3 years later, thoughts on The Revenant?

Werner Herzog once said, “If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil for one of my films, I would do it.” And judging from the movies he’s made, he’s certainly taken Old Scratch to the mat more than once. Alejandro González Iñárritu has certainly taken Herzog’s words to heart, and his latest film definitely has the Oscar-winning director doing his best to put the horned bastard in a chokehold. If last year’s Birdman was a wondrous high-wire act, The Revenant is a ‘roided-up Iron Man decathlon.

Iñárritu’s reputation of putting actors through the wringer seems to have reached an apotheosis with this film. The Revenant was a notoriously arduous shoot that took the better part of a year to complete, and indeed the behind-the-scenes saga of its creation could rival the finished product. Iñárritu, a consummate perfectionist, sought to shoot the picture entirely in natural light in the austere wastes of sub-Arctic Canada to truly capture the stark desolation of the American frontier circa 1823. No sound-stages, no over-reliance on digital effects. This resulted in an extraordinarily punishing experience for all involved, and indeed horror stories from the production seemed to point to Iñárritu’s work as being a potential folly on par with Heaven’s Gate, and that his impossible demands were those of a tyrant rather than an artist. Fortunately (for both us and for the crew), The Revenant is no folly. It is a thrilling, mesmerizing experience, more Coppola than Cimino . . . and yet completely unlike anything we’ve ever truly seen before.

True to form, Iñárritu has enlisted the help of top actors to bring his vision to life . . . and oh boy, he reeled in a whopper with his leading man. After coaxing successive career-best performances from the likes of Sean Penn, Javier Bardem and Michael Keaton, Iñárritu has turned his attention to the biggest movie star on the planet. Leonardo DiCaprio is a rather unlikely choice to play the central role of Hugh Glass, a 19th-century fur trapper and mountain man. DiCaprio is largely reliant on his personality, which has served him well in his most recent work, but playing a man like Glass is heretofore uncharted territory for DiCaprio. Glass is largely a silent figure, a living ghost even before the events that turn him into the film’s titular specter, and much of the film’s runtime focuses on Glass in isolation.

Iñárritu doesn’t let DiCaprio rest on his laurels for a single moment. At its core, The Revenant is a simple, almost Biblical story old as time: that of revenge. After Glass and his fellow trappers are ambushed by an Indian war-party (in a breathtaking one-take sequence that feels like Spielberg’s Omaha Beach fought with arrow and flintlock), the survivors make way down the river and try to gather their bearings. Glass reasons that the safest thing to do would be to track a new course through uncharted territory, but he is met with pushback by fellow trapper and erstwhile nemesis John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a half-scalped troglodyte who treats every other man in the company with scorn. He harbors particular disdain towards Glass for his perceived empathy for the “savages” and the fact that Glass has a half-Pawnee son (Forrest Goodluck). Fitzgerald is a bully, one whose bark is much worse than his bite . . . but there is fear in him, an animal’s fear that sparks alight in his ever-darting eyes. Hardy infuses the gruff trapper with a sense of desperation that he tries to camouflage with bravado, but it crumbles almost immediately when shit hits the fan.

And oh boy, does it ever. Glass ventures into the forest alone to do a little recon work and stumbles across two bear cubs. Before he knows what’s happened, a mean ol’ mama grizzly thunders from the underbrush and savages Glass, pawing strips of flesh from his back and throat while he struggles to escape. He manages to kill the beast, but when his compatriots find him, he’s on death’s door. Fitzgerald reasons that they just “finish ‘im off quick,” but the party’s captain (Domhnall Gleeson) opts for a different solution: a few volunteers stay behind to see if Glass recovers or, if not, that they give him a decent burial. Glass’s son volunteers, as does a young whippersnapper named Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and, eventually, the surly Fitzgerald. However, Fitzgerald has a mind to hasten things along, and things go very wrong in a heartbeat. Blood is spilled and Glass is dumped in a shallow grave to die. Only he refuses to die. And what follows is a hallucinogenic, sensually monstrous experience.

To aid him in his herculean labor of love, Iñárritu has enlisted the cream of the craft crop. Jack Fisk, who I believe to be the best art director on the planet, beautifully realizes the unforgiving world inhabited by these men, from fire-gutted villages to a chapel’s crumbling ruin. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner infuse the film with a spare, elegiac score that feels as simultaneously beautiful and horrific as the images they accompany. Speaking of which, the crown jewel of the bunch—as is so often the case with such films—is the cinematography. Emmanuel Lubezki, whose storied career has seen him work with the likes of Malick, Cuaron and Iñárritu in last year’s Birdman (winning Oscars for the latter two), rises to his occasion and manages to top himself under his fanatical director’s guidance. As Glass literally rises from his own grave to take vengeance on the men who abandoned him and took his most prized possession, he sojourns through the desolate wild, far harsher than Jack London could’ve imagined. Lubezki’s painterly sensibility creates an austere beauty, perfectly capturing the old adage that nature is red in tooth and claw. Don’t get the idea that Iñárritu and Lubezki have ventured into poetic Malickian introspection, either; the immediacy of Glass’s journey emphasizes that he could die at any moment, and that every single breath-snatching shot in the film could be the last one he ever sees.

The Revenant is stark and dizzying, but it nevertheless is modern myth-making in its purest form. In real life, the impetus for Glass’s vengeance was simply because he was abandoned and his gear was stolen in the process. Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith—quite wisely in my opinion—seek to add a much more personal bent to it all, and we are immediately riveted to the man’s driving need to survive to exact justice on those who wronged him. And it’s a testament to Leonardo DiCaprio that not only do we buy his burning thirst for revenge, we are in awe of it. As an actor who rarely has had the opportunity to use his physicality, and never in this capacity, it is a wonder to see him work so adeptly under Iñárritu’s direction. Despite largely holding court solo, it never feels like showboating. Every grunt, every hiss, every snarl is painfully, powerfully real. Never one to be outdone, Tom Hardy cements his status as one of the great actors of our era in playing an unabashedly repugnant villain to counter DiCaprio, and to see the two men share the screen is like seeing a pair of skilled alchemists spin gold from lead. The other actors in the piece—Gleeson, Goodluck and Poulter in particular—are excellent as well.

The Revenant took no prisoners in its making (I would kill to see a Hearts of Darkness-type documentary about the maddening shoot), and the finished product continues that tradition. It is a harrowing experience, seeing America’s brutal history laid bare like Hardy’s half-scalped noggin. Yet it is also an extraordinarily engrossing one, perfectly encapsulating the madness that springs in the weak and desperate, and the refusal of the strong to surrender. Iñárritu and his team wrestled the devil and walked away battered and bloodied, but not beaten. Herzog would be proud.