Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Entertainment grade: B–
History grade: C–

This article contains spoilers.

Hugh Glass was a frontiersman working in the upper Missouri river area in the early years of the 19th century. On a fur trapping expedition in 1823, he was attacked and mauled by a grizzly bear.

Violence

Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is one of a group of men finishing up a fur trapping expedition in the wilderness. They are attacked by Ree (Arikara) warriors. Whoosh! Someone gets impaled on a spear. Bang! Someone gets shot off his horse. Crack! Someone’s bones shatter. There’s an unflinching close-up of an arrow thwacking into a face, a gun butt bashing into a face, a flying kick to a face. A horse gets shot in the face. It’s exceptionally well choreographed and filmed.

The Revenant review – gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytelling

This scene is based on a real-life incident: William H Ashley and Andrew Henry (the latter played by Domhnall Gleeson in the film) set up the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1822. In June 1823, Ashley’s band of around 70 men was attacked by Arikara warriors – they estimated around 600, though in the film it’s more like a dozen. Various accounts suggest that between 12 and 18 of Ashley’s men were killed.

Characters

In the film, 10 men get away. Among them are Captain Henry, Glass, Glass’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and trappers John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter). They have a conversation, but it’s all so extravagantly mumbled that it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Fitzgerald is fighty and racist, so he’s the baddie. Glass is the goodie, because he loves his son (who is half-Pawnee) in a gruff, manly way that involves telling him off a lot. The backstory about Glass’s love for a Pawnee woman is fiction. It has been suggested the real Glass had such a relationship, but there’s no firm evidence – and no evidence that he had any children.

Wildlife

As the men make their way through a forest, Glass happens upon two bear cubs and their angry mama. If you felt wan after the face-smashing scene at the start, reach for the smelling salts. Chomp! Growl! Shake! The bear sniffs him to see if he’s dead, then jumps up and down on his back. Splinter! Howl! Slash! Glass shoots the bear. That really gets on its wick. It tries to rip his throat out. He stabs it in the neck. It flops on him and dies heavily, squishing him like a punctured bouncy castle full of blood.

The cinema audience is by this point laughing, half in horror and half because the scene goes on for so long that it becomes comical. Anyway, while historians are not certain of the precise details, the real Glass did get into a fight with a real bear, some time in August 1823.

Murder

The men find Glass in a rum old state. Captain Henry pays Fitzgerald, Bridger and Hawk to stay behind until it is time for Glass’s inevitable burial. When the captain leaves, Fitzgerald tries to bump Glass off. Hawk interrupts, so Fitzgerald bumps him off instead. This didn’t happen in real life, because Hawk didn’t exist. In the film, the ailing Glass sees Fitzgerald kill his son, giving him an extra motivation to stay alive and seek revenge. When Fitzgerald persuades Bridger to bury Glass alive and abandon him, you know Glass isn’t going to go quietly.

Survival

The real Glass survived his abandonment and dragged his battered body over hundreds of miles of terrain in pursuit of the men who left him for dead. Though he could read and write, Glass never set his story down in his own hand. It was first published by another writer in The Port Folio, a Philadelphia journal, in 1825. It may well have been embroidered then. It has been embroidered many times since.

Hardship

The film has invented some extra obstacles for Glass: it is snowing throughout, even though in real life his trek took place between August and October; the Arikara track him and chase him into a tree; he has to hollow out a dead horse to make himself a sleeping bag. It’s brilliantly filmed, but the characterisations and dialogue don’t match the sophistication of the visuals. Moreover, by the second lingering closeup of a horse’s eye or the sixth epic landscape shot with four-fifths sky and one-fifth land, even those sophisticated visuals begin to feel repetitive. As for the ending, it has been changed in one significant way: in real life, nobody got killed.

Verdict

The Revenant is an impressive film inspired by Glass’s real-life story, but lays it on a bit thick and ends up curiously unmoving. The whole thing is begging to be sped up into a two-minute YouTube video set to Benny Hill music.

Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith set their tone early, staging a breathtaking assault on a group of fur trappers by Native Americans, portrayed not just as “enemies” but a violent force of nature. While a few dozen men are preparing to pack up and move on to their next stop in the great American wilderness, a scene out of “Apocalypse Now” unfolds. Arrows pierce air and flesh as the few surviving men flee to a nearby boat. It turns out that the tribe is seeking a kidnapped daughter of its leader, and will kill anyone who gets in their way. At the same time, we learn that one of the trappers, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) has a half-Native American son named Hawk (Forrest Goodluck).

Low on men and hunted, the expedition leader Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) orders that their crew return to its base, a fort in the middle of this snowy wilderness. John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) disagrees, and the seeds of dissent are planted. He doesn’t trust Henry, and he doesn’t like Glass. In the midst of these discussions, Glass is away from the crew one day when he’s brutally attacked by a bear—the sequence is, without hyperbole, one of the most stunning things I’ve seen on film in a long time, heart-racing and terrifying. Glass barely survives the attack. It seems highly unlikely that he’ll make it back to the base. With increasingly dangerous conditions and a tribe of killers on their heels, they agree to split up. Most of the men will go back first while Fitzgerald, Hawk and a young man named Bridger (Will Poulter) will get a sizable fee to stay with Glass until he dies, giving him as much comfort as possible in his final days and the burial he deserves.

Of course, Fitzgerald quickly tires of having to watch a man he doesn’t care about die. He kills Hawk in front of an immobile Glass and then basically buries Hugh alive. As Bridger and Fitzgerald head back, Glass essentially rises from the dead (the word revenant means “one that returns after death or a long absence”) and begins his quest for vengeance. With broken bones, no food, and miles to go, he pulls himself through snow and across mountains, seeking the man who killed his son. He is practically a ghost, a man who has come as close to death as one possibly can but is unwilling to go to the other side until justice is done.

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The bulk of “The Revenant” consists of this torturous journey, as Glass regains his strength and gets closer to home through sheer force of will. Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning cinematographer for “Birdman,” Emmanuel Lubezki (who also took a trophy for “Gravity” the year before and could easily make it three in a row for this work) shoots “The Revenant” in a way that conveys both the harrowing conditions and the artistry of his vision. The sky seems to go on forever; the horizon is neverending. He works in a color palette provided by nature, and yet enhanced. The snow seems whiter, the sky bluer. Many of his shots, especially in times of great danger like the opening attack and the bear scene, are unbroken—placing us in the middle of the action.

At other times, Lubezki’s choices recall his work on “The Tree of Life,” especially in scenes in the second half when Glass’s journey gets more mystical. And that’s where the film falters a bit. Iñárritu doesn’t quite have a handle on those second-half scenes and the 156-minute running time begins to feel self-indulgent as the film loses focus. When it centers on the conditions and the tale of a man unwilling to die, it’s mesmerizing. I just think there’s a tighter version, especially in the mid-section, that would be even more effective.

About that man: So much has been made of this film being DiCaprio’s “Overdue Oscar” shot that I feel like his actual work here will be undervalued. Make no mistake. Should he win, it will not be some “Lifetime Achievement” win as we’ve seen in the past for actors who we all thought should have won for another film (Paul Newman, Al Pacino, etc.). He’s completely committed in every terrifying moment, pushing himself further than he ever has before as an actor. Even just the physical demands of this protagonist would have been enough to break a lot of lesser actors, but it’s the way in which DiCaprio captures his internal fortitude that’s captivating—his body may be broken, but we believe he is unwilling to give up.

The minimal supporting cast is good, and it’s nice to see Gleeson continue to have an incredible 2015 (also in “Brooklyn,” “Ex Machina” and “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens”). Tom Hardy is less effective, often going a little too heavy on the tics (wide eyes, shot up-close), but I think that’s a fault of the direction and not one of our best actors. In the end, this is DiCaprio’s film through and through, and he nails every challenging beat, literally throwing himself into this character that demands more of him physically than any other before.

What would you do for vengeance? What conditions could you surmount to get it? Or would you just give up? Our favorite films often drop questions like these into our lives, allowing us to appreciate the world a little differently than before we saw them. “The Revenant” has this power. It lingers. It hangs in the back of your mind like the best classic parables of man vs. nature. It will stay there for quite some time.