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'The Revenant' A gorgeous looking revenge flick
The Revenant is a beautiful looking movie but a dispassionate one
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The Revenant is a beautiful looking movie but a dispassionate one.
The Revenant, the latest from Spanish filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, 21 Grams), certainly pushes everything the director is known for into its Oscar-driven stratosphere.
Aureate camerawork, temperamental atmosphere and dramatic personalities paint Iñárritu's pseudo-art school canvas with a pat on its own back. It's a movie that looks heavy but remains unfulfilling.
The most talked-about scene is of course Leonardo DiCaprio getting mauled by a bear in one long unbroken take, an unnervingly vicious sequence that happens not long after another similarly splattered one; a ravenously violent battle between Western trappers and Arikara native American tribes.
The scenes give a taste of the grimness to come, as DiCaprio's legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass tries to overcome his deadly wounds to avenge a man who has done him wrong (to say more would be to somewhat spoil the story, though information on what Glass' travel was induced by is readily available elsewhere).
The violent mood sustains itself with almost-gleeful sadism throughout, giving a sense that Iñárritu can only evoke his main character's journey through barbaric invocations so self-satisfied that they almost cross into parody.
Reports that the movie's production was overlong and physically harrowing for the actors is certainly believable, and that pain trickles over onscreen.
DiCaprio's acting features a lot of grunting and seething, but as Glass, he manages to layer the generic quality of his given character with a sense of single-minded purposefulness.
As the father of a half-native son (Forest Goodluck), there aren't just eye-for-an-eye avenging fumes coming out of him, but sorrowful empathy and pain that goes beyond the physical.
As racist frontiersman and appointed villain John Fitzgerald, actor Tom Hardy gives DiCaprio a run for his money.
Bleak and bitter, Hardy's character's often-indecipherable accent sustains humanity beyond the greed and hate. When Fitzgerald waxes philosophical about nature and God, as well as his Indian-scalped head, the despicable quality of the character seems almost justified. Almost.
Both Hardy and DiCaprio's characters are written with single-minded emotions, and it's due to the actors that their non-characterization doesn't seem too obvious.
Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity and Birdman) captures the wilderness' temperament beautifully ' something that Iñárritu is clearly infatuated with, smothering his characters with an overabundance of mood shots that seems to confuse lingering with artful. This visual heaviness aims to give the movie some weight, as if Iñárritu realizes the tonelessness of his characters and story.
The Revenant is a gorgeous looking revenge flick that blankets itself with Academy-approved aesthetics and presentation. It's not nearly as meaningful as it wants to be.
The movie's spiritual-referring title feels surface only, with its fatalistic fascination taking whatever breathing space it had left.
Gracefully salvaged by its actors and (should have been edited) cinematography, along with a droning score by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, this 156-minute fancy-violent exposition is a smug non-odyssey that could have used a good dose of humility within its overwrought runtime.
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The Revenant
(20th Century Fox, 156 minutes)
Directed: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domnhall Gleeson
