Endurance test

The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish I was back on that boat that went down.’ He is mauled by a bear. Viciously. He is buried alive. He eats still-throbbing, blood-dripping raw liver, and quite forgets his manners. (Wipe your chin, man; there’s never any excuse.) He cauterises his own wounds, falls off cliffs, spins down rapids, slits open a dead horse and sleeps within for warmth. The film recently triumphed at the Golden Globes — best film, best director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), best actor (DiCaprio) — but all I was thinking was, ‘Oh God, please let this be over soon.’ Faint hope. It’s two-and-a-half hours long, long, long and while there are moments of tremendous, jaw-dropping beauty, the violence is so pitiless and the spiritual aspects so pitiful that even I wished he was back on that boat that went down. I know. Imagine.

This is based, apparently, on the true story of Hugo Glass, a 19th-century fur trapper who became famous in 1823 for surviving that bear attack, being abandoned by the two members of his expedition tasked to stay with him and staggering 200 miles over six weeks to avenge those who had left him for dead. Set in Montana and South Dakota, but filmed in the Canadian Rockies and Argentina, this opens as it means to go on, with grandeur and magnificence — a breathtaking landscape, an icy sun filtering through the groaning pines — combined with unflinching brutality. A hunting party is under attack from a Native American tribe, and the first you know about it is when, thwock!, an arrow bisects one of their throats. And from what I then saw from between my fingers, there were scalpings. (I think.)