Alejandro G. Iñárritu makes a gripping survival Western, with Leonardo DiCaprio carrying its physical weight. Its 157 minutes include too much solemn reflection, but the bear attack earns every flinch.
The Revenant is a good survival Western with a habit of making hardship last longer than it needs to. Alejandro G. Iñárritu wants us to feel the effort of staying alive in the wilderness, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass rarely allows us to forget how much it hurts. The revenge story is simple enough to leave plenty of attention for cold, injury and fear. Across 157 minutes, the physical struggle grips more reliably than the invitations to contemplate it.
Emmanuel Lubezki’s natural-light photography gives the wilderness a coldness that survives even its most beautiful views. His roving camera makes the action feel dangerously close, while the long takes deny us the small relief of a cut. We were horrified by the bear attack. The sustained attention to Glass’s helplessness makes the violence feel horribly prolonged, and the illusion holds well enough that looking for the trick offers little comfort.
DiCaprio’s performance is strongest when simply enduring the next physical demand seems to require everything he has. His near-wordless acting keeps our attention on the immediate problem of survival, and we believe the effort even when the ordeal begins to strain belief. Tom Hardy, as John Fitzgerald, is the more characterful presence, giving us someone to consider during a film otherwise liable to keep asking how much more a man can take. His scenes are a welcome change of emphasis.
Jack Fisk’s production design helps make the human surroundings feel scarcely more comfortable than the wilderness. Nothing in that work encourages us to settle back and enjoy a picturesque frontier, which is useful when the photography is so seductive. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s score sustains the unease without needing to compete with the violence. It is less persuasive when the film asks us to take suffering as a reason for spiritual awe.
The trouble comes when Iñárritu slows down to insist that this ordeal means something beyond the immediate business of surviving it. The religious imagery can feel ponderous, and the screenplay by Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith gives us too little of Glass’s inner life to make those passages revealing. Stephen Mirrione’s editing is patient enough to let the survival sequences become uncomfortable. That patience serves the action well, but in the reflective stretches we begin to notice how little has been added since the previous bout of suffering.
As a Western, the film is convincing about how small human plans become when set against the weather and the terrain. Revenge is a familiar reason to send a man into danger, but here the danger repeatedly becomes more interesting than his purpose. We would not ask Iñárritu to soften the violence or make the wilderness friendlier. We would ask him to trust those things to hold our attention without so much solemn encouragement. Choose it for a hard, absorbing evening, provided relaxation was never the plan.
