Matt Damon “scienc the shit out of” something on Mars, maybe, with help from the global village on Earth. The guy played by James Franco who sawed off his own arm, obviously. Louis Zamperini from Unbroken, certainly. In my press notes, Iñárritu says, “Glass’s story asks the questions: Who are we when we are completely stripped of everything? What are we made of and what are we capable of?” I would answer that some of us are capable of crawling a long way with grievous wounds while others are not.
He’s great with the rough textures of the material world he’s far too literal-minded for the higher realm. The bond with Hawk gives Glass a sort of guest-access pass to the Pawnee spirit world, which enables Iñárritu to do what he does worst: floating apparitions, messages from beyond, magic realism so clunky that it would embarrass a first-year film student. Iñárritu has given his hero a fictional teenage Pawnee son named Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), whose mother was murdered by white soldiers and whose mistreatment at the hands of Fitzgerald Glass is too incapacitated to stop. It should be said that there is more than survival at stake. Many artists make a point of compressing time, going from point A to point D to point H while preserving the illusion of fluidity. Just when you think the ordeal can’t last much longer, Glass rounds another bend, the gray wilderness stretches into the horizon, and you know you’re in for at least five more minutes of Leo lurching and grunting. The bulk of the film features the shattered Glass dragging himself across mile after mile of barren tundra, somehow staying alive despite roaming Ree, freezing temperatures, and his own festering infections, driven by the need for revenge against a trapper named John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) who took something precious from him. For Iñárritu, editing would offer too much existential relief: You have to live through it in “real time.” Every damn second of it. (I don’t care how it was done - I’d like to keep it a mystery.) Now the bear is deep in the frame, now so close that her snout mists the lens (nice touch!), her great body rippling with a terrible kind of beauty as she takes her time with her prey - who’s busy trying to reach a musket and insert a bullet with bloodied fingers, though you know a single bullet will only make the mammoth creature madder. I’ve seen thousands of heroes thrown about by thousands of giant monsters, and this throwing-about has no equal. It’s almost a relief when the Ree get off their horses and start scalping people - at least you get a heads up, so to speak.īut the movie’s showstopper is the “one-shot” mauling of the hero by that mama grizzly, who takes a break to check on her cubs before lumbering back for more ripping and chewing.
This is the sort of sequence in which every time the camera moves close to someone, you mentally prepare for a projectile to zoom in from offscreen and tear a path through his kidney. The “one-shot” ballet of butchery begins with an arrow bisecting a man’s throat - thock! - and then gets more ferocious, the camera spinning, tilting toward treetops, and only just veering clear of arterial spray. The Revenant opens with arty flashbacks to an attack on a Pawnee village, follows with a soupçon of Native American mysticism, and goes in for the kill with an attack on a group of trappers by the Arikara tribe (dubbed the “Ree”). He’s out to create a frontier myth of biblical proportions. But Iñárritu ups the vengeance stakes exponentially, piling primal horror upon primal horror. Glass staggered 200 miles over six weeks to inform them of their misperception and was evidently pissed off. He has found a hero ripe for mangling in Hugh Glass ( Leonardo DiCaprio), a real 19th-century explorer and trapper who became famous for surviving an 1823 grizzly attack and abandonment by two members of his expedition tasked to stay with him (they had thought he was a goner). The Hollywood columnist who wrote that it was too “unflinchingly brutal” for women was justly ridiculed, but he did pick up on something that’s there: Watching it is meant to be a test of a certain kind of “manliness.”įrom Amores Perros to last year’s award-winning Birdman, Iñárritu has labored to prove that he’s an artist who will not flinch, and now he’s into nervy, swervy single takes (or expert simulations thereof) to intensify your fight-or-flight instincts.
THE REVENANT FULL STREAM MOVIE
Photo: Kimberley French/Courtesy of Twentieth Century FoxĮarly in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s survival saga The Revenant, I gasped “Bloody hell!,” meaning both “What an amazing filmmaker!” and “ Get me out of here!” The movie is visceral with a side of viscera.
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