Film review of ‘The Revenant’

Does ‘The Revenant’ deserve its (many) Oscar nominations?|

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a good director of trailers, not films – the one-shot whimsy of a teaser for “The Revenant” turns to nihilistic drudgery over two and a half hours. The movie is mostly Leonardo DiCaprio in the muck, dragging himself along with his elbows, driven by his indomitable will to win an Oscar.

DiCaprio’s character, Hugh Glass, serves as a tracker for a party of fur trappers lead by Capt. Henry (Domhnall Gleeson). They’re filmed in pristine, early American wilderness where the weather freezes waterfalls on cliffs and snow boogers on men’s mustaches and the best way to stay warm is running from the arrows of the Arikara war party that’s forever on their heels. All in all, a tough place to be a single parent, as Glass is to Hawk (Forrest Goodluck).

In spite of its absurd tally of Academy Award nominations, if “The Revenant” is to be remembered at all, it’s for the scene where Glass meets a mama grizzly in the woods, a confluence of Oscar- and bear-baiting. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki brings us right into the conflict – raging ursine breath fogs the camera lens while Glass is rag-dolled over forest floor (though, as 20th Century Fox took pains to clarify in the media, the bear assault is non-sexual in nature). Our hero is left with ill-placed holes all over his body, like the ones in his neck that leak the water he sips straight back out of his throat.

In his diminished condition, Glass slows down the frantic trappers and one of the company, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, wearing a chic beaver skin do-rag to cover his partially scalped dome), feels the humane thing is to “finish off” his colleague. He astutely says something like, “we’ll all be dead if he don’t quit wailing” (sensing Iñárritu’s dialogue is subpar anyway, Hardy mumbles and grunts his lines – he would benefit from subtitles as much as the Native American characters).

Capt. Henry inexplicably leaves this man in charge of caring for Glass and his boy and it doesn’t take Fitzgerald long to prove he has a rather loose definition of the term “proper burial.” He deposits his patient still breathing in a shallow grave and the repercussions of this frontier pragmatism extend for the punishing duration of the film.

In his interminable chase for vengeance (in this life or the next), Glass is forever bursting forth from bandages, stitches, caves, sealed huts and even the chest cavity of an appaloosa. He convinces as a slithery, snow-bearded phoenix but to what end? The whole film has already been spoiled for anyone who bothered to google the word “revenant.”

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“The Revenant” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated R. Running time 2:36. Visitcinemawest.com.

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