The Revenant is beautifully photographed. Really. It’s beautiful. I mean, you’ve never seen such beauty. We’re talking nature here, people. Rivers. Mountains. Snow. Even an avalanche. Some fog, both early morning and late afternoon. Also, it’s supposed to be set in 1823, so the idea is we’re seeing land that few if any human beings have ever walked on. No footprints! No signs about cleaning up your campsite!
The Oscar-winning director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and the star, Leonardo DiCaprio, have done nothing for months but talk about how difficult it was to film The Revenant. It was so difficult, you wouldn’t believe. They were out. In the cold. They had to haul equipment up mountains. DiCaprio had to pull a live fish out of a river and eat it—and it wasn’t even cut up by a sushi chef! Oy, the difficulty! It nearly broke them! Imagine the bravery these two men showed, only getting paid $20-30 million (DiCaprio) and probably something like $5 million (Iñárritu) to put up with such suffering, such pain, such indignity! But they didn’t mind the sacrifice, because they were sacrificing for us, you see. To bring us art.
And not only that. They were bringing us a message. A message about capitalism and its horrors, 200 years ago and today. The movie begins with a team of trappers getting waylaid by a tribe of Arikara Indians. The trappers apparently both deserve every arrow that gets shot into their eye—but, like Mongo in Blazing Saddles, we learn that they are only pawn in game of life.
“These corporations were getting these young men . . . to sign away their lives, killing every animal, breaking every promise to [Indian tribes], and cutting the trees and using nature as we are today,” Iñárritu has said. “So I thought this was very resonant of what we are doing now. This is the start of the regulated capitalism that we live in now. That’s exactly where it was born. That vision of having no responsibility to any community, the greed of that.”
Yes, the greed! Considering the need we should all feel about exposing capitalist rapacity, it should be a matter of absolutely no moment to you that Iñárritu spent $135 million on a film about some guys in 1823 who were trying to score a few beaver pelts! And hey, you want some more irony? The novel on which the movie was based is by Michael Punke, who is now the deputy U. S. trade representative. This man is working to open more markets for exploitative capitalists to earn their filthy lucre on the backs of indigenous peoples—just the sort of negative force against whom Iñárritu is determined to stand! Unless, that is, he needs $135 million to make a movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio spends most of his time grunting.
He grunts because about 15 minutes in, he’s assaulted by a bear. This actually happened in the 1820s to a trapper named Hugh Glass. So did the crucial twist in the story, when men paid to tend to Glass’s injuries instead left him behind for dead—which filled Glass with such rage that he traveled 1,500 miles to find them and kill them. (And then didn’t.) To “raise the stakes,” as they say in Hollywood, DiCaprio’s Glass is driven to stay alive and pursue revenge when Fitzgerald, the man paid to watch him, kills Glass’s half-Indian son before his eyes before attempting to smother and bury Glass.
The bad man is played by Tom Hardy, a sometimes great actor who is doing himself no favors trying to master American accents. He did a bad Brooklyn in The Drop and a bad Appalachian in Lawless. He didn’t take any chances this time, and if they handed out medals for Best Performance as Tommy Lee Jones, Hardy would win gold, silver, and bronze.
His face lost in a Z Z Top beard, DiCaprio alternates between visions of his (natch) idyllic life with the Pawnee and scenes of him rolling around on the ground in agony and being hurled about by a raging river. He’s probably going to win an Oscar for this thing, even though it’s by far the least interesting performance this wonderful actor has ever given.
If you gave me a minute I could probably spin this into yet another statement about the evils of late-stage capitalism, but I don’t want to keep you. In this way I am unlike The Revenant, which is two-and-a-half-hours long.
What this movie needs is some rapacious capitalist downsizing!
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
