I'm a bit late* to The Revenant, one of three movies that came out last December with showdowns in the snow (The Hateful Eight and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens being the other two). But I wanted to makes sure I saw it before Oscar night, so that I might have an opinion of it regardless of its fate there.
The conversation that has developed around The Revenant since its release has, weirdly, focused on some of its more tangential aspects: how hard it was to film (it almost exclusively used natural light); whether Leo finally gets his Oscar; and, of course, the quickly-refuted but likely pop culturally immortal rumor that DiCaprio has a rather..., um...intimate experience with a bear.
Having seen the movie, which tells the story of the epic quest for revenge of early American fur trapper Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) upon his fellow fur company man Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) after Fitzgerald kills Glass' son and leaves Glass for dead in the frozen wilderness following Glass' mauling by a bear, I can confidently say that the above conversation points aren't really the most important parts of the movie. But nor are some of its elements that just felt a bit extraneous: namely, subplots involving crude Frenchmen and morally complex Native Americans, and the inscrutable, sometimes bizarre vision quests on which DiCaprio's glass sometimes journeys involving his dead wife.*
Yet some of the better aspects of The Revenant do, in fact, relate somewhat to the superficial conversations that have sprung up around it since its release. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who won Best Director and Best Picture for last year's Birdman, clearly worked (and worked his actors and crew) hard to capture the visceral (the bear attack, multiple squirming-in-your-seats, quasi body-horror scenes, the climactic fight), the involving (an arresting opening battle between fur trappers and Native Americans, a precipitous trip through rapids filmed underwater), and the beautiful (every scene is technically proficient, but special marks for any shot of either nature by itself, or Glass set starkly against it). Leo's performance seems to have accomplished that difficult, mysterious task of turning the pre-Oscar conversation in his favor. His grunts and grit are impressive, though his immobile wordless gasping reminded me of nothing as much as this scene from SpongeBob, of all things:
As much acting as Leo does, however, it is Tom Hardy's Fitzgerald, in all his shifty, mannered, survive-at-all costs complexity who emerges as the more interesting character, and Hardy who gives the better performance. As for the bear, well...it's pretty brutal. Let's leave it at that.
The Revenant has all of this working in its favor. Yet The Revenant's most compelling characteristics have not featured nearly as prominently in the "conversation" surrounding it since its release: namely, its explorations of masculinity and morality.
Even if you know only as much about The Revenant as I have told you so far in this post, you can probably guess that it's a pretty manly movie, almost cartoonishly so at times. Maybe three female characters even appear on screen, and virtually everything else involves manly men doing manly male things: cauterizing a neck wound with gunpowder, disemboweling a horse to stay warm in its innards**, breaking a bone apart to suck on marrow, etc. This is not to say that women can't, or don't, do these things, but that the The Revenant is deliberately set in a time when men were not only more likely to be the ones doing them, but had to do so routinely (life is pretty hard when you don't have utilities or appliances, another probably unintended takeaway from The Revenant).
This sets up an interesting examination of the virtues and vices of manhood that probably wasn't meant to be the focus of The Revenant, but is there nonetheless. Foremost is the tender paternal relationship between Glass and his half-Native American son, whose death fuels Glass across miles of frozen wasteland for revenge even though, as Fitzgerald mockingly, almost devilishly, reminds him, it "ain't gonna bring your boy back." It is also in smaller moments scattered through the film, such as the rape of a Native American woman by a Frenchman (manhood wrongly understood) which receives punishment by castration when the tables are turned. And it's in a second--albeit perverse--paternal relationship between Fitzgerald and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), with Fitzgerald cruelly tutoring Bridger in a way of life that prizes selfishness and survival above all else.
Morality in difficult circumstances, incidentally, is another probably intended-as-secondary theme of The Revenant that nonetheless stands out. The moral antipodes of the film, of course, are Glass and Fitzgerald. Siding with Glass is the obvious choice, but he and Fitzgerald remain parallel characters, manly men drawing from a particular set of skills to ensure their survival. As both men engage in violence and acts of questionable morality, The Revenant forces us to consider the messiness of moral decision-making, and to wonder why (or perhaps whether?) the choices Glass makes keep him on the moral high ground that Fitzgerald abandons early, if ever he occupied it.
But Glass and Fitzgerald are not the only explorations of morality The Revenant ventures. Other characters--such as Poulter's Bridger--also face choices, small and large, mostly concerning whether to make what seem like the easier, if unjust, choices, or to reject the sparse yet tempting logic of the state of nature by showing human compassion. Two of these moments involve sharing food, as befits a movie where the basic questions of survival loom so large. Others concern whether to indulge in momentary, heated passions--especially revenge--or to apply the heart's staying hand.
The Revenant's technical and dramatic proficiency and thematic complexity make for a very good film. I am not sure I am willing to call it great; it falls a bit short of Jeremiah Johnson, my gold standard for this genre.*** Though I could see it growing on me over time. We'll know tomorrow if it grew enough on the Academy to earn Leo the Oscar that he doggedly pursued across the frozen wilderness.
*This is in part because the weekend a strong blizzard hit D.C. closed down all public transportation and made me want to make an appropriate trek through the snow to see The Revenant, all the city's theaters closed as well.
**This makes at least three DiCaprio films in which his character is haunted by a dead wife, the other two I know of being Inception and Shutter Island.
***Star Wars did it first.
****I would say, however, that it's better than the underrated, very similar Seraphim Falls, which also follows the personal feud between two manly men of the distant American past (Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan) across the unforgiving wilderness, and also features some strategic usage of animal carcasses.
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