•
Rating: Revenant cannot be explained and evaluated without considering Birdman. It is a film born precisely in opposition to its predecessor, as a completion of it. Iñárritu was able to make Revenant also because he earned credit and respect from critics and the public; he certainly couldn't have used it as a calling card. The film is beautiful, but it takes on many further meanings when coming after a movie like Birdman.
If that movie relied primarily on a highly refined script, crafted in every minute detail with measured words, this one goes in the opposite direction: Iñárritu takes a canonical, predictable, raw story and attempts to ennoble it as much as possible. The director no longer works on concepts; the sequences almost never bear additional messages. This is cinema that operates at the roots of the very concept of filmmaking, which is to show something wonderful, even before narrating or arguing. To do justice to this primal vocation of the Seventh Art, the filmmaker essentially works in three directions.
He tries to stay as faithful as possible to reality: filming in wild locations, the absence of artificial light, fidelity in dialogue to a low register or communicating through grunts. The story builds itself without much embellishment, but by placing the viewer into a scenario. The pleasure of viewing, unlike the intellectual enjoyment of Birdman, comes from the experiential pleasure projected onto the viewer, also because they realize that the actors and crew truly lived in those environments.
A second way to ennoble the narrative material is the more exquisitely aesthetic component of the filming. Revenant is a film that showcases all the austere beauty of the natural world: again, there's an oppositional alternation to the suffocating microcosm of the Birdman theater. Here, the vastness of the landscapes, the true protagonists of the film, is palpable. Humans are often filmed in wide shots because the environment must never be secondary. Whereas human society dominated in Birdman, nature, with its strict rules, dominates here. Indeed, man has regressed to an animalistic state, selfishly focused on his own survival. Consider the pointed sign: "We Are All Savages." The elements Iñárritu chose to stay true to reality, from settings to lighting, serve equally, with faithful Lubezki's mediation, to highlight the beauty present in his film. A wild beauty.
The third key factor for the success of the work lies more simply in Iñárritu's direction. From this viewpoint, the level has been raised even further. Complex tracking shots alternate with more fragmented montages, long shots dialogue with extreme close-ups. The language is rich and conveys the director's presence on the set, alongside his actors. The shots play with low angles, with camera movements from one speaker to another, or by positioning the protagonist in a vast space, celebrating his majesty but never ignoring the misery of Hugh Glass. In the best moments, the camera's eye is an additional protagonist.
DiCaprio and Hardy are excellent performers and bring convincing characters to life. Leonardo does everything, entering animal carcasses, being naked in the snow, and crawling through much of the adventure. Tom plays the pragmatic and unscrupulous man, John Fitzgerald, who explains his life philosophy in a two-minute story, with a highly significant, grim metaphor. Perhaps the only minor imperfection in a work that grants almost nothing to the rhetoric of a revenge film is in the construction of Glass/DiCaprio's past: slightly bland are the dream sequences showing his family.
So, a film that doesn't have a message to deliver but represents a truly remarkable aesthetic and performative effort. Birdman was difficult to make, but it was already a beautiful film on paper. Revenant is different: it is a film that, on paper, might even seem unnecessary because its virtues lie entirely in the collective act that allowed its realization. It is not great in theory but in practice: in the efforts of the actors, in the reality of the scenarios, in the expressive power of the act of filming, in natural light, in the brutality of the feral component of the human soul. With Revenant, the Mexican filmmaker sought to delve into this wild dimension, and to do so, he first conceived a wild film, not artificial, experiential, devoid of grand narrative constructs or eloquent speeches, but in its few noteworthy phrases, it is incisive and biting as never before. It's a film that grunts and drags itself covered in wounds and grime, like its protagonist: when it finally speaks, it nails you.
Loading comments slowly
