An existential tale of survival and revenge by the great Iñárritu

Rating: 9/10 (4 March 2016)

Adapting the mostly true experiences of fur trapper Hugh Glass that took place in Montana and South Dakota in 1823, "The Revenant" is an amazing existential tale of survival and revenge that'll leave you feeling gutted and skinned, thanks to the remarkable vision and cinematic artistry of the great Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the director of last year's multi-Oscar-winning "Birdman", and who has just won his second Best Director Oscar for "The Revenant". He was also the Mexican genius who gave us three narrative-juggling films of great humanism: "Amores Perros", "21 Grams" and "Babel", the latter I consider his masterpiece.
Forget the stories of its difficult production (being filmed in authentic remote and bitter cold locations), and how star Leonardo DiCaprio actually suffered throughout by being immersed in freezing water, stuffed into a horse carcass or actually consuming a bison liver, what you'll bear witness to on the screen will pull you completely into its stark, ruthless, primal world and hold you there, thanks to DiCaprio's career-best performance as the film's protagonist which justifiably earned him his first Best Actor Oscar. The film is long (arguably too long) and unrelentingly slow, but few viewers will find themselves bored due to its calculated hypnotic pull, completely enwrapping viewers in its frozen world almost as much as Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" put us in the desert. Above all, it has two sequences that will stay with you forever: the grizzly bear attack which occurs, as do many sequences, in one seemingly single long take -- but I found even more effective the first Indian assault. That scene delivers such brutal realism I actually felt terrified as never before in a movie theater due to the scene's directorial staging of the trappers' panicking while the Indians' arrows frenetically strike the men's flesh with the force of stinging missiles. This scene makes every other Indian attack I've ever seen in a film postured and artificial.
Iñárritu is a Mexican genius, born in 1963, who managed to build up an extensive amount of cultural experiences through early travels, beginning at age 17 by crossing the Atlantic on a cargo ship then working his way across Europe and Africa. After his journeys, he returned to Mexico City, majored in communication, then began a career as a radio station host interviewing rock stars and hosting live concerts while single-handedly building WFM into the number one station in Mexico. All these experiences apparently became the source of his eclectic filmography, beginning with writing and directing a famous Mexican TV pilot, "Behind the Money", and making a few short films before beginning his feature career with "Amores Perros" in 2000. His best work conveys a cinematic exuberance close to a Mahler symphony in its scope, forming a synthesis of despair and joyfulness in rendering the human experience. "The Revenant" finds him at his most obsessive and committed during its long shoot in a way reminiscent of the epics of David Lean: an 80-day principal photographic schedule in the coldest weather at locations so remote it required more than nine months in unbearably torturous conditions, all due to Iñárritu's refusal to use computer-generated imagery (saving the few effects scenes that necessitated it). The director's monomania for realism became so intolerable that many crew members walked off the project (or were fired), and Tom Hardy wound up attacking the director, nearly strangling him. The efforts of Iñárritu (and his collaborators) can be seen in the final production.
Cinematographer Emmaunuel Lubezki (whose nickname is 'Chivo' which means 'goat' in Spanish) has an affinity with this director (he won an Oscar for Iñárritu's "Birdman" before winning one for "The Revenant"). After tests on 35mm and 65mm film stock, Lubezki and director Iñárritu decided to shoot "The Revenant" on 6K high-resolution digital to be able to schedule one more hour of shooting time per day, almost exclusively in natural light for authenticity. And since lensing Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men", Chivo has been justifiably famous for long unbroken takes (in fact, most of "Birdman" is constructed as if its entire drama is uninterrupted by a cut), and he continues that tradition, if in a less obvious fashion, with "The Revenant" in its Indian assault and grizzly bear attack..
Though the film ultimately does not attain formal perfection, I left the theater carrying a new life experience unlike anything I'd seen before, achieved through Iñárritu's singular vision conveying a quintessential portrait of the American wilderness with great cinematic poetry. One of the year's most significant achievements in film.