I should’ve packed a parka when I went to see The Revenant. It’s the coldest-looking movie I’ve ever seen and, sorry to say, it left me cold. It’s too long for its thin story.
I feel almost guilty for not liking it much because I so looked forward to it based on rave reviews of critics I respect.
First, let me hasten to state The Revenant does have some astonishing moments filmed by the masterful Emmanuel Lubezki under the direction of the brilliant Alejandro G. Inarritu. Many of the meticulously conceived scenes depict unbearable suffering and cruelty, so expertly filmed you almost cry out in pain. Those horrific sequences are intermixed with scenes – alas, too many – of austere wintry beauty.
The movie is about a man, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), in a fur-trapping party that is attacked by Indians. Later, a grizzly bear rips him almost to shreds. A vicious villain leaves Glass alone to die after murdering Glass’s son. The rest of the movie is a grueling series of efforts by the poor guy to survive – to crawl, stumble and limp back to the trading post in order to exact revenge on the sadistic fiend.
Sounds like a gripping story, doesn’t it? Well, it is, intermittently, but it gets lost in the wilderness, so to speak, and by the time the film ended, I was sitting there wondering what was all the fuss about?
Here are the reasons I wouldn’t rate The Revenant a masterpiece:
• Its length becomes monotonous. How Glass manages to survive and forge on alone is at times riveting, yes. But then we have scene after scene of cold, overcast landscapes: many shots of a faraway moon in a misty winter night, frequent shots of pine trees seen from every angle, glimpses of snowy mountains, snowy slopes, snowy ravines, more trees and still more trees. And more snow. Some of the shots, as I mentioned, are stunning in their cold bleak beauty. We do get a shivering visceral feeling for this bitter outdoor world, the place of such suffering of the people in it. And yes, the inhospitable landscape is practically a character in the story and thus deserves a good long look. But sometimes less is more.
• Why did Inarritu keep intruding with so many artsy calendar shots? It’s the same scenery obsession for which the sometimes great director Terrence Malick is known for – interrupting some of his stories constantly with gratuitous inserts of scenery, all but eclipsing the story he’s trying to tell. He did that in The Thin Red Line, which could have been a superb war movie without its profusion of static jungle scenery shots intruding on it. Is it any wonder that Malick’s The Tree of Life, another way-too-long movie stuffed with scenery shots, used the same cinematographer who filmed The Revenant? Make no mistake, Lubezki is a supreme artist with a movie camera (he shot Inarritu’s Gravity, a movie I love), but too often he overdoes the scenery for its own sake, or is it Inarritu’s fault, or the film editor’s fault? If about half of the landscape scenes (about a half hour’s worth) had been cut from it, The Revenant might have had more impact.
• In a mercilessly realistic movie like this one, we expect the story to be believable, moment to moment, in all of its true grit. But there are several improbabilities in The Revenant, including an almost laughable sequence in which Glass, sitting on a galloping horse while being chased, goes flying off of a high cliff and survives apparently without so much as a broken bone or nary a scratch. Did the big pine tree below “break” his fall? Such improbabilities are so jarring they undermine the power of the story.
• The ending is a letdown. It’s supposed to be the big revenge scene. It involves a bloody, snowy hand-to-hand combat scene, as overdone as the fights in an old Grade B Western and just as improbable. Glass and his nemesis grapple, grasp, choke, stab and hack mightily at each other. But Glass suddenly decides not to administer the coup de grace so God can mete out justice instead. It just doesn’t ring true; it leaves the viewer hanging. It’s a final stab at some of the mystical notions Inarritu introduced early into the movie but then didn’t develop, such as much ado about trees’ strong root systems (symbolic, get it?) and about Glass’s martyr-like sufferings in close-ups that come squirmingly close to those in The Passion of the Christ. I almost expected Glass to be crucified on a snowy hill just before The End.
Despite its moments of hallucinatory intensity and severe beauty, The Revenant verges more on being cinematic winter calendar art than the storytelling masterpiece it could have been. It doesn’t deserve the Best Picture Oscar.
