#499: The Revenant
Trappers, revenge and bears, oh my!
Initial release: December 16, 2015
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
One of the most lasting bits of American mythology is how wild and remote the wilderness is. America is, or was, full of miles and miles of uninhabited forests and hills and mountains; this mythology intertwines with legends of the Old West to form a narrative of man’s conquest over nature (or, more realistically, settlers’ conquests over the local indigenous population.) From the colonial frontier at the end of the 18th century to the slow and steady building of railroads that could take you from New York to Los Angeles in a week at the beginning of the 20th, 1800s America was defined by constant westward expansion. But always, the wilderness was in equal measure a threat and an opportunity. Which is what brings us to the story of Hugh Glass, as recounted in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s seminal survival film The Revenant.
Based on stories about a real-life fur trapper, Iñárritu’s film introduces us to Glass as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who alongside his half-Pawnee son Hawk serves as a guide for a group of trappers. While the marauding Arikara war party that forces the trappers into a hasty retreat pose a frequent threat throughout the film, the real villain is another trapper, Fitzgerald, who makes his contempt for Native Americans, and by extension Glass for fathering a child with a Native woman, more than clear.
You’ll note I didn’t talk about the bear yet. Don’t worry, we’re gonna talk about the bear now.
It’s actually a fairly brief scene, at least compared to the film’s overall runtime; early on in the film, as the group is travelling home, Glass wanders off alone to scout game when he happens upon some bear cubs. He is promptly mauled by the cubs’ mother in a terrifying four-and-a-half minute sequence that leaves him broken and bloody; he only survives because he’s able to pull out a knife and repeatedly stab the beast in the neck as it lunges for him again. While it’s not the scariest bear moment in a movie (that would be the screaming bear in Annihilation) or even a video game (Condemned 2: Bloodshot has an incredible rabid bear sequence that has lived rent-free in my head in a way the rest of the game simply hasn’t) it’s certainly the most harrowing, bordering on torture porn and almost going on just long enough to be too long. Glass’ suffering is brutal and visceral and changes the tone of the film forever, even compared to the violence leading up to this point. For all its relative brevity, the bear attack serves as the hinge upon which the film changes direction. It stops being about a group of white settlers on the run from angry natives (revealed early on to be looking for the chief’s daughter, whom the Arikara believe to have been kidnapped by the trappers) to a story of revenge as Glass, left alone with Fitzgerald, Hawk, and another young trapper named Bridger, is forced to watch, immobile and unable to speak, as Fitzgerald murders Hawk and bullies Bridger into burying Glass alive and leaving. From here Glass is reborn, literally crawling out of his own grave, and from here he fights to survive with one goal in mind: getting even.
The Revenant is at heart a survival film, and survive is what Glass does, from making a makeshift fishing net out of rocks to eviscerating a dead horse to take shelter from the snow (something fans of Star Wars probably will recognize.) To better enhance the realism of the film, Iñárritu went so far as to drag cast and crew out into the middle of nowhere up by Calgary, Canada, the Canadian Rockies serving as a stand-in for the Dakotas; if DiCaprio looks like he’s freezing his ass off, that’s because he is. Indeed, Iñárritu focuses a lot on the sprawling vastness of the Dakota wilderness itself, an enormous empty void, sparsely populated but endlessly beautiful for all its hostility. It’s a haunted realm of deep woods and frozen rivers; it’s truly terrifying, even without bears in it. And Iñárritu seems to understand America’s weird relationship with nature, the way we’re equally in awe of it and terrified by it, seeing it as a sort of haunted house in which is everything that we do not know. A surreal scene of a meteor falling to earth goes totally unexplained (it’s apparently a reference to Iñárritu’s earlier film, Birdman) but feels at home in this film, the kind of odd encounter we might expect from a wild land that we filled with devils of our own making, that which we rather unceremoniously call cryptids.
As we build our cities and roads and cut down our old-growth forests we slowly seem to forget the raw natural beauty that this country still prides itself on. Films like this are a reminder that the wild still exists outside our city limits; scenes like the bear are a reminder of why I stay inside the city limits.
