Broken Glass

Two heavyweights face-off in The Revenant, but the real star is director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's camera. It glides curiously through the story with a distinct sense of what matters and what doesn't, devoted purely to the narrative, to progress, at times perching itself so close to the actors' faces they seem to be in danger of sensing its interference.

This conscious being (which has unlimited access to the action) does all the thinking and feeling for you as it whisks across the natural marvels of the Louisiana Purchase. It takes you into its environment so fitfully that by the time it ends you'll feel like wiping the snowflakes off your shoulder. The film is like Gravity or Avatar in that its most obvious virtue is its groundbreaking visual design, but the Revenant is more than its presentation. It's an honest, gutsy look at survival, the ugliness of it, and dares to believe that desperation doesn't turn everybody into apathetic survivalists - that even in these circumstances there are still good and bad people. It's a grim, savage story told within an optimistic framework.

The novel by Michael Punke (upon which the film is based) traces an incident in the life of Hugh Glass, who in 1823 fought his way back to health after a bear attack in order to avenge his son's murder. As Glass, Leo Di Caprio is stern and withdrawn - silenced by old tragedies. Tom Hardy is Fitzgerald, a brute whose origins are unknown and whose lack of feeling toward others is his greatest advantage. Glass's pursuit of Fitzgerald occurs during a lawless period in the American West, at a time when frictions between the white settlers and natives spike after a young native girl is kidnapped. Glass and Fitzgerald are solitary, humourless, morbidly pragmatic men. Glass lacks complexity, but DiCaprio affects pain and blind conviction with the profound sense of honesty he brings to every role. Fizgerald is even less complex, but Hardy has that shifty, not-quite-there quality that suggests he hates everything, including himself, and that everything he does is motivated by a bad temper he can't account for. Perhaps Iñárritu knew that if he stripped back the dialogue and cast well enough that the characters would simply grow out of the essence of each actor. The physical hardships of the shoot must have helped to focus the performances, which are restrained, honest and relentlessly masculine.

The Revenant is a great movie. But what does it mean to those of us who like to intellectualise our gut instinct through analytical discourse? Why is it more than just a great-looking movie? The plot isn't sophisticated, the characters are intuited more than fleshed out, there is little ambiguity beyond what lines of dialogue are lost to Hardy's mumbling, and most of its pleasures stimulate the subconscious mind. I can't explain the exhilaration of riding alongside DiCaprio as he is frantically pursued on either side by a throng of spear-throwing Native Americans, nor how director Iñárritu manages to engulf the viewer into the immediacy of that experience with unprecedented fidelity (it feels as if it's the first time you've ever watched a man being chased on horseback).

Perhaps it comes down to ancestry. Fairy tales captured our imagination long before we moved on to political satires and Lars von Trier films. There's a collective nostalgia in revisiting archetypes and a comfort in watching morality plays in which life's biggest lessons are revealed to be the simplest ones, complete with the satisfactory conclusion reality so often denies us.