According to reports, The Revenant shoot — which took place in remote tracts of Alberta, British Columbia and Argentina — was an endurance test for actors and crew alike.
It’s also a gauntlet thrown down for Academy voters: Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated five times for such performances as The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street. Here the actor throws blood, sweat, tears and everything else he has into the role of Hugh Glass, as if daring Academy members not to hand him the statuette this time ‘round.
Glass was a real-life frontiersman who signed on to work for the Rocky Mountain Fur Trading Company in the wildlands buffeting the Missouri River. The film opens in 1823, with Glass and company being set upon by Arikara Indians — cinematographer Emmanuel Lubekzi’s stunning landscapes suddenly and harshly punctuated with arrows and soiled with mud and the blood of humans and animals.
Glass survives the attack (no spoiler: it’d be a short film, otherwise) but catches another bad break when he is torn apart by a grizzly bear. Instructed by their superior (Domhnall Gleeson) to stay with a dying Glass, two men do the opposite, burying him — still alive — in a shallow grave and then making tracks. Glass claws out of that hole and then travels some 200 miles across the wilderness, fighting winter, hunger and predators of all stripes, determined to kill the men who left him for dead.
While dragging himself through one Odyssean trial after another, Glass clings occasionally to images of his dead wife and of his half-breed son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). This is a world where both native and white men are savage; where there are many victims — of race and bigotry, of an impossibly harsh natural landscape and of a man-made economic enterprise that sought to tame it.
Even Tom Hardy’s character, Fitzgerald, gets his moment of sympathy, a seemingly impossible feat.
That’s it, really. Two hours and 36 minutes of acute suffering, a survivalist skill-set sure to impress even the most dedicated prepper and self-reflection. Alejandro Inarritu (Best Director winner at last year’s Academy Awards for Birdman) directed, produced and co-wrote the film, based in part on 2002’s The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. Inarritu excels at visceral grit (sometimes with realistic viscera!) and frontier realism and only falters when it comes to the supernatural elements that pepper the film.
No matter. The experience, a potent revenge play between DiCaprio and Hardy, two actors never better, is worth the ordeal.Â
The Revenant screens at Scotiabank.
