The movie is directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the multiple Oscar-winning director of "Birdman" and the only director more likely than David Fincher to technically over-complicate things to such a perverse degree that the resultant movie becomes at once dazzling and monotonous. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a real-life frontier survivor, Hugh Glass, a widowed fur trapper and single father who was on an expedition through Montana and South Dakota in 1823 in the company of his half-Pawnee son when he was mauled by a bear. Tom Hardy plays the betrayer Fitzgerald, who murders Glass' son and leaves Glass to die of his wounds in a freshly dug grave. "The Revenant" is a Leonardo DiCaprio film through-and-through, boasting most of the elements we've come to associate with his star vehicles: he plays a slightly aloof and mysterious character who is haunted by visions of a dead mate and traumatized by past experiences with violence (often the two experiences are combined, as is the case here) and proves his manhood through feats of endurance, by suffering mightily, or simply by remaining autonomous long past the point where one might reasonably expect his character to have given up, collapsed from exhaustion, gotten murdered by enemies, etc. Glass might be the ultimate version of this DiCaprio hero, the apotheosis, the Big Kahuna. He gets symbolically killed multiple times throughout the "The Revenant," starting with the bear attack and continuing on through his betrayal by Fitzgerald (there's even a shot of Glass's gnarled hand rising out of the dirt) and then through his miraculous survival of a blizzard (inside a carapace made of tree branches, by a Native American who respects Glass's tenacity and gets murdered by French trappers in the very next scene).

The real Glass eventually recovered in subzero temperatures and sought revenge. This synopsis makes the film sound like a long-lost Clint Eastwood picture, about a monosyllabic gunfighter who is symbolically or actually killed and then raised from the dead to exact vengeance on his tormentors. "The Revenant" might have made a good Clint film, though surely nowhere near as visually audacious as the one envisioned by Iñárritu. He and his regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, shoot the entire movie in available sunlight and firelight, usually through a super-wide-angle lens that keeps the characters in the foreground and the landscapes in the background in sharp focus while creating a bit of a gargoyle effect (distorting faces into ovals). The camera is never in what most directors would consider a typical place, and Iñárritu never cuts unless he has to. A lot of the time you're watching a closeup of somebody either speaking or listening while the camera leaves lots of negative space screen left or right, or creeps slowly around them. These are horror movie strategies that prime you to expect a threat to emerge from off-screen, from behind the obstruction that is the character's face, or from the background. It's the correct approach for what is, in its heart, as much a horror film as a survival story.



The instantly notorious bear attack sequence is staged using the third approach: threat emerging from background. The bear charges out of the bushes and lays into Glass for what feels like an hour (though it's really just a few minutes), dragging him, clawing him, biting him, stepping on him, fogging up his eyeballs with his stinky bear breath. Like nearly every other scene in the movie, this one is staged as a bit of primal theater, Werner Herzog by way of Looney Tunes. As my friend Keith remarked, this is a movie about a man who tries to survive nature's multiple attempts to murder him. Remember how your high school literature teacher taught you that one of the basic stories is Man vs. Nature? Well, this one is Nature vs. Man. A lot of the time, the best Man can do is hunker down and pray. Glass drags himself across frozen tundra despite a bum leg and ghastly wounds, hurls himself down icy river rapids to escape Native American trackers, survives another Native American attack by riding a horse off a cliff and into a tree and then guts his dead horse and climbs into its carcass to survive yet another snowstorm.

