THE REVENANT. (2015) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE REVENANT. (2015) DIRECTED BY ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU.

BASED ON THE REVENANT: A NOVEL OF REVENGE (2002) BY MICHAEL PUNKE.

STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO, TOM HARDY, DOMHNALL GLEESON, WILL POULTER, FORREST GOODLUCK AND GRACE DOVE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a survival-slash-revenge film set in the American wilderness of North and South Dakota in the year of our Lord 1823. Leonardo DiCaprio wins his first ever Academy Award Award, after having had five previous nominations and five fruitless and frustrating trips to the Oscars, for his role as Hugh Glass.

Glass was a real-life fur trapper and frontiersman, a trader, hunter and explorer back in the days when large swathes of America were still unsettled in both senses of the word; folks hadn’t settled there yet and there was still hostility between any potential settlers and Native American Indians.

In the film, he’s working as a guide for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, headed by one of its founders, Army officer Captain Andrew Henry, played by Domhnall Gleeson. The Captain seems like pretty much an honourable man; he doesn’t do anything here to suggest that the opposite is the case.

When Glass is mauled by a big brown grizzly bear and left for dead, Captain Henry at first insists that the company carry Glass along with them on a stretcher. But the ground is thick with snow and conditions are wet, freezing cold and generally terrible, so eventually Henry agrees- reluctantly, it must be said- to leave him behind.

Not on his own, mind you. Glass’s young son, Hawk, by a Pawnee woman, refuses to be parted from his old Pops. Also staying behind are Jim Bridger, a decent young fella with a conscience, and the dastardly John S. Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who only volunteers because of the hundred dollars being offered by Captain Henry on behalf of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.

Despite having promised to stay with Glass until he dies naturally, and to then give him a decent burial, the despicable and self-serving Fitzgerald murders Glass’s son Hawk and leaves Glass for dead in a shallow grave. Then he persuades young Bridger to leave with him by tricking him into believing that the Ree Indians are nearby and coming for them.

I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that Glass does not die, and that he literally climbs out of the grave to go after Fitzgerald for killing his son. He faces all kinds of physical privations, dangers and obstacles as he goes on his solitary journey; hunger, cold, wetness, rapids, Indians, even French-Canadian hunters who brutally murder the one friend he makes on his solitary trek.

Leo probably wins the Oscar for all the ‘acting’ he has to do. I mean, he’s not looking suave and handsome here while quaffing champagne and eating lobsters on a yacht with a load of beautiful women in bikinis. Nah, that’s his real life, lol.

No, in THE REVENANT he’s filthy and bedraggled and beardy, dressed in stinking furs he’s ‘trapped’ himself. His hair is permanently wet and half-covering his face, he’s covered in blood and scars and he barely speaks six words of dialogue throughout the whole thing. He has to let his face and body do most of the talking, to convey the depth of suffering and human misery he endures in the film. So, goodbye Leo, hello Oscar, and the rest is history.

The scenery is magnificent throughout the whole film. Mountains, rivers, the tallest of tall trees in the forest and acres and acres of snow-covered ground, it’s all there, looking as bleak, disturbing, vast, challenging and as unsettling as it must have looked to those first early frontiersmen, those trail-blazers who, well, erm, blazed a trail across America for others to follow, often enduring terrible hardships in order to do so. Lots of great stories came out of this time, though plenty of tragedies too.

My two most memorable scenes would be the attack by the grizzly bear- he’s adorable, and so are the cubs!- and the scene where Leo slits a horse’s belly wide open, lifts out the innards and climbs inside the empty corpse for shelter. Don’t worry, the horse had already expired in a fall off a cliff. Otherwise, it’d just be . . . Well, it’d just be messy, see . . .?

I hate seeing animals slaughtered, but this was definitely an era in which it was done out of necessity and a very basic need to survive, so you kind of get a pass for that. Once it starts being done for fun, or sport, that’s when my patrician blood starts to boil over.

THE REVENANT is really a man’s film, with all the surviving and blood and guts and everything. There’s no romance in it or anything, and the only women present are the ghost of Leo’s Pawnee wife (ghost
sex is worse than no sex!) and a young Indian girl who is raped by French-Canadian voyageurs.

The film clocks in at a butt-numbing two hours and thirty-six minutes. Having sat through it once, I (mercifully) feel no need to ever watch it again, which is just as well as it’s leaving Netflix at the end of June. And all the solitary struggling against nature gets a tiny bit boring after a while. Sorry, but there isn’t even any decent sex in it, not even gay sex between the women-starved frontiers blokes! (PS, I used to think that ‘frontiers’ was actually spelled ‘front ears,’ what am I like…?)

You should watch the film yourself, though, if you haven’t already, even if only to see what he finally won the Oscar for. I reckon it was for all that serious ‘acting . . .’ Oh, and there’s a sequel coming out this year as well. It’s called THE REVENUNCLE . . .