The Revenant is not for the faint of heart

Near the beginning of The Revenant, a grizzly bear mauls frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). The attack is violent and up close. Glass’ fur-trapping companions discover him later, and one of them vomits when he sees Glass’ wounds. That trapper captures how the audience will feel through most of this gruesome film about life on the American frontier.

The Revenant, in select theaters Christmas Day and opening nationwide Jan. 8, is not for the faint of heart. We see a freshly scalped head, an arrow pierce a man’s throat, and a lot of stabbings. White men slaughter Native Americans, Native Americans slaughter white men, and Sioux slaughter Pawnee. The film is rated R for its unrelenting goriness, as well as a rape, some brief nudity, and some bad language.

If you’re still with me: The Revenant also is one of the most beautiful and visually creative films of this year. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who already has a string of feats from Birdman to Gravity to The Tree of Life, hit another one out of the park.

Much of the opening battle sequence between Arikara Indians and fur trappers is a single shot, a breathtaking experience. Director Alejandro Iñárritu (of Birdman acclaim) shot the entire movie in natural light, and you can feel it. DiCaprio’s breath fogs the camera lens.

The story is based on a real life explorer, Hugh Glass, whom legend says was mauled by a bear, left for dead, and trekked his way back to his companions. In Iñárritu’s version, Glass is on a fur trappers’ expedition with his son. After the bear nearly kills Glass, the captain (Domnhall Gleeson) offers to pay men to stay behind with what remains of Glass while the rest of the crew presses on to the fort.

John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) volunteers to stay, along with Glass’ son and the fresh-faced youngster Jim Bridger (Will Poulter). Without giving too much away: Glass finds himself abandoned and claws his way out of a freshly dug grave. The word “revenant” means a person who has returned from the dead.

Like every extreme sufferer since Job, Glass tries to make sense of the horrors that assail him at every moment. Across the wilderness, on rocks and in a snow bank no one but God will ever see, Glass scratches a message about what Fitzgerald has done to him.

“Behold, I cry out ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered,” Job says in Job 19. “I call for help but there is no justice.”

Most of The Revenant feels like a world without justice, where only survival matters. Can Glass sew up his own wounds? Can he find water? Despite all appearances to the contrary, Iñárritu’s world does have a higher power governing it. The final scene reveals order amid the chaos.

But Iñárritu all too vaguely hints at the meaning behind the brutality. This film is like a baseball that looks like a home run when it comes off the bat but drops just short of the outfield wall. The ghosts of the dead seem to make up the only spiritual world here. Glass hears his dead wife’s voice in the wind, and he sees the dead in dreams, once in the ruins of a church.

Why does Iñárritu show a church? Are the ghosts we see over and over pointing to something else? It’s not clear. There are two lines about a “creator” and “God.” A Pawnee man who helps Glass tells him, “Revenge is in the hands of the creator.” Glass later repurposes the line: “Revenge is in God’s hands, not mine.”

The acting here is award-worthy. DiCaprio might win his long-awaited Oscar. And Hardy’s character Fitzgerald is the embodiment of evil itself: He is manipulative and sadistic. Ultimately, Fitzgerald is deeply cynical, as I imagine Satan is. “So what?” is his final response to all the death and destruction.

Glass heroically refuses to say, “So what,” but the spirits of the dead aren’t enough inspiration to go on living in a world as bleak as this. Job 19 echoes Glass’ agony, but ends not with visions of the dead: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth.”