Inarritu in Winter

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2016)

Alejandro Inarritu has made gripping movies set in such places as Mexico, Tokyo, Morocco, Barcelona and Manhattan and now he conquers the Canadian Rockies and Tierra del Fuego (standing in for the U.S. Rockies) in winter with this tale of brute survival, loyalty to loved ones and humane principles and the limitations of revenge.
Leonardo DiCaprio gives another of his super-charged performances as a white fur trapper who, in the company of his half-breed son and other trappers hunts for a fur trading company in the years immediately following the Lewis and Clark Expeditions that jump started U.S. expansion west of the Mississippi. En route he runs afoul of an emotionally damaged and brutal fellow trapper (Tom Hardy) and encounters a sympathetic Indian who is looking for the killers of his family.
There are similarities in look, theme and situation to earlier Westerns ("The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The Searchers," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Jeremiah Johnson," "Dead Man") and even an Eastern ("Dersu Uzala") and a Mid-Eastern ("The Passion of the Christ"). The mostly male cast is appropriately grizzled, bearded, unkempt and squalid, with Hardy notably vanishing into grungy dishevelment with a dead-on Texas accent to boot.
Gore is everywhere from the earliest scenes, as is fantasy. It is impossible to believe that DiCaprio or any human being, no matter how fit, could survive the bear attack that sets the tone for the grueling survival narrative that follows. Further tests and trials are no more convincing, but DiCaprio gives it all his actorly oomph to make it seem believable. His struggle takes on a mythological quality after a while; you don't believe the literalness of it but you are carried by the spirit of it. Over the course of more than two hours he is repeatedly mangled, frozen, crushed, starved, drenched, sliced and punctured. He probably even dies for a while before emerging reborn from the bloody slit of a horse carcass he has gutted and into which he has crawled naked to keep from freezing after the animal and he fall off a cliff into a snow bank.
The sparsely swelling chords of Ryuichi Sakamoto's musical score complement the intensity and obsession of the journey.