A Rare Experience

Rating: 8/10 (21 December 2015)

It is one of the most beaten clichés of movie-marketing to call in the viewer to experience something unusual. When in truth there are very few filmmakers who are able to pull off something like a sensory cinematic experience.
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu is one of those rare directors. His movies defy narrative conventions ("21 Grams", "Babel") and also visual templates ("Birdman"). Now he has achieved his next big step. A big budget adventure story that is reduced to its most minimal plot-elements while being a truly immersive experience that manages to give a tangible sense of a long-gone era.
Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a tracker who assists a band of fur-trappers in the early nineteenth century. He is attacked by a bear along the frontier of Montana. And after being left for dead finds himself amidst an unforgivable wilderness.
The screenplay written by Mark L. Smith and Iñárritu is a starting point for a film that relies first and foremost on the image and is therefore reconnecting with the era of silent film and the most fundamental roots of the medium. Iñárritu who tried to avoid as much as possible the trappings of computer effects has production designer Jack Fisk, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, costume designer Jacqueline West and his actors pull out all the stops. You are left with images, sounds, faces and languages that force you to reflect on your life two hundred years after the events shown here.
Leonardo DiCaprio manages, not unlike Tom Hanks in "Cast Away", to hold the screen with his presence in a performance that is mostly wordless. From teen-heartthrob to superstar to character actor; DiCaprio's trajectory seems to be about choosing his projects according to the challenges they face. And it must be said that his devotion to the portrayal of an archaic character whose prime motivation is survival is as simple and riveting as can be.
Before he began shooting "Birdman" Iñárritu sent his cast an image of Philipp Petit, the high-wire artist who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center. It was a symbolic gesture of what he and his collaborators were trying to attempt with their movie. "The Revenant" represents another high-wire act by this Mexican iconoclast. It is a successful attempt to resurrect not only a forgotten time, but also some often neglected qualities of cinema.
May it jolt all those timid formula-makers out of their slumber.