The Revenant

Alejandro Iñárritu's epic revenge Western is impressively staged, sumptuously photographed, and powerfully acted, with a performance by Leonardo DiCaprio that should finally win him an Oscar. Still, the film's excesses are maddening. DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass, a hunter guiding a party of fur trappers and frontiersmen through the northern American wilderness in the early 19th century. After Native Americans attack and kill most of the company, their leader, Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), looks to Glass for guidance back to their outpost on the Missouri River. However, many survivors, particularly the partially-scalped John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, in yet another riveting performance), distrust Glass and his half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). The rest of the picture is essentially Glass, the character, and DiCaprio, the actor, getting put through the harrowing ordeals by animals, the elements, his fellow man, and Iñárritu.

Unquestionably, The Revenant is an impressive movie. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot the entire film in real mountainous locations with natural lighting, mostly in sequence, enduring the same brutal weather conditions as the actors. But it's not a transcendent outdoors picture in the tradition of Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson (1972) or Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf (1983). Although the plot is loosely based on a true story, most of it defies credibility. Despite DiCaprio's deeply committed performance, we're always conscious of the actor, the camera, and the shooting conditions. Iñárritu's inability to put us fully under his spell is due mainly to the overly cerebral nature of this very physical movie. The narrative is not sufficiently epic to justify this picture's grandeur or lengthy running time. And as a result, we constantly find ourselves marveling at (or wondering about) the production instead of participating in Glass's emotional journey. Rather than a poetic statement about human nature, man's will to survive, or the savagery of the white men who "civilized" the West, The Revenant comes off as little more than an exquisite endurance test. It's full of itself, but ultimately it leaves the viewer feeling empty.