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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘The Revenant’ (MA) 154 mins ****

“REVENANT” is the present participle of the French word revenir (to come back). Colloquially, it can also mean a ghost.

The International Movie Database rates co-writer and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu’s dramatisation of history-writer Michael Punke’s novel so highly that it has put together a special accolade page trumpeting the contributions by its two principal actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy playing, respectively, Hugh Glass and John Fitzgerald, fur trappers in the western mountains of north America before the great European westward migrations really began.

“The Revenant” is a Western like no other. Reflecting actual events in the 1820s (many movies make this claim; this one is well-documented), it recounts what happened after a bear savaged Glass, one of a group returning to the nearest outpost settlement before winter. Glass had a teenaged part-Indian son. When Fitzgerald decided that Glass couldn’t survive the terrible mauling and insisted that the party keep travelling, the son defied Fitzgerald who killed him.

The story follows a simple but spectacular narrative line. Glass is alive, barely. Left crippled in the wilderness, he recovers enough to set out across terrain so arduous in weather so cruel that fit men might find the challenges too much.

There’s little dialogue in “The Revenant”. It contains few shots in which DiCaprio is not present. Glass has vengeance to wreak on the man who abandoned him and killed his child. Dramatically and emotionally powerful, the role makes extreme physical demands on actor and stunt double alike. Uncompromising in depicting discomfiting behaviours, it’s great cinema that you’d be silly to miss.

At all cinemas

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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