The Revenant: Back from the dead from Oscar

Cast: Leonardo Di Caprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson, Lucas Haas

Rated: 7/10

It’s a dark, depressing and mostly frigid environment that this film takes you into. To top it, the journey is full of horrors, blood, gore and a burning revenge plan of a half-eaten-by-bear way-scout to travel to the other corner of this unending landscape and kill the murderer of his son.

Despite the slow but intense action of a factual story set in the 19th century, despite its lead actor Leonardo Di Caprio not speaking many, or should we say any, dialogues, despite the prolonged and agonising journey that battles the pitfalls of sheer monotony — it grows on you and you want to navigate to the end.

Though all the talk of this film based on real character of folklore America, Huge Glass, is about whether this time round — finally — Di Cap will get his much awaited Oscar for Best Actor, one should not take away from the immense work put into this landscape-ridden film by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and director Alejandro G Inarritu.

While Lubezki creates the atmosphere that is so relevant to this story, Inarritu has pieced together the tale with a dogged kind of authenticity.

But back to Di Cap. Well, after four nominations for his earlier similarly enabled roles with no Oscars yet, the big question remains. Well, for starters, as Glass, Di Cap is given next to nothing dialogues which test his histrionic skills as never before. Then, he is made to look so shabby and hidden by fur and filth all through the film that it is only his singular acumen for the big screen that could have shown all those intense emotions, mostly through his expressive eyes and facial contortions.

Third, with most of the film being brave enough to concentrate on Di Cap’s facial close-ups, the actor deserves undiluted applause for creating a reality so intense that you believe in his agony, feel his pain, live with his determination and survive as he does, the cold, snow-bound inertia of the white landscape.

It is a film of strong will-power, of defeating death, of a revenge so fuelled that nothing can kill it, not even the inherent boredom of the isolation that the tale bequeaths on him.

The violence is stark, as are the times that these fur-people live in. You cringe, you close your eyes and you even turn away at certain sequences, but they all seem to be the only option of the perpetrators. In one such sequence, Glass cuts out the innards of a dead horse and goes to sleep in its belly all nude to keep himself warm! In another, he eats a raw fish with maniacal hunger and in yet another, he joins a savage in eating the raw and bloodied meat of a wild buffalo left behind by jackals!

Not to mention the centrepiece of the film—his fight with an enraged bear who tears him apart mercilessly, coming back to him repeatedly. How it was managed, despite the computer graphics, is a tale to tell in itself.

So best actor, best picture, best cinematography — this one deserves it all.  

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 28 February, 2016