meIt’s man versus bear. And the Bear wins. Or is it? Alejandro González Iñárritu’s brutal and beautiful new western thriller <레버넌트(The Revenant)>Early coverage of , naturally, focused on a very special scene. After encountering several bear cubs in an eerily quiet forest, 19th century fur trapper and pioneer Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, hears the snot of their parents behind them. The parents are adult grizzly bears, who generally correctly understand Glass’s overall intentions. The scene that follows is one of horrifyingly primal violence, a brilliantly conceived CGI-reality clusterfuck. During that time, I clutched my whimpering fetal ball so tightly that I actually had to roll out of the movie theater auditorium later.
The immersion and immediacy of that confrontation reminded me of the moment in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where moviegoers go into a sensory-enhanced “feel” and watch a sex scene on a bearskin rug. They feel every bear fur. I could too, I felt every drop of bear spit, every cog of teeth, and understood what it felt like when part of my ribcage was exposed to fresh air and light rain.
Some even described it as a rape scene. That’s not true. But it’s about power, fear and anger, and this moment is as much the driving force of the film’s themes as the human duality that follows. It’s more common in movies than in reality. Revenge, revenge on humans, maybe even some kind of revenge on nature. Screenwriter Mark L Smith worked partly from Michael Punke’s 2002 novel and partly from the real-life story that inspired the book. The adventures of Hugh Glass, a Wyoming mountaineer who survives a bear hunt and goes on an incredible journey to track down the two men who abandoned him to die. The story fictionalizes and reinforces his personal circumstances and motivations for divestment.
Glass joins other civilians participating in an American military expedition led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) along the Missouri River to establish a lucrative fur trapping base. Glass and the others are attacked by tribal warriors in an exhilarating and terrifying sequence, their cries of warning silenced by the hissing sound of arrows hitting their necks. Glass, a seasoned tracker, guides the retreat of terrified survivors across the country, where he is mauled by a bear, and two men are attentive to his care and promise extra pay. Young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy) are Tom Hardy with wide eyes and cruel malice. Left alone with their charges, they leave Glass to die in agony and return to base, where they tell a good story about burying Glass to Christian for extra pay. But they don’t think Glass has a crazy will to survive.
Typically, immersive films put you inside, immerse you in the feeling of anticipation. Iñárritu and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, do just the opposite. That means they expose you to the elements. You are in the stinging, painful cold, beneath an endless, merciless sky. This is not an immersion that feels like sensual surrender. It’s more like the skin is peeling off. The images the film conjures are wondrous and crystalline. Breathtaking landscapes, foliage on frozen hillsides and a tiny crescent moon are all beautifully rendered in unsentimental close-ups. But there is something hallucinatory and unhealthy about these images. It was as if hunger and suffering had reduced Glass to the secularized state of a medieval saint tormented by visions. Poignantly, he pretended to shoot a distant deer with a tree branch instead of a rifle, and for a moment I had no idea what he was imagining when he suddenly encountered a vast plain full of bison. The ruined church looks like a miraculous example of cave painting.
The Revenant recalls Ford’s The Searchers and revises its themes of tribalism and sexual misconduct, as well as its brutal scalping calls. The first warriors to attack are enraged by the kidnapping of a Native American woman, Powaka (Melaw Nakehk’o). At times Iñárritu appears to have been inspired by Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, with its visions of imperial greed and vast flooded rivers. Or perhaps, in his documentary Grizzly Man, the grim-faced Herzog famously listened to someone dying through headphones. There must be something Altman about the winter frontier, and there’s certainly something of Malikia’s weightlessness in Glass’s dreams about his wife. But what is most characteristic of this Iñárritu film is its singular control and fluency. However extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control, and he unleashes twisty, spectacular travel scenes to convey it. In some ways, it’s no different from his previous film, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice on your skin.