With The Revenant, director Alejandro González Iñárritu has crafted a vivid, viciously realistic tale of survival and revenge.  Iñárritu won the Oscar for Best Director for Birdman last year and with his stellar work for The Revenant, has aligned himself to become the first director in film history to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars.

 

The Revenant tells the true story of frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DeCaprio, on a fur trading expedition in the 1820's.  After being maliciously mauled by a bear, Glass is left for dead by members of his own hunting team.  From there, the rest of the film is a peek-through-your-fingers struggle for survival.  

 

DiCaprio gives one of the best performances of his career in a role that is the exact opposite of his line-a-second, boisterous performance in The Wolf of Wall Street.  In The Revenant, much of Leo’s performance is done non-verbally.  He does more with his eyes and his facial expressions than he’s ever done with dialogue in his career, and that’s saying something considering the body of great work Leo has amassed. The anguish and rage on his face as he struggles to cling to life is pretty mesmerizing to watch.  What the man goes through is truly unbelievable.

 

The film proves how powerful certain emotions can be.  Glass’s will to live was driven by revenge.  It fueled him to the point where he literally crawled to the ends of the Earth in search of it.  The beauty of The Revenant is that it truly feels like we are with Glass through all his trials and tribulations.

 

In Birdman, Iñárritu used a lot of glide cams to make us feel as if we were traveling the halls of the theater or that we were on stage with the actors as they performed their scenes.  The same technique is used in The Revenant.  Instead of seeing a wide shot of Glass on a horse, we are with him as he’s riding.  Instead of a stationary shot of him in the water, we are with him as he slowly wades in it, searching for cover.  It’s the feeling of occupying the same space as these characters that really gives The Revenant its realistic feeling.

 

As good as DiCaprio is in the film, Tom Hardy deserves special mention.  If you’ve read anything I’ve written in the last 3 years you know that I’ve been touting Tom Hardy for a while now.  I’m not sure there’s another actor working today that has a stronger body of work over the last few years.  While his performance in Mad Max: Fury Road this year made him more of a household name, it’s his performance in The Revenant that is garnering the most attention.  

 

Hardy plays John Fitzgerald, a member of the fur trading crew.  He’s the most vocal of the crew about leaving Glass behind.  To say his character is of low moral quality would be an understatement.  I’m not sure how an actor can literally change his eyes while in character, but Hardy does it here.  There is nothing in Fitzgerald’s eyes the entire movie.  They’re empty and soulless.  For an actor to achieve that is nothing short of astounding.  To put it simply, Tom Hardy is operating on a higher level right now.

 

The other star of the film doesn’t appear in the film, in fact, it’s the man behind the lens, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.  Lubezki won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Birdman last year and the year before for Gravity.  He might just make that a hat trick this year.  The visuals in The Revenant are breathtaking.  The shots of the landscape look like something out of National Geographic.  Lubezki also used natural lighting for almost the entire film.  Some of the beautiful shots of nature are a perfect juxtaposition to the violent and primal nature of the film.

 

The Revenant is a beautiful film depicting one man’s fight for survival.  That said, it’s not for everybody.  It’s brutally violent at times and, to put it simply, somewhat exhausting.  As the credits roll, you are guaranteed to feel emotionally drained. While it’s not a film I will feel compelled to revisit in the near future, the themes and imagery will stick with me for quite a long time.