The bookies have been busy calculating. Will Alejandro González Iñárritu win the Oscar for the second year in a row? I seriously hope not (I had hoped he wouldn't win last year either). For this skilled director, the importance of being earnest is always taken to the extreme, and I could imagine him skinning a live badger (why not a bear) with the same unblinking earnestness and Oscar-worthy sombreness as when he's making The Revenant. This is a narrative borrowed from the old American myth, so there are white settlers and colonial swagger, and there are the victimised and vengeful natives, including one noble savage who, in the middle of a murderous blizzard, constructs an outdoor spa for Leonardo DiCaprio, our revenant of the story.
As a survival tale, this is engaging, and Iñárritu's vision of the brutal landscape, the desolate majesty of the 1820s frontiers covered in blood and snow, is stunning (the extraordinary cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezski, gunning for his third Oscar). And of course, we have that terrifying bear attack scene, on its way to become a cult object, in which the tracker Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) is mauled viciously and extensively by a grizzly (she was computer generated). Glass' flesh-ripped lesions are the image taken from a passion, and we get the message. America is founded on a trail of violence between men and nature, men and men, men and God, and men against their morals.
Before the bear strikes, Glass is making a hasty retreat through an inhospitable terrain with a team of fur trappers after being ambushed by arrow-shooting Native Americans. The white men are trekking through the forests and ravines of snow and sludge -- the sky is as violent as the pursuers -- when the grizzly jumps on Glass and nearly kills him. Seeing him half-dead, the party basically abandons him with the malicious Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, also up for an Oscar), before he leaves the wounded man to die in a half-dug grave. But a revenant being a revenant, Glass survives and sets out through the wilderness for revenge and redemption, whatever comes first, preferably both at the same time.
The bookies are also busy calculating if Leonardo DiCaprio will finally win his first Oscar. It's a safe bet that he will, and it's a shame that he should have won from something more complex and fun, such as The Wolf Of Wall Street. The actor's commitment here is beyond dispute; his Hugh Glass spends a lot of time crawling through snow, gets sucked under by whirlpools, staggers to beg for a share of bison sashimi from a hunter, and finds shelter from a ferocious storm inside the stomach of a dead horse after he's removed its guts. He grunts and speaks as if his tongue has been ripped off. This is acting of the most visceral manner, and while the film is about the harsh physical reality of the primitive world as well as a search for the elusive human soul, we don't see much (or none) of the latter.
That's why The Revenant is best appreciated at its face value -- as a shell, a beautiful, windswept shell that contains less than it promises. Iñárritu is such an accomplished technical filmmaker with a sense of grandiloquence and emotional maximalism, that his effort to go metaphysical is hollow, if not sometimes ridiculous (the native in face-paint who heals Glass in a makeshift bamboo shed filled with herbal smoke, seriously?).
The tale of the American foundation, the dreamy flashback to Glass' halcyon days with his native wife, and the spiritual hokum associated with the indigenous people -- all of this seems like stock visual cues, a ready-made mythology borrowed to give the adventure more depth. Taking itself too seriously, the film puts on an air of respectability (and Oscar worthiness) solely through Iñárritu's craftsmanship and storytelling bravado that glosses over the rickety core. This is an opposite to stronger, spiritually potent works that deal with the foundation of modern America, such as Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, or even Martin Scorsese's Gangs Of New York, where the story of how the country was gestated through blood, conflict and violence are more chilling, and more real.
