The Revenant - Movie and Lunch Club Review

Considering The Revenant received twelve Oscar nominations including ones for best picture, best actor, best supporting actor and best director it didn’t surprise me that my Movie and Lunch Club chose it for our January outing. What did surprise me, though, was at noon the seats in the theater were nearly sold out. Usually our group of twelve to fifteen are the only ones viewing a film at that time of the day and for this two hour film even our group fleshed out to twenty-seven. Nominations apparently do drive ticket sales.

The Revenant---a French word that means to return---was based on a true story about a man who worked for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, circa 1820, and while it was short on dialogue it long on action-packed tension with flying bullets, arrows and axes and bad-ass men in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Leonardo DiCaprio played a frontiersman/guide who got mauled by a grizzly bear early on in the film, then he was left for dead in a shallow grave. But he crawled out, and driven by revenge, he crossed the snowy, isolated landscape living off the land along the way on a quest to find his son’s murderer at an Army outpost. “It's epic poetry, an existential journey through nature,” DiCaprio said of the movie, “and this man finding a will to live against all odds."

The Rolling Stones reviewer wrote: “Note to movie pussies: The Revenant is not for you.” I read that after seeing the movie and I laughed out loud. Truer words were never spoken. Several woman in our group were constantly covering their eyes. Others were animated in their body language and to my deep embarrassment, I let out two choice swear words. I was thankful neither one was the F-word because I was sitting next to a very prime and proper woman. It was quite the adventure story if you can handle blood and guts and guys peeing. For some reason the director included several shots of guys watering trees. Maybe he wanted to be sure the audience knew there weren’t any Portia-Potties in the wilderness. I say that tongue-in-cheek but it begs the question: What did they do for Portia-Potties on location? It was quite a feat just getting the actors and cameramen to where they filmed let alone all their equipment. Most of the set locations took them 2-3 hours to get to each day and 2-3 hours to get back home to their base. The crew and actors even had to do a two week boot camp out in the wilderness before the filming began.

According to the New York Times the movie was shot “in outwardly unspoiled tracts in Canada and Argentina” and the photography was beautiful. I was happy that The Revenant also got Oscar nominations for cinematography, sound editing and sound mixing. All three of those elements added plenty of tension to the movie. If you’ve ever been in a deep woods when the wind was rubbing the trees tops against each other you’ll know what I mean. And when DiCaprio would climb up a hill the background “music” reminded me of a horror movie; you didn’t know if he’d find a band of hostile Indians, a herd of buffalo or a breath-taking vista view of nothingness. One of the best and most graphic scenes in the whole movie, the grizzly bear mauling, has the most interesting back story on how it was filmed. I won’t spoil it for anyone who wants to see the movie but I’ll give you a hint: Rubber trees. All and all it was worth the price of admission and then some. It also gave me a reason to call my brother after I found out he went to see the movie all by himself. 

Growing up, a good friend of my parents was big-time into reading about the American Frontier. He had a wonderful set of antique books that were reprints of true stories and journals written by people living during the 1800s---spelling errors and all. When he died, his widow gave me that set because none of her kids were into history or books and she knew I’d value those sixteen volumes. One volume is all about fur traders and I started reading it again last night. It impresses the heck out of me that someone can pick a story out of a book like that and turn it into an epic movie. In my next life time I want to work in the movie industry. I can see myself making rubber trees or repairing costumes on location but I would never, ever sign on to a film that takes place in so much snow, mud and icy water. If there was an Oscar for enduring hardships to make a movie, Leonardo DiCaprio would win it hands down. ©

DiCaprio's interview about the making of the movie.

An article about how the bear scene was made can be found here.