Why Leo DiCaprio should win the Oscar

Strap yourself in for a world of pain, because Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest film, The Revenant, does not take prisoners. Rather, it pits frontier scout Hugh Glass (a visceral, Oscar-sure performance by Leo DiCaprio) against a whole array of life-taking obstacles, including (SPOILER ALERT!) treacherous colleagues, Native American warriors, hypothermia, starvation, falling off cliffs, being buried alive and, yes, being savagely mauled by a bear. As its title implies, The Revenant is basically about a man who comes back from the dead, in more ways than one. In Leo’s case, he appears to possess at least nine lives   — which, when you do the math and factor in Seth McFarland’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, still leaves Leo coming up a little short.

But not at the Oscars, where the oft-nominated DiCaprio is practically a shoo-in for that trophy. (Don’t lay wagers on anybody else; it’s Leo’s year, and he has the battle scars to prove it.)

The subzero shooting conditions in British Columbia and Canada and Iñárritu’s down-and-dirty approach (very long, uncut shots with maximum savagery) seem to have brought out something primal in DiCaprio. There’s no faulting his performance as a man bent on survival, for all the obvious reasons — chief among them, revenge.

Factor in Tom Hardy as particularly loathsome fur trapper John Fitzgerald, and you can see just what keeps Leo going through a series of near-deaths and rebirths that are as harrowing for the viewer as they no doubt were for the actor.

Opening with the kind of disembodied voices that are Terrence Malick’s stock-in-trade, The Revenant announces itself as a spiritual journey as well as a physical endurance test. Glass, toting along his half-breed son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) in the wintry Montana mountains, works for a team of fur trappers — fur pelts are big business, especially in the brutal Northwest, so the men kill and skin deer, wolves, bison and the occasional bear, meanwhile trying to ward off attacking Native American tribes like the Arikara, who specialize in collecting scalps, and competing French trappers.

On top of that is Fitzgerald — a coarse, mumbling Indian hater (half of his scalp was removed by a tribe somewhere in the dark past) who doesn’t trust Glass or his half-breed son. The resulting confrontations set in motion a story based on actual frontiersman Hugh Glass, once played by Richard Harris in The Man in the Wilderness (1971). Here, DiCaprio does away with stiff-upper-lip British formalism and relies instead on bodily fluids — spit, blood, all the viscera that the body contains and emits. His voice reduced to a series of grunts halfway through the picture, The Revenant becomes a study in pure survival acting. For the audience, too, it’s a matter of endurance: how many shots of Leo cauterizing his own throat with gunpowder can a reasonable moviegoer take?

Along on the trip is Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, who’s had a banner year, appearing in other Oscar nom Brooklyn and The Force Awakens) as the fair and decent hunting party leader, and Will Poulter as Bridge, a young trapper who sees too much.

Hardy is up for his Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actor here, giving a half-crazed, unblinking calculation to his role as Fitzgerald. He’s the guy on the mission who always wants to take the shortcut, or blame somebody else. In short, a dangerous a-hole.

Strip away all the hearty characterization and gritty detail, and The Revenant is basically a tale of revenge. But even within that genre, it manages to transcend itself through pure immersion. A subplot involves a tribal leader’s missing daughter (a sly inversion of John Ford’s classic 1956 Western The Searchers, in which a white girl is abducted by a Native American raiding party and tracked down by John Wayne). Here, tribal father Elk Dog (Duane Howard) looks for daughter Powaqa, who’s gone missing after a camp raid. We don’t know whether she was taken by soldiers, another Indian tribe, or French trappers. (The Revenant also offers the unusual sight of French trappers speaking Native American dialect, and Native Americans speaking in French — all part of the tapestry that made up the frontier marketplace in those days.)

A special credit goes to the scenery. Majestic cinematography is provided by Emmanuel Lubezki, who imbues the wilderness of British Columbia, Canada and Argentina (mountains, presumably) with an implacable force, and at times astonishing beauty — whether it’s extreme close-ups of frozen pine needles, ants grappling with a fallen comrade, or the endless expanse of the frozen north, rendered in heart-stopping detail. You can see what led men to try and conquer this expanse, and why, perhaps, nature tried so hard to kill them off.

There’s something especially beautiful about the sound of Iñárritu’s northwest: there are various shots of Leo gazing up at towering pines, waving in the breeze. You can hear that particular sound that branches, leaves and needles make when a wind blows through them, and it’s both majestic and disturbing: the sound of infinite isolation.

Adding to this lethal beauty is a glacial and meditative score by Ryuichi Sakamoto who, in his wintry years, can still carve out chords that are sublimely affecting while never intruding. (It’s ridiculous that he wasn’t nominated in Oscar’s Best Score category.)

Since it’s Iñárritu, you know that there will be a) lots of blood and sinew, and b) occasional hallucinatory imagery. Here, we see Leo encounter in his fever dreams towers of horse skulls (or something like that), perhaps symbolizing the carnage upon which the West was built; a fleeting shot of a live bird escaping from his fallen wife’s breast; surreal shots of wolves on fire; not to mention the odd levitation.

Iñárritu, who scooped up an Oscar trophy for last year’s Birdman, goes full Western here, and it’s perhaps the goriest depiction of survival we’ve seen since, well, Quentin Tarantino’s snowbound cabin tale, The Hateful Eight. While hallucinations and walking down Broadway in his underwear were punishing enough for Michael Keaton in Birdman, it’s nothing compared to the horrors that DiCaprio suffers. Again, tales of Leo eating the rawest possible sashimi and sleeping inside dead animal carcasses for the role only fuel his chances of winning. And if you suspend your disbelief for a moment, you will have no trouble accepting that a 175-pound actor can grapple successfully with a 1,500-pound bear. It’s all part of the magic of filmmaking. Or maybe Leo is just that Method, that cool. 

* * *

The Revenant opens Feb. 3 in 2D and IMAX cinemas, from 20th Century Fox.