The new year continues with strong emotions. Today, Alejandro Iñaritu's much awaited The Revenant.
The Revenant is the 6th feature film directed by Alejandro Iñarritu, on whose dynamic grand guignol directing styleThe MacMahonian already passed judgment, namely in our seminal review of his previous forgettable effort Birdman (reviewed January 20 2015). The Revenant is much better.
The Revenant tells of the plight of fur trapper Hugh Grass (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the northernmost fringes of the Louisiana Purchase circa 1820, whose party is ambushed by Ree Indian marauders, resulting in ¾ of them being killed and causing Grass to flee across the snowy winter wilderness, in the process fighting a grizzly bear with a knife (reportedly a true episode) and concurrently seeking revenge for the murder of his half-Indian son by a fellow fur trapper, odyssey in the course of which he overcomes odds only slightly better than Sandra Bullock's in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013). The Revenant is like 25% Northwest Passage (King Vidor, 1940), 40% The Searchers(John Ford 1956) 15% Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982) and 20% Black Robe (Bruce Beresford, 1991).
The Revenant follows a recent trend of films portraying heroics overcoming superhuman odds, e.g. Gravity, Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2013) or The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2014), due mainly, not to the protagonists's strengths or courage, but rather in the interest of gratifying the viewer's empathy. Whether this is a consistent pattern and, if so, a subliminal reaction to the current pervasive economic anxiety in the rich world, is a matter for brows higher than The MacMahonian's. Marginally less bloody than Tarantino's films, The Revenant opening sequence is possibly the best Indian battle scene ever (matching, and perhaps inspired by, the Omaha Beach disembarkation sequence in Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg, 1998), as well as the best man-grizzly one-on-one fight sequence (granted, not much competition in the category), features singularly atmospheric photography and an exquisitely unobtrusive soundtrack co-authored by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose last film contribution I recall was for Bernardo Betolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). As for DiCaprio, his thespian skills, never understated, meet here no challenge, as he doesn’t need to do much else than permanently cringe at the amount of danger, pain, cold, hunger, fatigue and grief that visit him every few minutes.
A great film is usually more than the sum of its parts. The Revenant may not be quite great but the aforementioned qualities, orchestrated by Iñarritu's for once with focused energy, result in an energetic and emotive viewing.