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.
