Movie violence can be exhilarating. Classic films like “Fight Club" and “A Clockwork Orange” are riveting in their depravity. Recently, “Mad Max: Fury Road” hit theaters in a titillating whirl of fists, cars, and explosions. Director Quentin Tarantino has built a career on sadism and shock with movies like “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill.” Like these movies, “The Revenant” is brimming with bloodshed, but the violence is not gripping so much as it is wearying.
Set in the 1820s, the film follows a crew of fur trappers through the wilderness of Montana and South Dakota. Early on, trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) find himself confronted by a grizzly bear after being separated from the group. The mauling seems to take a long time and spares no detail, leaving the audience beleaguered and repulsed. This is only the beginning of the violence. DiCaprio later cauterizes his own neck shut with gunpowder and sleeps stark naked inside a dead horse.
And to what end? Ostensibly, Glass’s motivation is vengeance for his dead son, but the plotline is underdeveloped. The son, Hawk, makes a short appearance in the film but never endears himself, and for all of Glass’s guttural whispering about his boy, the relationship between them is never shown to be particularly fruitful or important.
Also underdeveloped is Glass’s own character. He is resilient, resourceful, and masculine, but beyond that, very little is revealed. Glass has a minimal number of lines—he spends more time gurgling his own blood than actually speaking—and he shows no growth from the film’s beginning to its conclusion, leaving the film as the same grunting, battered beast he entered as.
The movie has generated buzz around DiCaprio as a contender for a Best Actor award with this performance, but unfortunately the award would be unwarranted. DiCaprio screams and yells and shows viewers his pain, but his character was ultimately one-dimensional and uninteresting. Maybe next year, Leo.
The best performance in the film actually belongs to Tom Hardy, who plays DiCaprio’s enemy, Fitzgerald. Hardy is his typical surly self, but his Fitzgerald is a little bit crazy, too. His excellent monologue about a friend who found God in the form of a squirrel, only to kill and eat it, provides the movie with its only humor. Hardy is a mountainous man known for his smoldering, gravelly reticence, and when he plays the most outspoken and developed character in a movie, it’s a red flag.
The Revenant is supposed to be beautiful, and indeed there are stirring shots of eerie, icy, wet wildernesses, gorgeous images of dew sparkling on trees and craggy mountains rising in the background. However, these scenes are not particularly integrated into the film. It feels as though DiCaprio just happened to be surviving in this wilderness—the movie would play out much the same way in a desert or in a rainforest. In a movie with so few characters and so few lines, the setting must carry some weight, and though it is ever-present, the great northern backdrop is essentially inconsequential.
The enduring image from this film is not a mountain or river, not a father and son embracing. It’s a dirty, chapped DiCaprio, foaming at the mouth, digging around in the rotting flesh on his shoulder with a skinless, bloody knuckle.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated the film is set in Canada. The film is set in Montana and South Dakota.
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