As regular readers of this blog know, I usually have no trouble finding words to express my thoughts or feelings, but I'm pretty much speechless after watching The Revenant (2015) at the theater yesterday. I've rarely seen anything as beautiful or affecting. The movie is about mountain man Hugh Glass, who was horribly maimed by a grizzly bear and left for dead by two comrades, John Fitzgerald and the youthful Jim Bridger. Glass survived the ordeal and made his way back to civilization (or what passed for the same in the West) to exact retribution on the men who abandoned him.
My only complaint about the movie is that Glass was given an Indian wife and half-breed child in the movie, even though neither character figured in the novel on which the movie is based. The child is murdered by Fitzgerald while Glass is incapacitated. I'm pretty sure the screenwriter wanted to make Fitzgerald detestable so as to make it more satisfying for the audience when Glass catches up to him. (The image in this post shows their deadly confrontation near the end of the movie. Click to enlarge.) It would have been more subtle (and therefore more interesting) if all Fitzgerald had done was abandon Glass. The question would then have arisen: Is that enough to exact retribution? Does being abandoned justify killing the abandoner? I blame the unsubtlety of American audiences for the moralistic overkill.
I can't wait for the DVD to be released. I plan to watch the movie at least one more time, and perhaps several times before I die. I rank it with Jeremiah Johnson (1972) as one of the greatest films ever made.
Here is the trailer.
