Very few movies provide its
audience one particular experience that can only be given by a book, getting
lost into it. While other movies let us watch the story unfold, these select
few let us be part of it. We struggled to differentiate reality and a dream
state (Inception), we felt grateful to have touched the soil after passing
enormous hardships to get back to ground from outer space (Gravity). Likewise,
we have now felt pain, hunger, anger and solitude in a barren tundra and know
what it is like to be left to die alone. There have been a lot of Man Vs Nature movies before but
none have left us this beaten and bruised as
Alejandro Innaritu’s exceptionally shot, The Revenant.
Legendary Rocky Mountain
Frontiersmen Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is injured in a vicious bear attack
while guiding a fur trapping expedition in the northern Missouri river. Left
for dead by members of his hunting team, he needs to find extraordinary skills
of survival to stay alive and extract revenge on John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy)
who had done him great wrong.
In what is essentially a simple
tale of revenge, Alejandro Innaritu manages to create an unforgiving
masterpiece of grit, determination and survival so raw that you can even smell
the breath of the characters. The intimacy of the work is such that you wonder
if what’s giving you the chills, is the air conditioning of the movie hall or the
landscape depicted in the movie come to life. It is minute-after-minute of
arrow stricken men, butchered animals and ghastly moments that are downright
visceral and can leave you with a disturbed gut but it is also of visual
brilliance and great acting. While you could literally feel the drooping saliva
of the grizzly, you can also taste the water when Glass sticks his tongue out
to drink water from the falling sleet.
Eddie Redmayne’s reaction when
Julianne Moore declared the winner of best actor at this year’s Academy awards perhaps
encapsulates just how much the World wanted to see Leonardo DiCaprio lift the
Oscar statuette. Some might question the choice given that there were two other
power packed performances last year from Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) and Redmayne
himself (The Danish Girl) but perhaps its poetic justice and a culmination of
all his previous nominations that tipped the favour towards DiCaprio and now
the World has one less thing to worry about. The performance itself resonated
with his Oscar misgivings: Beaten, Bruised and left in the cold, he eventually
crawls and fights his way to get his revenge.
Mark Rylance’s phenomenal work as
the captive US spy in Bridge of Spies was the only thing that stood between Tom
Hardy and a first academy award as he spits venom in his role as John
Fitzgerald who is as cold and unforgiving as the landscape of the movie itself.
Tasked with a role that is more challenging than DiCaprio’s, Hardy captivates
the audience with so much of dark side that you are forgiven to have missed the
humanity in it. How much he communicates through those powerful eyes! The
premise of his character is not new to him specially after The Dark Knight
Rises, Warrior and Legend but he brings something fresh to it every time he
laces up his boots as a Villain. This complex, power packed performer will be
one of the best performers of this era.
Alejandro Innaritu’s vision is a
testament on how to convert what in essence an art house making into a
commercial blockbuster. The Revenant is grand, brilliant and spell binding but
ultimately exhausting. In an attempt to elevate the movie from a simple revenge
tale Innaritu poses a lot of questions from race to climate change to humanity
to a brutal system that helped build a nation. But he leaves no attempt to answer
them but simply lets his characters be victims of all these problems. In doing
so he has left a sense of incompleteness which is akin to Glass’ final moments
in the movie, a long stare into the emptiness. Is that the point of it all?
It is not customary to finish a
review with a take on a movie’s cinematographer. But Emmanuel Lubezki’s work is
so captivating that you really wonder what this feature would be without this triple
Oscar winner and multiple time nominee. His work in the Revenant is not just
visual but also the way he lets the audience feel the movie or in his own
words, immersive. Shot exclusively in natural light which is limited in the
terrain where they shot the movie (Canada and Argentina), Lubezki brings us
every sunrise, frozen plants, shooting stars, frozen waterfalls, every wound in
Glass’ body and the fear in the men’s eyes. What could be equally or more
challenging than shooting landscapes is capturing human emotions in its micro
detail. So, the idea a movie like this involves the camera to be more emotional
than mechanical and that is exactly what Lubezki achieved. Shooting for this
movie was termed hellacious by the cast filled with unnatural hardships but the
end product is heaven. The movie itself is a grand statement of what happens
when the director and cinematographer works perfectly in sync with each other.
While the Revenant falters on
content and grace, it more than makes it up with its unique style of
moviemaking that’s brutal and awkward to watch but ultimately manages to floor
you with knock out performances and out of the world cinematography.
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