The Revenant
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leonardo dicaprio
tom hardy
will poulter
quick fox: A | Gold
winding dragon
The Life of a Trapper
No man, it seemed, might break upon the hip
So stern a wrestler with the strangling grip
That made the neck veins like a purple thong
Tangled with knots. Nor might Hugh tarry long
There where the trail forked outward far and dim
Mark Twain, in his later years, became increasingly cynical about the human race. Whereas old Chuck Darwin saw human as a higher form of evolution, Twain thought our species was heading in the opposite direction. His thoughts are best summarized from his essay “The Lowest Animal” (1896) in which he says, “Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.” I don’t know whether Alejandro Iñárritu was channeling his “inner Twain” when he directed The Revenant, but the idea of human cruelty is a perfect starting point of discussion for a film about a man, a bear, and the quest for vengeance.
The winner of three Academy Awards (including Leonardo DiCaprio’s first Oscar for Best Actor), The Revenant (2015) is based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel, which in turn is inspired by a 1915 poem titled “The Song of Hugh Glass.” All of them put their own spin on the tale of a real person named Hugh Glass, a fur trapper who miraculously survived a grizzly bear attack and crawled his way back to civilization.
Let’s set the stage. The year is 1823 and the so-called Era of Good Feelings is going strong. The United States and the Arikara tribe are firmly at war. Only 24 states have entered into a country still in its infancy. And, depending on the trading company, a beaver pelt could be worth a decent pair of shoes. Four pelts could get you a pistol. I suppose in an age when most necessities could be bought for less than a buck, beaver pelts were luxury items.
Iñárritu’s story features Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a gritty fur trapper leading an expedition to Fort Kiowa of the American Fur Company, located in present day South Dakota. But this is Arikara territory. And as the film opens, the tribe makes their point clear that Manifest Destiny be damned — war leaves no survivors. In a stunning piece of cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki (best known for his cinematography work with Terrence Malick), the American fur trappers are under attack. The camera moves like a grim reaper, floating in an uninterrupted pan from victim to victim. Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) tries to corral his men to the boats in the chaos, supporting a man with two arrows in his back. John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) angrily stabs an Arikara warrior in the neck with his hunting knife and then grabs as many pelts as he can carry, yelling at his fellow trappers to do the same. Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) is being drowned by an unknown assailant, bubbles spewing from his mouth as he screams in terror. Hugh Glass (Leanoardo DiCaprio) repeatedly shouts for everyone to abandon the pelts, as he searches for his half-Pawnee son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) to make sure he’s safe. Most of their company are killed, but the few remaining survivors make a hasty retreat on the boat, away from the burning trees and Arikara celebrating on the shore.
Survival
Or so it seemed. And when they lifted him,
His moan went treble like a song of pain,
He was so tortured. Surely it were vain
To hope he might endure the toilsome ride
Across the barrens. Better let him bide
There on the grassy couch beside the spring.
And, furthermore, it seemed a foolish thing
That eighty men should wait the issue there;
The opening scene in The Revenant is a tone-setter for the two-and-a-half hour epic, dragging us into a world where man is at its most animalistic. It’s so brutal, you could say it’s almost unbearable (yes, that pun was 100% necessary). But it also introduces us to the sort of people who forged the mythos of the American pioneer — steely-eyed, blue collar laborers (before we even had a word for “blue collar”) who came from the desperate sludges of society. After all, given the choice, very few people would willingly take on work where animal attacks are frequent, mountain avalanches and rapid rivers await weary travelers, pneumonia and hypothermia are at every turn, and Native Americans parol their territory for invaders. It’s a life where you have to be willing to kill another person at any moment (a promise that young Jim Bridger learns the hard way). Is that cruelty? I think Twain would certainly agree; Darwin might call it survival of the fittest.
Which leads us to the famous bear attack in The Revenant. It’s a gruesome sight to behold, and a bit of an overkill (for Hugh Glass, definitely, and even worse for the audience), because as it goes on and on we’re left wondering how much longer we have to watch DiCaprio writhe in agony. But in fairness, it’s not savagery for the sake of sadism; it serves two important purposes. For one, it’s a test of wonder — the longer the scene lasts, the more amazed we are that Glass survives the ordeal. Second, Iñárritu wants to make sure we recognize that we need to compare the bear’s attack on Glass versus Glass’s vengeance trip against John Fitzgerald.
Following the attack, the rest of the trappers find Glass and try to carry his broken body back to Fort Kiowa. It seems like a futile mission, so Captain Henry offers a reward for anyone who will stay behind until Glass dies and give him proper burial rights. Hawk immediately volunteers (you know, because it’s his dad and all), along with Bridger (out of the goodness of his heart) and Fitzgerald (for the money). But after Fitzgerald is unable to convince Hawk to abandon his father, the older, grisly *grizzly * trapper murders Hawk in front of Glass (who has enough consciousness to witness it) and then lies to Bridger about Arikara being nearby to compel the young man to follow the other trappers.
The rest of the film is one slow burn to an inevitable confrontation between Glass and Fitzgerald. It’s filled with incredible acting performances from both DiCaprio (who, because of his injuries, spends the majority of the time communicating in guttural sounds and death glares) and Tom Hardy (who speaks with a garbled drawl and presents himself as a wizened, fatalistic character). As is typical with epics, Glass stumbles/crawls his way over many miles, and encounters spiritual figures. The most important of which is Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud), a Pawnee native whose entire village had been slaughtered, and provides the main lesson for Glass: “Revenge is in the Creator’s hands.”
[As a quick side note, it’s a wonder nobody took revenge on Iñárritu for his direction style during production, especially DiCaprio. Many crew members quit because the shooting was a living nightmare. Every day for almost a year, they exposed themselves to sleep deprivation, frostbite, and hypothermia—practically none of which were communicated to the crew when they signed on thanks to conflict between Iñárritu and producer James W. Skotchdopole (whom Iñárritu later banned from the set). DiCaprio, being the star of the show, went through hell and back — eating raw bison meet, wearing a 50-pound beer skin drenched in water, swimming in frozen rivers, hiking across snowy mountains in Argentina, and most notably crawling bear-naked inside a bloody horse carcass. Not a real horse, though, just an incredibly life-like one made out of latex. If DiCaprio wasn’t allergic to latex before, he certainly is now.]
The Death of the Revenant
For dying is a game of solitaire
And all men play the losing hand alone.
Admittedly, The Revenant is an acquired taste. It’s incredibly dark and cynical, and — like a revenant rising from the dead — relentless in its pursuit of haunting the living. The beautiful cinematography and powerful ensemble cast aside, which stand as enough merit alone to see The Revenant, the story told is one that will haunt the audience for a long time. The feeling is like combining the endlessly Hobbesian No Country for Old Men (2007) with Harold M. Abrahams’ line in Chariots of Fire (1981), “I’ve known the fear of losing but now I am almost too frightened to win.” What I mean is that we’re witnessing a long vengeance trip that is guaranteed to be a losing battle. The grizzly bear attacks Glass because she believes he’s endangering her cubs, and Glass seeks revenge for his son’s murder. When we think about the film in terms of how Iñárritu wants us to view it, cruelty and vengeance, the bear can hardly be faulted for either. Mother Nature’s first law is self-preservation; yet, when we’re forced to consider how that applies to human action, The Revenant asks us to be better than that. Throughout the film, characters act behind the banner of self-preservation (saving their own lives, fear of being caught in a lie, protecting one’s territory), but in truth it’s cruelty begetting cruelty. The bear is an animal; The Revenant wants us to be human.
Ultimately, we know that The Revenant can only end miserably. Glass fights a losing battle because he’s lost his son, and vengeance isn’t going to bring him back from the dead. The title “The Revenant,” in Iñárritu’s story, is not about the mythological-like Hugh Glass coming back from the brink of death, it’s referring to Hawk, Glass’s son. With a determination of a man possessed, Glass refuses to go gently into that good night, because it’s as though a part of him believes that by killing Fitzgerald, he can bring Hawk back from death as well. Of course, we know — as the film hammers home with both Christian and Native American spiritual imagery — that that is a futile hope, and the end for Glass can hold nothing except unfulfillment.
The Revenant is a film of anticipation, waiting for two challengers to enter the coliseum (so to speak) and battle to the death. It’s shot almost as if we’re watching an uncomfortable — yet captivating — National Geographic documentary, and with no hesitancy to disparage the days of the American pioneers, emphasized with dismemberment and bloody entrails. The acting is superb, albeit a bit hard to understand Tom Hardy’s thick mumbling. And despite its length, we get the full picture of what it feels like to be a man on a quest for revenge.
But when at noon he had not ceased to moan,
And fought still like the strong man he had been,
There grew a vague mistrust that he might win
~ The Song of Hugh Glass (1915)