Man vs. Nature

Rating: 9/10 (11 January 2016)

Only one year after his major Oscar win with "Birdman", Alejandro G. Inarritu delivers another awesome cinematic experience with his survival western drama "The Revenant". Most of the publicity surrounding this film is about whether or not this will finally gain Leo his first Oscar. But there's so much more to this film. And Leo is not even the star of this movie - even though he's terrific in it, I'll come to that - but the real star is sitting behind the camera. It's cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki.
I'd like to say that the art of cinematography has reached perfection with "The Revenant", at least it has reached its peak up to now. Chivo's images approach Nature as something elemental, terrifying, yet painfully beautiful. It does not comment on these images, it does not judge, it is rather something that is felt than intellectually explored. Of course we have the long uncut shots that Chivo is already famous for, but the dogmatic restriction to solemn use of natural lighting comes off as even more incredible here. The movie has been chided for its brutality, but it never uses that unnecessarily. It is rather a realistic approach to the hard life in the Northwestern parts of North America in the early 1800s.
Leonardo DiCaprio delivers a stellar performance as Hugh Glass, the protagonist who is trying to survive on his own in the wilderness although being severely wounded. It is rather a physical performance that he shows without any subtleness, but as an acting tour de force it is overall extremely respectable. Tom Hardy excels as his counterpart John Fitzgerald, a cold-hearted pragmatist who has his own methods for survival. To me, he definitely deserves an Oscar nomination for that performance.
The only issue I have with this movie is with some of the directorial choices made by Inarritu. In my opinion, it would have been the perfect film if it had been linear from beginning to end - just a straight, gritty western that is always in the moment and in the wilderness. Instead, Inarritu continuously breaks the scheme by integrating flashbacks and dream sequences, which come off as quite impressionistic. Those impressionistic elements bothered me, as they slowed down the pace of this (overall too long) movie and distracted from the movie's greatest strength: the Man vs. nature elements. But after all, this is an incredibly beautiful work with superb acting and the best camera work I've ever seen.