning. Famously shot chronologically, using only natural light, it's absolutely a visual and technical masterpiece. The film opens on a battle sequence, and some of the lengths of the unbroken camera shots are incredibly unbelievable.
The film has also gotten a ton of critical acclaim, winning a handful of Golden Globes last weekend and claiming several Oscar nominations this week. The public, as well as critics, believe that the role of Hugh Glass will finally be the piece that wins Leonardo DiCaprio "his" Oscar. He famously ate raw meat for the role (he is a vegetarian), and has been regaling the celebrity news and the awards circuits with tales of how grueling the process was, for himself, for the other actors, and for the crew.
I walked out of the film with two prevailing sentiments. First, that I had no desire to see the film again anytime soon. It was one of those works of art that leaves you emotionally drained, raw, and in no hurry to jump back in to the world that it had created. Second, I was cold. Very cold. The entire film was shot in Canada and Southern Argentina and was about a winter fur-trapping mission gone awry, the difficulty of survival against the elements, and all I could think of when I left the showing was how happy I was going to be to snuggle up under my duvet that evening.
The story of a frontiersman battling nature to survive and seek vengeance on the man who, after trying to kill him, left him for dead and murdered his son is surprisingly accessible, even though neither I nor anyone I know has ever faced such a plight. Which sounds like an elementary thing to say, but it's not- Glass is not overly-humanized for the sake of the audience. He is not given large amounts of interaction with other people that reveals his character, and he isn't given trivializing backstory in order to show his tenacity. We are instead to glean his humanity by the way that he behaves, by himself, in a frozen forest. I would hate to think of the impression I would give an audience if I were observed behaving, by myself, in a frozen forest.
I think the true gems in the film, DiCaprio aside, are Tom Hardy, the man who leaves Glass for dead, and Domnhall Gleeson, the moral captain of the fur-trapping expedition. Gleeson may have been the most underutilized actor in the film (which is saying something when the entire 2.5 hour extravaganza has roughly 100 total lines of dialogue), but I may be biased. I think he's had one of the most exciting years that any actor has had, ever, with his appearances in Ex Machina, Brooklyn, The Revenant, and a little film called Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The first three have generated a hefty critical buzz, and the latter has had unprecedented global box office success.
Spoilers ahead, you've been warned.
I found the series of flashbacks to his wife and earlier life helpful at first, as I wanted to know more about how Glass came to be, but ultimately to be a waste of energy. I didn't follow everything that they were trying to tell the audience, and it wasn't consistently apparent whether they served as a figment of Glass' mentality in order to survive the tundra or as a vehicle for the audience to learn more about Glass' wife. I'm forced to assume the former, because if their purpose was the latter, they failed desperately. In a film where so many things worked so well, they were the only thing that, in my mind, weren't executed perfectly.
Alejandro González Iñárritu has created quite a stunning film. It left me visually breathless, it was a cinematic masterpiece, and yes, it might finally win DiCaprio that Oscar. However, at times, it was too in-your-face. Critics (some appropriately, some inappropriately) have claimed that this movie isn't for the faint-of-heart, and they were correct.
Ultimately, it left me lacking. Yes, the cinematography was beautiful, and yes, the acting was superb, but The Revenant builds too fantastical of a world with such a gritty underlayer. The HFPA, in my opinion, gave the Golden Globe to the wrong "Best Picture". It would have been better served in the newsroom, the futuristic desert wasteland, or the Room.
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