“The Revenant” is one western film deserving of 70mm.
Unlike the locked room drama “The Hateful Eight,” which is projected in that format in select theaters, Alejandro G. Innaritu portrays a sprawling, desolate early American wilderness with visual flourishes both elaborate and spare and deserving of widescreen viewing.
It is set in a world of towering forests, turbulent rivers and an endless and stark frozen landscape.
It is an environment familiar from Terrence Malick’s “The New World,” about settlers in Virginia, by “Revenant” director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, who also filmed Malick’s “Tree of Life” and Innaritu’s “Birdman.” “Revenant” shares their fluid sense of perspective and sweeping visual strokes.
At its heart is an oppressive naturalism. Man is made insignificant by this ancient space. But if nature is cruel man can be crueller. White traders and trappers exploit its resources and the indigenous people who live there retaliate violently.
Innaritu throws the worst this world has to offer at one man, a tracker played by Leonardo DiCaprio, whose party is attacked by Indians searching for abducted woman from their tribe.
DiCaprio, wounded and left for dead, all but crawls across the wilderness in pursuit of a wizened survivalist played by Tom hardy, who left him behind. Extreme misadventures follow: DiCaprio guts a horse and hides inside the steaming carcass during a snowstorm and cauterised a wound with gunpowder.
When the bearded and bloodied DiCaprio isn’t speaking a native dialect to his Indian son, with subtitles, he grunts like an animal as he struggles from one catastrophe to the next. And an ambient soundscape turned up to eleven reinforces a sense of being surrounded by danger.
In the most visceral scene DiCaprio is mauled by a bear for what seems like ten minutes. It is excessive to the point of comic while also being brutally realistic, both of which are true of the film overall.
The result is eventful to the extreme, but without ever seeming consequential.
Tags: DiCaprio, Innaritu, Malick, Revenant Posted by