Alejandro G. IIñárritu may have done well just getting out of the house. Whereas his last film (Birdman) fixes on the stuffy indoor mania of Broadway stage production, this time he spins the camera outward, to the vast and austere winter, where its unyielding brutality takes hold.
The Revenant follows the improbable survival of Hugh Glass, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, a frontiersman who defies a series of gruesome threats to his life. We first see Glass as a trapper, skinning animals for pelts along with his son Hawk of mixed-Native-American race. At the outset this distinguishes Glass from the rest of his peers, a barbarous and uncouth group of men — Mr. IIñárritu makes sure to show several urinating openly — each of whom thinks he has the best idea for their safety. When their camp comes under ambush from hostile natives and the survivors flee, Glass emerges as the authority given his knowledge of the land and its constituents. But the plan falls apart once Glass is viciously mauled by a grizzly bear and wounded to the point of incapacity, his throat gashed so he cannot speak.
The rest of the sprawling film sends Glass further and further down its bleak pit of anguish, leaving him with little but his wits and faithfulness to overcome the obstacles. He witnesses the murder of his son at the hands of a fellow trapper named John Fitzgerald, played by a brutish Tom Hardy, though he can’t confront him due to his injuries. Thereafter he drags himself across the frozen Dakota tundra, forages for shrubs, picks marrow from dead animal carcasses, and escapes continued attacks from native combatants. When death appears all but certain, Glass comes to rely on a mantra from his slain Pawnee wife — “the wind cannot defeat a tree with strong roots” — that guides his winding path back to the very people who left him for dead.
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Evan Klonsky 