The Revenant Review
The Revenant is a two-and-a-half-hour endurance test. It’s not escapist. It’s not fun. It is a long, slow, gray-colored movie about a guy who gets mauled by a bear and has to crawl hundreds of miles across a wintery hellscape in order to make it to safety and exact his revenge. If that description sounds like what you want to see, go for it. If not, then you’ve been warned.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Hugh Glass, a real fur-trader who was actually mauled by a bear and crawled for weeks across the unforgiving wilderness. It’s an amazing true story, and an amazing performance from DiCaprio, who very clearly put himself through some hardships of his own in order to give us this dirty, grunting character.
The main antagonist of the film—well, besides nature and that angry mama bear—is a slimy fur trader who leaves DiCaprio for dead. He’s played by an unrecognizable Tom Hardy, who once again delivers a performance that would’ve really benefitted from some subtitles. Like his role of Bane in the last Batman movie, he mumbles and grunts and refuses to enunciate. I considered rewatching the film, just so I could get a better understanding of what he was saying, but I don’t think I have the endurance skills to handle sitting through this one more time… At least not with all the gory bits still fresh in my mind.
From the very first scene, you know that things aren’t going to go well for our hero. While the score pounds our ears with jarring drum beats and noises that could barely be labelled music, the camera flits around without a single cut. We see arrows go through necks, axes slash into flesh, and all sorts of crazy cowboys-and-Indians visual mayhem. There are a few quiet moments between the bloody opening scene and the bloody closing scene, but at no point does the tension ease up with any sort of lightness or relief. The world is a harsh place, and the characters are even harsher. We just have to sit through it and wait (vainly) for the glimmer of something good to happen.
My biggest problem with this film isn’t that it’s long and depressing. I’ve seen plenty of long and depressing films that I’ve actually enjoyed, films that balance all the negative stuff with at least a couple moments of humor or surprise. The Revenant doesn’t do that. In fact, the story doesn’t come to any interesting conclusions about revenge or survival. There’s a difference between a film with a depressing tone, and a film whose only reason for existence is to depress the hell out of people. You won’t walk out of the theater pondering deep thoughts. You’ll walk out of the theater wanting to take a shower.
The Revenant is director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s return to his dour, miserable roots. He’s an amazing director when it comes to visuals (the landscapes in this are breath-taking), and he has a very strong hand when it comes to his actors giving hopeless, cry-faced performances. Watch Biutiful or Babel and you’ll see a flood of A-listers have the absolute worst times of their lives. He also directed last year’s best picture winner, Birdman, which is kooky and enjoyable and ridiculously daring in both style and content. It’s actual fun. Unfortunately, that looks like it’s going to be the outlier to Inarritu’s career, because The Revenant is as depressing and hard-to-watch as Babel, only with an added bear mauling to spice things up.
Honestly, it’s difficult to review a movie like The Revenant.
It’s beautifully made and impossible to look away from. The problem, for me anyway, is that it’s not an experience that I really wanted to have. Of course, movie critics have to judge a film on its own terms. We have to figure out what it’s trying to do, and whether those goals were met. You can’t say When Harry Met Sally is a bad film because it wasn’t scary enough. You can’t say that Ghostbusters is bad because it didn’t make you cry. (The new Ghostbusters will make fans everywhere cry….)Every film has different goals in mind, and a critic has to take that into account. Watching this movie, I knew from the very first scalping that this wasn’t going to be an enjoyable experience. It was going to be grim and gruff and sickening. Well, mission accomplished.