abandoned trapper survives bear and winter to avenge murdered son

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2016)

Like the classic Western, The Revenant examines the thin line between savagery and civilization, as played out in the white man's ambivalent conquest of the native American. The central clash is between two white survivors, Hugh Glass and John Fitzgerald.
Both men have their proteges, son Hawk and cadet Bridger respectively. Hawk soars but Bridger follows the wrong orders, imperilling his life and soul.
Glass bridges both cultures, having lived among the Pawnee, learned their language and values, having lost a Pawnee wife and now caring for and avenging the death of his son Hawk.
Glass lives with the spirit of his slaughtered wife and in the last shot appears to rejoin her in the spirit world. Indeed the title may connote dreamer and avenger but it literally means a returning spirit. As he says before his last mission, "I ain't afraid to die anymore. I'd done it already." Hawk says to the moribund Glass, then Glass says to dead Hawk what he said to his dead wife: "I'm right here. You hear me?" The spirits are there to address. This rebuts Fitzgerald's last remark: "You came all this way just for your revenge, huh? Did you enjoy it, Glass?... 'Cause there ain't nothing' gon' bring your boy back."
Fitzgerald survived a scalping. When he meets his ultimate end it's not directly at Glass's hand but by nature. The Pawnee consign him to the rushing river.
Fitzgerald is reduced to the material. He's greedy, murderous, dishonourable in every way. He has no moral sense. In his theology God is a squirrel you can shoot and eat.
For Glass and the natives nature is a far larger spirit than an edible squirrel. That's the point of the powerful images of the landscape, Kananaskis (aka the suburbs of Calgary). God is in the land, either as a harsh test or as an enabling spirit. When Glass pulls himself out of the gutted horse he overnighted inside, he pats a respectful salute before moving on.
The central metaphor is what Glass learned from his wife: "As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight. You breathe. Keep breathing. When there is a storm. And you stand in front of a tree. If you look at its branches, you swear it will fall. But if you watch the trunk, you will see its stability." Time and again Glass saves himself or is saved by deploying the twigs and trunks around him. When he rides off a cliff a tall tree breaks his fall. In contrast, the French hang his Pawnee friend from a tree, a summary if not an emblem of European civilization. The Pawnee serve the nature the ostensibly "civilized" exploit.
Both the white and the native sides are mixed. Civilization is undercut by the army's savagery when it eliminates Glass's adopted tribe. As Glass warns his son, "They don't hear your voice! They just see the color of your face. You understand? " Even the counselled silence won't save Hawk. Glass as rumoured did kill an officer: "I just killed a man who was trying to kill my son."
Captain Andrew Henry is a man of honour and integrity, proved by his confrontation of Fitzgerald. But his company shows a moral blind spot when its workers end up owing the company for their expenses on a thwarted hunt for pelts.
There is also savagery among the natives, as the Sioux try to wipe out the Pawnee. But the one native's pursuit of his daughter, abducted and raped by the French, and the succour Glass gets from another isolated Pawnee put them on the honourable side.
As usual this historic drama is about the time it is made as well as the time in which it is set. Star DiCaprio makes its pertinence clear when he speaks out against the threat of the oil sands and pipelines to the natural preserve and our continuing neglect of native rights.