Blood lost. Life found.
The Revenant is a rare feat of modern myth-making. It is, like all myths, a simple tale, a recognizable one: a story of revenge, set in the now-distant past, full of violence. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), fur trapper in the 1820’s, is attacked by a bear while traveling with a party of fellow trappers, among whom his son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), born to a murdered Native American woman, stands out. Glass exists, after the attack, in a state of waking death: unable to move or speak, the men must lug him across the wintry terrain back to the relative safety of Fort Kiowa, a burden that proves unmanageable for the six or seven men remaining in the group. And so they leave him behind to be watched, cared for, and eventually buried by three volunteers: Hawk, a second boy, and a man named Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), whose mercenary nature and dislike of Glass’s relationship with “savages” has already been made clear.
Fitzgerald, the only one of the three to have reached manhood, gives Glass a premature – live – burial, after killing Hawk in front of his mute father’s bed and lying to the young man who accompanies them. After an undisclosed period of time, Glass awakens, crawls through the dirt by his elbows, lays on his dead son’s chest, and breathes out, in a Native American tongue “I will not leave you.” He exhales in our direction, three times, his breath fogging up the lens. His eyes close. And this is where The Revenant’s story truly begins.
At first, the technical aspects of the film can be distracting. Alejandro Innaritu, winner of the Best Picture Oscar last year for Birdman, again enlists the twice-Academy Award winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman) for a film shot completely in natural light and in astoundingly long, precise mobile takes. The opening scene of the film, after a series of flashback, montage-like images of familial destruction overlaid by scarce voiceover, is a showboat of the technical wonder that is achieved in the film’s first teaser trailer. The result is, initially, a bit off-putting: sinking into the extraordinarily realistic world feels difficult when the prowess of the filmmaking and its distinct technical achievement are so immediate. By the time the first arrow lands in the first skull, though, what felt at first like novelty feels entirely necessary, and what is immediate, instead, is the blood.
And oh, what blood there is. The body count on the white mens’ side during the opening scene continues to rise throughout the journey: at first, it is around thirty-four, and it steadily climbs into the forties before the captain of the band, played by Domnhall Gleeson, tells death’s messenger “They were my men. You don’t have to tell me how many.” The slayings are unapologetically gruesome and uncensored: beheadings, arrows to the face, limbs separated from their masters and axes plunged into smaller appendages. The violence feels abrasive, in the beginning, but somehow never overdone. Nor is the gore fun. Perhaps thanks to the naturalistic condition of the environment, the bloodshed remains representative and never becomes resplendent in the way a Tarintino picture, or any more stylized approach, certainly would.
And that is good, because the brutality is the center of the story – that is its engine, its pulsing, bloodied heart. The majesty of the film lies not in its depiction of violence enacted, but violence suffered and surmounted. Glass’s journey, after waking on his son’s body, consists, at first, of crawling. He crawls through snow, through dirt, away from enemies and toward water. Eventually, he finds a crutch of sorts, but he always looks more at home on the ground, and seems to move faster toward his undisclosed destination whilst travelling along it. The first time we see him stand without the aid of a branch is after a particularly harrowing ride down a freezing cold river through a series of waterfalls – an escapade which would feel cartoonish and humorous in a less convincing movie – in order to escape from the Natives which hound the trapping party from the opening battle onwards. He emerges not crawling onto the beach of frost but walking above it, as if somehow this latest act of nature’s indifferent brutality was what he needed to get back up.
Such is the rhythm of the film. We watch Glass, and DiCaprio, not so much leap over hurdles as weather them, and each bludgeon of fortune he withstands serves as an opportunity to reclaim his body and life – both of which, in one possible reading of the movie, ended in the moment when he lay on his son. Glass’s motivation is clearly revenge, justice for the death of his boy: he can be seen carving Fitzgerald’s name into a rock when he gets the strength to, and it feels, at one point, like the only thing keeping him alive in the frozen wilderness. His suffering, though, is what serves as a catalyst for his transformation back into a man: in one particularly gory scene, we silently watch him cut open a horse’s belly and remove its contents, one at a time, before stripping naked and crawling inside to wait out the winter night’s cold. It is a moment which feels both convincingly real and in some way rehearsed, ritualistic. When Glass emerges from his primordial cocoon, the sun is out, and the snow is melting: the ritual worked.
DiCaprio could not have made this movie five years ago. Though he’s always been a talented performer, much of his work gives off the sensation of headiness, like his body is lagging behind in some way as his brain works overtime. The Wolf of Wall Street was, to my mind, his first truly masterful performance, given by an actor who had found a freedom in his own being, in his own physical self. Here, that sense of visceral experience is put fully to the test, and DiCaprio is up to it.
As is Tom Hardy, whose performance as Fitzgerald somehow gives us the most terrifying presence the British actor has yet put on screen, which is saying a lot. What makes Fitzgerald put us so on edge is his eyes – whether in moments of monstrous violence or sardonic exposition, Hardy’s eyes give us a man who exists, at his core, in a state of intense, primal fear, and, as we are continuously reminded by the news these days, a man so full of fear is a man who will do absolutely anything to escape it.
Other notable performers include Domhnall Gleeson, as the captain – whose role, as good an actor as he is, makes far more sense upon the event of his death – and Will Poulter, the second young boy of the trappers’ party, who spends the film being chastised by Fitzgerald for not having what it takes to be a man (he has too much of a conscience).
The whole experience of watching The Revenant is paralleled by that scene of horse-disemboweling described earlier: it is brutal, and bloody, and, from a metaphorical standpoint, astonishing: the spiritual essence of the film calls to mind, perhaps, a more pragmatic Terrence Malik (whose last few movies Lubezki has also filmed). The grounded nature of the religiosity, the grueling acts it takes to uncover the profundity in the story, is what makes it feel, like all myths, at once ancient and oddly current.
There is another story in the film, though, in the background of the trappers’. The Native American party which is stalking our protagonists are given their own motivation in Paqawa, the kidnapped daughter of their chieftain, who evokes her name in every scene he enters. “Maybe Paqawa is there,” he speaks in a deep, constant voice full of a different kind of persistence than exists in DiCaprio’s eyes. “They may have Paqawa,” he repeats over and over: his small group of native nomads carry out their mission like a roaming collection of ghosts: they don’t so much inhabit the landscape as haunt it, searching for the member of their party they lost, long ago, and who didn’t follow them into the afterlife. There is a brief monologue given by the chief, to French settlers, consisting of “you have taken everything from us. The land, the horses, the food…” and in a script which contains, I would estimate, twelve total pages of dialogue (though the film is two hours and forty minutes) its inclusion is no accident. Nor is the presence of an arc in which a stray Native American gives Glass food, puts him on the back of his horse, then builds him shelter and treats his wounds – before being hung by the neck by a group of French colonials. And the most moving scene in the film, from an emotional standpoint, is the moment when Glass watches a man march a kidnapped “savage” woman into the woods and rape her, before he interrupts the savagery with a pistol to man’s neck and sets the girl free – the girl’s identity, one may guess at. It may be this parallel myth that floats by in the background, this story of a race of people decimated by an alien force and searching for their lost ones, which The Revenant seems to echo more than anything – people, alas, cannot return from the dead.
In a particularly haunting scene, though, which feels eerily like the warmest in the film, the Native stranger and the white hero sit together against a bleak, white sky and catch snowflakes on their tongues. It is this stranger who, after briefly sharing the story of his own family’s slaughter, gives the film the thematic revelation Glass won’t learn until the end: “Revenge is in the hand of the creator.”
