+Technical Mastery, -Synthetic Spirituality = Memorable Mediocrity

Rating: 7/10 (21 December 2015)

My popcorn tin was heavier when I binned it than when I collected it. Why did I throw up when watching The Revenant? There isn't that much gore to speak of.. What's worth a loud unflattering speech is the wooden spoon of pseudo-philosophical pretensions AG Iñárritu gags the audience with for 2 hours and 26 minutes. I sat with that warm tin on my lap even through the 10 minute credits, contemplating.
Consider that Glass' chief motivation for returning from the grave (gravely wounded really) is his love for his Pawnee son, with whom the only memorable scene shared is patting him down from an outburst against Fitzgerald's (Hardy) ferociously racist taunts. He only becomes that much close to him after Fitzgerald coats his rusty knife with the teenager's gastric juice, in a powerfully screamed-out scene.
Consider how much running time we spend watching Glass wander wistfully into the afterlife, despite knowing full well he'll overcome his bear wounds for a showdown or the film wouldn't be funded. He eavesdrops on whispers by his murdered wife's wraith, only to wake up and cauterize his torn-open neck with gunpowder; Iñárritu wants to both have his bison liver and eat it. How much can you cheat the narrative?
Most redundant of its sophistry is the Darwinian symbolism, as Glass evolves from being bruised and buried, to a crawling creature, to a one-legged limper, to a biped man to a horseback riding gunfighter... In Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, evolutionary symbolism at the end served a purpose of literalizing how survival is a prerequisite for evolution; we wouldn't be writing reviews on IMDb if Neanderthals hadn't scrambled Mousterian tools 300,000 years ago. Here, Glass gets wounded and persists only to become the same man again.... not even a wiser fellow.
Above everything, the over-ballyhooed bear attack is dampeningly underwhelming. Not-to-spoil anything, but you remember it, how you give a cat a bowl of milk, the bowl gets swirled around a bit with only a few licks of milk spilling over the edges.. Yeah. Oh, it's not even all in one long continuous take as it's been touted to be, there's a very visible cut soon after Glass arms himself with a knife. What it isn't is even 1/10th as visceral as the jaguar-mauling from Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. What it is is ten times more pointlessly protracted and thusly expensive.
On the other hand, The Revenant is filmed with such hypnotic beauty. Lubezki's camera floats around inordinately, (pans more than it tracks) and he seems to find heavenly imagery in every 360° plane. Nature has never looked better in a Hollywood production. There's a grim fairytale (& Ron Fricke-esque) edge to the proceedings. The wide-screen frames are filled with towering forestry, snowmelt and dew drops dripping off the damp lushly colored leaves in close-up. Negatively charged oxygen reaches for your lungs off the screen. When the film slackens to luxuriate in wonder, never is it boring; it's only catching its breath.
The editing is often fabulous. From flame-to-flame match cuts in the snow, and most memorably, Glass' labored breath fogs the lens, dissolves into clouds floating in the mountain ranges which are then viciously consumed by Fitzgerald's pipe smoke.
But Ho! there... characters' lives are risked for this virtuosity. There's a scene in which Jim Bridger, the story's most conflicted entity, when finding their way to camp with Fitzgerald, happens upon a massacred Native village, huts still smoking. Him and us, (but not Fitzgerald) see a surviving lady, for whom Bridger leaves a parcel whose contents neither we nor her know to be; she's seen Fitzgerald stomp around and cuss, she's surmised his inclination towards violence. She has to choose between 1) staying safely alive by hiding a little longer, or 2) bowing to the logistical limitation of Iñárritu needing to pan around, show her to the audience discovering bread in the parcel and pinching off mouthfuls, then urgently cut to the next scene. Does she play it safe? Not if The Revenant is going to strike a balance between manipulative and masterful.
Still, despite the objectionable, emetic and offensively on-the-nose endeavour, Iñárritu deserves an Oscar again, if only for the scene in which Glass eviscerates a dead horse he's ridden off a cliff, and the camera smoothly sails around from the horse's back as its viscera are scooped out, travels in a long take, timed to the action, to find Glass snuggling into its steaming 'womb' then conclude with a close-up of his face. Wow!! (No matter how many takes and fired crew members it took)
The most human performance is by Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald, consistently flawed and gleaming with gallows humor. Don't be surprised if during the final snowy showdown, you're rooting for him to cut down pretentious.
DiCaprio, well, he..... works the hardest. You know that clip they play at the Oscars, your most electrifying moment during a performance, DiCaprio's here is effectively a grisly series of those. My two favorite are him trying-to-not-blink to save his life, and him crawling out of a shallow snow grave, and mortared between his teeth, equal parts spit and grit. Despite my reservations, I'll cheer a lung out for either clip.
You can almost hear the voices in his head (his Birdman?) yell in Calvin Candie rhetoric; "Eddie Redmayne, that new kid, he gimped hisself out last yur, won that Oscar for it.. What are you gonna do, Huh!?!"
Such a troubled production, he ate real raw bison liver, yet still he required 5 stunt doubles and 3 photo doubles... that there is a metaphor for the whole movie.
While the film is never boring, calling it entertaining would be flattering it. No exhilaration derives from watching a man ride a horse off a cliff; the experience is very akin to staring into an open wound, waiting patiently for it to a cicatrize into a scar. 7/10.