Subject: Re: ‘The Revenant,’ Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Is the Most Breathtakingly Beautiful Film of the Year - The Daily Beast
From: "Matt" <[email-masked]>
To: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2015 10:52:49 -0500

I feel like this is a movie that I need to see in the company of men.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Matt <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Yes. When are we seeing this?
>
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Eric Schwerin <
> [email-masked]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/04/the-revenant-starring-leonardo-dicaprio-is-the-most-breathtakingly-beautiful-film-of-the-year.html
>>
>> ‘The Revenant,’ Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Is The Most Breathtakingly
>> Beautiful Film Of The Year
>>
>> Don’t judge a film by its production problems—a lesson established years
>> ago by James Cameron’s *Titanic* and reconfirmed now by another
>> big-budget Leonardo DiCaprio
>> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/12/why-leonardo-dicaprio-who-wows-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-deserves-to-finally-win-an-oscar.html>
>> project, *The Revenant*.
>>
>> Writer/director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s follow-up to his Best
>> Picture-winning *Birdman *is an old-school western that arrives on
>> Christmas Day upon a wave of ominous press about its torturous production.
>> Those difficulties reportedly included
>> <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-leonardo-dicaprios-revenant-shoot-810290>
>> a budget that spiraled from $95 million to a supposed $165 million; a shoot
>> complicated by Iñárritu’s desire to make the film sequentially and to use
>> only natural light; and incessant weather-related delays that necessitated
>> a relocation from Canada to Argentina, and forced co-star Tom Hardy
>> <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/17/tom-hardy-opens-up-about-celebrities-right-to-privacy-and-rehearsing-in-front-of-his-dogs.html>
>> to drop out of his subsequent role in *Suicide Squad*. From the sound of
>> it, *The Revenant* was an arduous chore to make. And as the final
>> product proves, it was definitely worth the trouble.
>>
>> Inspired by Michael Punke’s 2002 based-on-real-events novel, Iñárritu’s
>> latest is, on the surface, a straightforward revenge film.
>>
>> It concerns 1820s explorer and fur trapper Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), who’s
>> mauled by a ferocious grizzly bear in the American wilderness and then left
>> for dead by his comrade John Fitzgerald (a captivatingly cold-eyed Tom
>> Hardy)—albeit not before Fitzgerald, more interested in self-preservation
>> than loyalty or honor, kills Hugh’s half-Native American son Hawk (Forrest
>> Goodluck) in plain view of the crippled Glass. It’s an especially brutal
>> blow to Glass, who, as seen in surreal flashbacks, already lost his Native
>> American wife to American soldiers, one of whom he killed in order to
>> protect his adolescent offspring.
>>
>> Though horrifically clawed to pieces, Glass literally rises from his own
>> grave (the first in a series of resurrections) and sets out across the
>> harsh land in search of Fitzgerald. His subsequent mission plays out with
>> few plot twists, as Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith’s script, devoid of the
>> intertwined-strand message-making that plagued the filmmaker’s *Babel*,
>> proceeds like a single-minded B-picture about one man’s unrelenting quest
>> for the vengeance he craves, and deserves.
>>
>> That resolutely one-way trajectory makes *The Revenant*, in a basic
>> sense, a throwback to old school pulp fictions—especially the
>> back-from-the-dead *Point Blank* and *The Limey*. While the director
>> doesn’t complicate his familiar genre tale, he does embellish it in ways
>> that both enhance its visceral thrills, and deepen its themes.
>>
>> Working with famed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (an Oscar winner each
>> of the past two years, for *Gravity* and *Birdman*), Iñárritu delivers
>> one breathtaking snapshot of suffering and tenacity after another, in the
>> process making *The Revenant* the most awe-inspiringly beautiful film of
>> the year. The duo’s camera begins by gliding in and out of a chaotic battle
>> with fluid ferocity, moving in to close-up and out to grand, expansive
>> panoramas (and back again) with a masterful grasp of spatial dynamics. Such
>> aesthetic virtuosity is ever-present, with Iñárritu and Lubezki crafting a
>> bevy of prolonged single-take centerpieces that vacillate between intense
>> intimacy and large-scale wonder and terror, all of them shot with a
>> naturalistic splendor—the majesty of forests coated in fresh snow, the
>> formidable iciness of roaring rivers, the gnarliness of torn-to-shreds
>> human and animal carcasses—that has a rugged, tactile quality to it.
>>
>> In other words, you can just about feel the grit, grime, spittle, blood,
>> and tears coating everyone—and everything—in *The Revenant*, which
>> conveys precisely what it would be like to exist in Glass’s weathered
>> shoes. Despite its A-list pedigree, Iñárritu’s film is an out-there
>> experiential work that situates viewers in a very particular time and
>> place, fighting through the elemental forces—external and internal—preying
>> upon Glass. In that regard, it has something in common with Gus Van Sant’s
>> *Gerry* and *Elephant*, experimental indies that articulated unspoken
>> ideas through atmospherics.
>>
>> Iñárritu’s many breathtaking compositions, meanwhile—gazing up at swaying
>> treetops, at lone figures amidst barren landscapes, at heavenly sunrises
>> and sunsets, and at rushing water (not to mention a canteen decorated with
>> a spiral-circle design)—are all directly modeled after the work of auteur
>> Terrence Malick, as are the hushed voiceovers from unseen characters and
>> oblique flashbacks to moments of bliss and desolation.
>>
>> Such sights invariably come across as borderline plagiaristic, just as
>> Iñárritu’s single-take shots resonate as *Birdman*-ish look-at-me
>> gestures. In *The Revenant*, however, Iñárritu’s brazenly showy
>> tendencies are justified by his imposing formal artistry, and by the way
>> his visuals work in tandem with his story’s weightier concerns. Be it the
>> up-close-and-frighteningly-personal bear attack that leaves Glass at
>> death’s door, a sequence where Glass takes shelter from a storm by
>> disemboweling a dead horse and climbing inside its hollow body cavity, or a
>> magnificent flight from Native American attackers in which the camera
>> mounts up alongside Glass on horseback, and then hovers over the gorge he
>> plummets off of, the film captures the harsh, unforgiving exquisiteness of
>> the untamed American wild. It also, crucially, gets at the grueling nature
>> of survival: how persevering requires suffering; how physical pain can be
>> dwarfed (and negated) by emotional agony; and how God cares little for
>> pleas of help and salvation, if He even exists at all (other than in the
>> next morsel of meat tasted by a famished tongue).
>>
>> Bolstered by a cracked-lip, mouth-foaming performance of anguish and fury
>> by DiCaprio, in a physical role that often requires him to go long, silent
>> stretches crawling about the ragged earth like a newborn (re)learning to
>> walk, *The Revenant* is laced with protective-father undercurrents but,
>> at heart, is about the primal impulse to endure. Glass dons the fur coat of
>> his bear attacker but eventually becomes an animal in man’s clothing. That
>> ironic twist speaks to the film’s portrait of survival as an instinct
>> shared by all living creatures, and which, as seen in the actions of Glass,
>> Fitzgerald, or a Native American chief looking for his kidnapped daughter,
>> supersedes notions of morality, fairness, or decency.
>>
>>
>> Eric D. Schwerin
>> [email-masked]
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>