The Revenant: Viciously, Savagely Beautiful

There's a verse in the Bible that goes like this: Be sure your sins will find you out. I don't think John Fitzgerald was thinking about the Book of Numbers when he killed a half-native boy in his scouting party while also leaving the boy's savagely injured father for dead in the wilderness. Still, if he did, he'd have missed a lot of otherwise avoidable trouble. It's 1823, and European settlers are pushing west, trying to colonize the remainder of North America. Nevertheless, the settlers are just as prone to infighting as they are to bothering the mysterious and often-violent natives that inhabit the territories they're trying to annex, and if nothing else, The Revenant is often fascinating to watch. Much has been said about the merits or lack thereof of colonialism, and while I imagine some were frustrated by the refusal of The Revenant to say much of substance about contentious history, I'm more than content to watch a historical film with more on its mind than mimicking a New York Times opinion piece. This movie does not take the familiar five-thousand-foot view of reproval, instead placing us firmly in the boots of a group of explorers threatening to violently self-implode. It's more of an experience movie than anything else, yet The Revenant remains spellbinding in its simplicity from start to finish, even if it's better felt and experienced than critiqued and thought about. But who am I kidding? I have to review the movie I got, not the one I or other may have wanted.

Emmanuel Lubezki, a cinematographer from Mexico, creates some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen via his work on The Revenant, good enough to take a convincing spot in the top one percent. I have a soft spot for visual naturalism, and the ways that The Revenant uses both natural light and natural darkness are otherworldly. Every frame of the movie is something you would see on a calendar, both beautifully alien and completely natural. I could almost feel the freezing water running through my fingers, burn my hands on the flames, or even feel the sting of a native's arrow. On your own time, do some reading on the production of this movie. The shoot was an absolutely brutal ordeal, and the commitment of both the cast and crew of The Revenant to shooting on location gives it an immersion unrivaled by just about any other historical film out there.

However, there's a far-from-hidden powder flash of brutality for every picturesque spectacle of breathtaking beauty. Frontier life is dangerous, and The Revenant capably captures how quickly things can go from good to bad to worse to worst. It works better as an experience movie than it does a well-rounded narrative, and that's not entirely a bad thing. It's incredibly simplistic, yet it remains unbelievably immersive - the more unsettling the violence, the more uncomfortable the immersion. The scenes of natives and settlers - and settlers and settlers - doing battle are merciless. You'll feel every punch, every broken bone, and every blow of a tomahawk or rifle butt. The Revenant is probably the most violent movie I have ever seen, not necessarily because of the amount of shed blood, but because of how it chooses to shed it - even the animals get in on the fun. One memorable moment features a pack of wolves taking down an unfortunate buffalo like they're in a National Geographic feature.

Despite being beautiful, The Revenant is far from subtle. However, that's not to say it isn't measured. It remains strangely neutral for a movie featuring native-settler relations, managing to escape being a familiar accusation, an empty condemnation, or even impotent bothsidesism. This movie is more interested in being an experience than a message, and it avoids any obvious race or rage-baiting that often plagues other movies like it. No one in this freezing armpit of the world is concerned about ideology, that much is clear. A knife in your back hurts whether you're a colonizer or the colonized. Everyone in this movie has one goal - to survive, for whatever reason, even at the expense of relationships with other settlers. This movie does what it does exceptionally well, even if it doesn't do a whole lot.

The characters of this movie aren't especially deep, though the acting in The Revenant is spectacular. The casting is absolutely immaculate, and each character brings a different semblance of a personality to the table. Tom Hardy's portrayal of Fitzgerald, a ruthlessly practical settler with a hair-trigger temper, is the standout. Hardy is nearly unrecognizable in the role of this terrifying and borderline-psychotic antagonist. However, the simplicity of this film's characters and plot doesn't do its two-and-a-half-hour runtime any favors. The revenge story premise of The Revenant is already paper-thin, and when stretched out as far as it is, I really felt its length, and not in a good way. This movie could have stood to be a half hour or even a drastic forty-five minutes shorter than it actually was. Still, I remain amazed at the one-two punch of bone-crunching brutality and visual splendor. A view this incredible makes looking away from the movie's shortcomings a little easier.

While it’s true that experience movies can only do so much to beef up their narratives, The Revenant remains unapologetically pure cinema despite its simplicity, and even because of it. It’s two-and-a-half hours of nearly-unbearable violence intermingled with what could be the most breathtakingly beautiful visuals I’ve ever seen in a movie - historical accuracy be spurned via the view. This dramatic reimagining of the story of Hugh Glass is one of my favorite historical movies. It takes images we usually see through a history book's safe and clinical lens and injects them with what I can only imagine is a healthy and realistic dose of brutal bloodshed, brutal being an understatement. This isn’t a movie too interested in any philosophizing or social criticism, which lends it an accessibility. This ground-level view does much to make you almost believe that you’re really watching a bunch of vengeful settlers kill each other in the early 19th century. Because that’s really what this movie is about, and that’s okay, even good. The Revenant may not be interested in saying – or shouting - a whole lot we haven’t already heard, but its words bite. And cut. Punch, bruise, kick, stab, and shoot. This movie beats you over the head with the blunt end of a tomahawk before pausing to let you admire the beauty of the snow and the stars overhead. I have to say, something in my borderline-numb mind appreciated the beauty that much more after being brutalized.

The Revenant - 8/10

Matthew 6:9-15