The Revenant

This was ‘inspired’ by true events and there’s an awful lot of movies like that around at the moment. Maybe invention and imagination are dead in the film industry. Maybe producers believe fact is stranger than fiction and therefore more profitable. Or maybe, as here, they reckon a combination of the two is the best bet. Whatever, we are presented with a spectacularly visual adventure story set in the Louisiana Purchase in the winter of 1823 in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a real life hunting guide, Hugh Glass, whose near-death experience and fight for survival are basically true but whose superhuman efforts to save himself take a considerable suspension of disbelief. That’s probably because the film was based not on a biography of Glass but on a novel inspired by his story.

A revenant is somebody who returns from the dead, which is what Glass pretty well did without actually dying. His hunting party, seeking furs and led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) is attacked and half slaughtered by Arikara Indians and while the survivors are escaping, Glass is viciously mauled by a female grizzly bear under the mistaken impression that he is after her cubs. The rest of the hunting party carry him to safety but then Henry decides they can take him no further and leaves three men, the deeply untrustworthy John Fitzgerald Out in the cold: DiCaprio plays American folklore hero Hugh Glass in this tale of survival and revenge (Tom Hardy), the young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and Glass’s half- Pawnee son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) to care for this clearly dying man while the rest go on to seek help. But Fitzgerald tires of this task, persuades Bridger that Hawk has gone missing and Glass is dead and the pair of them shove off. All these proceedings and the rest take place in a glittery, freezing snow-covered landscape, beautifully photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki.

Now, though, left to die, DiCaprio really comes into his own. Though barely able to move a hand he somehow manages to get up, stagger off towards what passes for civilization out there, feed himself by catching fish, take shelter by scooping out the belly of a dead horse and curling up inside it, and evade the baleful Arikaras, who believe he may have kidnapped their chief’s daughter. The hardships he has to endure verge on the unbelievable but then the director, Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman), is rather given to the overblown. Yet despite that you watch riveted thanks to a huge degree to DiCaprio, almost unrecognisable in hefty furs and an enormous beard. For long periods he is alone and wordless on screen but it’s a remarkable performance, which has already made him a hot favourite for this year’s Oscar. He dominates the film but while handing out the plaudits we must not forget our own Tom Hardy, who appears to have a contract insisting that no movie can be made without him. Last year alone he starred or co-starred in five, including Legend and Mad Max: Fury Road, and, as in Revenant, was excellent in all of them.