Leo may get the Oscar for his role in a tale of revenge and survival set in 1820's America.
The Revenant
Grade: A-
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu (Birdman)
Screenplay: Innarritu, Mark L. Smith (The Hole) from the Michael Punke novel
Cast: Tom Hardy (Mad Max), Leonardo DiCaprio (Wolf of Wall Street)
Rating: R
Runtime: 156 min.
by John DeSando
“Nature red in tooth and claw” Tennyson
The 19th century’s romanticism and growing naturalism inspired Tennyson to describe in these lines the dark side as Darwin would change forever our benign view of man and nature. Director/writer Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu and writer Mark L. Smith adapt Michael Punke’s novel in a naturalistic way that makes the 156 minutes seem as long as it must have taken noted explorer Hugh Glass (Leo DiCaprio) in the 1820’s to recover from being buried alive in the wilderness he helped open.
After being mauled by a bear and left for dead by his comrade in trapping, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who also murders Glass’s son in front of him, Glass drags himself 200 miles! back to civilization to exact revenge. Although it is a survival/revenge story, with the usual formulaic occurrences, DiCaprio and Hardy succeed in making it real, tortured, and visceral in the extreme.
I can try to guess how much discomfort DiCaprio went through for this Oscar-worthy performance, which lacks only the variety and nuance of speech that characterizes frequent Oscar winners. What the role demands and delivers is the almost insane will to survive and revenge.
A heavy dose of naturalism (not just realism but realism with bedrock of rawness and violence) is best exemplified in the mother bear protecting her cubs by savaging Glass, a tour de force scene. The Pawnee Indians also illustrate the harsh world with one chief briefly cataloguing what the white man has taken from the tribes.
Needless to say, the cinematography by Tree of Life’s Emmanuel Lubezki is stunning in sharp grey to reflect the winter conditions that contrast with the snow. Rarely does the sun shine, and in figurative terms it shouldn’t because this is a grim world where animal pelts are a man’s riches, and a life can be lost for a simple miscalculation or an indifference bred of Nature’s seeming carelessness for human life
Glass accepts, as all must, Nature’s final demand: “I ain't afraid to die anymore. I'd done it already.”
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
