Scribes James W. Bellah and Willis Goldbeck gave us one of the great, enduring quotes of all of cinema at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
“This is the West, sir,” Maxwell Scott tells Jimmy Stewart’s Senator Stoddard. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Legends are as ingrained in the history of the West and the frontier as they are to the British, with their stories of Arthurian heroes and other assorted mythologies.
That’s why it’s difficult to scold director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” for pushing the limits of credulity in terms of the cold, merciless cruelty that befalls just about everyone in his 19th century wilderness horror.
It’s hard to deny that the film is a marvel to see and hear. Industry gold-standard cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (“Birdmam,” “Gravity”) has his lens trained on every perfect moment of sunlight struggling to make its way through the wintry clouds. Equally gorgeous is the film’s soundscape, with the aural wonder of the bedraggled cast, crunching through the dense forests and icy plains, just as lush for the senses.
But for all its technical accomplishments — especially the tightly edited flashbacks of life for Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) before his wife’s death coupled with impassioned words to his son Hawk (“So long as you have breath, keep fighting”) — the actual storytelling of the film should be as polarizing as its bitter, near-arctic climate.
For a film that makes brilliant efforts to be of a place and time and in your face to the point where it cannot mask production design errors or sloppy makeup work (neither of which I noticed), going to the lengths that “The Revenant” does to subject DiCaprio’s Glass to absurd levels of battering and bruising undercuts the amazing, realistic aesthetics.
The much-discussed bear attack scene is most notable because it absolutely strains any viewer’s capacity for suspending disbelief. How does any human come away alive from it? How is this not fantasy? Substitute the battered DiCaprio out for Iron Man or Superman and it still is a stretch in terms of survivability.
It’s the same problem that befell the Christopher Nolan “Dark Knight” films — selling the fantastic by way of a sliver of realism and then disposing of that realism offhandedly. Films can and should cross the line between the real and the incredible, but “The Revenant” does so like a game of hop-scotch.
To the filmmakers’ credit, it is relentless in pushing the envelope, creating a taxing cinematic experience for viewers. An early scene of an attack on Glass’ camp of trappers sets the tone: There is little in the way of brutality and physical suffering the camera will avoid. Arrows through the neck, animals slashed and shot, scalps shorn from the rest of the body.
If you can be entertained by that violence alone, mazel tov. But “The Revenant” is tremendously simplistic in its other elements, especially with its near-adolescent take on the struggle of man against nature, man against man, and so forth. Most of the film is dedicated to the revenge angle Glass has against Tom Hardy’s Fitzgerald, a fellow trapper who is pragmatic to a fault, hesitant to follow Glass’ lead or subject himself or his valuable pelts to imminent peril.
Iñárritu has said in interviews he wanted people to “feel the cold, smell the fear.” He certainly achieves that, but “The Revenant” leaves you feeling little else given its sparse and otherwise weak themes.
“The Revenant” is rated R. Two hours, 36 minutes. Three and a half stars out of five.