![]() As expected, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki dazzles with his use of natural light - the torches, the rolling myst, the sunsets, oh my - and should start writing his acceptance speech for next year’s Academy Awards. The Revenant affords such bleak chaos for a number of reasons, but above all because it’s so damn beautiful. The finale is a taut, bloody massacre on the snowy shores of nowhere. It’s an uncomfortable, startling experience that strangles the eyes and ears from beginning to end. The opening is a stressful, gory battle with arrows, bullets, and blades that rivals Spielberg’s retelling of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. ![]() Iñárritu wrangles this terror with an amalgamation of touch-and-go one-shots and intimidating close-ups, to the point that we’re able to see men’s breath fog up the screen. This isn’t the fringe of society it’s the barren nothingness, where there’s seldom room for humanity, if at all. With the exception of a few female Indians, The Revenant surges forward with pelts of testosterone, painting the American West as a dangerous man’s world, where pillaging, scalping, raping, and killing are everyday occurrences. ![]() The ever-exceptional Hardy, who nails another transformative role, leads a supporting cast that could best be described as, um, masculine. How Hardy didn’t lose his shit - especially coming off a year that includes the wasteland of Mad Max: Fury Roadand the doubled-down role of Legend - is just remarkable. In fact, his skin never rises above a blueish hue throughout the entire film, which isn’t surprising considering Iñárritu’s well-reported hellish shoots across Canada and Argentina. Even when he’s doing something as simple and rudimentary as bathing, he’s hunched over naked in freezing temperatures. He’s tossed around like a rag doll, he drags his body across icy terrain and rivers, he sleeps in a horse carcass - hell, he sinks his teeth into a fish he snags straight out of the water. Granted, the 40-something actor has invested his body into most of his roles, whether it’s slicing open his hand for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained or throwing out his back for Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, but he defies all expectations here with one of the most brutally exhausting performances of all time. (Read: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Top 10 Performances) The ensuing injuries only insist upon this further. Glass obliges, but it’s almost a shrug off, as if to infer that as long as he can breathe, it doesn’t matter what happens to his flesh. There’s also a subtle digression on the human body itself as a temporary organic vessel for the more timeless soul, and the film ruminates on the belief that our existence goes beyond our own two feet. Midway through, Glass stumbles into a stranded Pawnee Indian, who warns him that his wounds have made his body rotten. It’s an intriguing concept that fuels much of the proceedings, especially as a countermeasure to Glass’ own tortured feelings of revenge, which he’s told is in “the creator’s hands.” The idea is that whatever keeps you breathing, whoever keeps you alive, is what you truly believe in and nothing else matters. ![]() God is interchangeable to everyone in this film: For Glass, it’s his dead wife and son for Fitzgerald, it’s a future in Texas for one stoic Indian father, it’s his lost daughter. ![]() In the same scene, Fitzgerald prods the kid and insists he “ought to be god to ” for saving his life. Tom Hardy’s murderous John Fitzgerald regales Will Poulter’s boyish Jim Bridger early on with a story about how a squirrel was god to a past acquaintance of his - simply because it provided the man sustenance. One instance is how the film tussles with the meaning of god. It’s a malleable film in the sense that Glass can represent so many things, and while he’s mostly alone in his journey, he’s often hampered by circumstances and paired against characters that touch on a measure of recurring themes and conflicts. ![]()
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