Haunting and Revenge

Haunting and Revenge

The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu.

            Hollywood often rewards actors for stretching themselves to a new dimension, which usually translates as shaving their heads, choosing to look less attractive than usual, playing a disabled person, or simply playing against type.  That thinking probably accounts, at least in part, for the nomination of Leonardo DiCaprio for his performance in The Revenant, a film surrounded by many stories about the difficulties of its production.  According to the director,

Alejandro González Iñárritu, DiCaprio not only performed under conditions of extreme cold and discomfort, but also, though a vegetarian, ate (or at least chewed on) a chunk of raw bison liver or heart or some organ, depending on whose account  your read: the sacrifices one makes for the sake of art.

The film itself derives from a famous historical incident as well as from the novel of the same name by Michael Punke.  In 1823 a trapper named Hugh Glass, one of a party of mountain men seeking beaver pelts, was badly mauled by a bear; the leader of his group left two men behind, one of them Jim Bridger, who became one of the most famous Westerners of them all, to tend his wounds and protect him until he died.  Thinking he was doomed and fearing for their own safety in an area patrolled by hostile Indians, the men abandoned him, an act that haunted Bridger the rest of his life.  As it turned out, Glass miraculously survived and, without weapons, tools, or supplies, traveled hundreds of miles to catch up with the men and exact a fitting revenge.  (In 1971 a pretty good movie, Man in the Wilderness, starring Richard Harris and John Huston, told a somewhat different version of the Glass story).

The major plot of the picture, changed and embellished significantly by the director, follows in a linear fashion Hugh Glass’s (DiCaprio) struggle for survival and his phenomenal journey through difficult and dangerous country.  It also presents an almost masochistic epic of suffering, as Glass manages to cauterize his throat wound by burning it with gunpowder, shows him crawling, gradually limping, swimming through icy waters, and evading Indian attacks in order to catch up with his betrayers, Bridger (Will Pulter) and John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).  The director fleshes out that relatively simply plot by intercutting scenes showing Fitzgerald, the major villain, spinning lies about Glass’s death and burial, and Bridger suffering his guilt in silence.

The director, who made the most successful Birdman, also thickens the soup by adding characters and events to both the factual and the fictional story—flashbacks to Glass’s Indian wife, now dead, Fitzgerald’s murder of Glass’s young son, a climactic fight, and so forth.  He also appears to have attended the Terrence Malick school of sentimental mysticism, interpolating events from Glass’s life, his memories of his wife and son, and dreamy, sometimes hallucinated images of the wife for some reason floating in the air above the wounded trapper.  Presumably these memories and images provide some of the motivation, beyond mere revenge, for Glass’s epic quest.

Although Leonardo DiCaprio occupies most of the screen time, raw meat eating and all, several other actors also perform competently and believably.  Tom Hardy in particular, as John Fitzgerald makes a most convincing villain who betrays without a qualm and embellishes his story with a number of inventive details, becoming for a while the hero of his own tale.  The bear that attacks Hugh Glass deserves at least a mention for best performance by an ursine actor since the late Bart the Bear, who distinguished himself in The Edge a number of years ago.

Filmed in natural light in appropriately rugged surroundings and terrible weather in Canada and Argentina, The Revenant stands out among the current crop of honored films for the daring and determination of the director.  If he bears comparison, for good or for bad, with Terrence Malick, he also resembles the Werner Herzog of Fitzcarraldo in his apparent attraction to suffering, a kind of obsession with authenticity that cost his cast a good deal of physical pain, hypothermia, frostbite, etc., similar to the problems Herzog’s alter ego, Klaus Kinski, complained about in Burden of Dreams.  If directing a movie presents the sorts of challenges that involve something like running a small country, Iñárritu may qualify as a benevolent dictator and his film certainly reflects the verisimilitude he sought.