Alejandro González Iñárritu is the nominal director of The Revenant, a historical drama set in the American wilderness of the early 19th century, but the movie doesn’t resemble any of his previous work. Prior to his Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), his films—Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010)—were unbearably dour and self-important, with gimmicky overlapping plots, filmmaking techniques cribbed from Steven Soderbergh, and a message that boiled down to “it’s a small world after all.” By contrast, the world portrayed in The Revenant is gigantic: vast landscapes, mile-high trees, and infinite horizons. But the auteur of that vision isn’t Iñárritu—it’s cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.
Lubezki’s work is particularly wondrous in a scene (one of the few taken from the book) in which Glass, nearly starving to death, stumbles into a field full of buffalo. The camera follows him as he climbs the side of a cliff, and as he crawls over the edge, the perspective swoops around him onto the field, where buffalo run around each other in a great mass. Lubezki doesn’t just linger on that image, though; he turns it back around and around again, showing Glass and the buffalo and Glass again. Likewise the bear-attack scene occurs in one long take, tightly framed on the bear and Glass so that the audience feels the claustrophobia and panic of the encounter. When it’s over, Lubezki flips the camera skyward, conveying at once the enormity of nature and the serene settings in which violence often occurs. Lubezki is just as adept at capturing the geography of the human face—as Fitzgerald relates to a fellow trapper his utter lack of faith and compassion, Lubezki slowly zooms in on Hardy’s facial contortions, making the character look as oblivious and vicious as the bear.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
