His struggle to live is primarily motivated by his thirst for revenge after a fellow trapper, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), stabbed to death his teenage son who’s mom is a native American, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck). John also buries Glass alive but he manages to climb out of his shallow grave. That’s the narrative core of the movie, but in Glass’ painstaking crawl back to civilization, we are offered a lot more to lengthen the vengeance-based film’s plodding two and a half hour running time.
First of all, we are truly awed by the film’s spectacular cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. The stunning visuals showing Mother Nature with rivers and mountains in its pristine beauty are all postcard pretty (shot on location in Canada and Argentina.) The gut-wrenching scene alone where Leo is repeatedly mauled by the bear is already worth the price of admission. This is an over extended scene and they really go to town in staging it convincingly, with the camera swinging helplessly to give us a sense of the intensely scary situation that Leo is subjected to.
It’s harrowing to watch and we don’t know how they did it (probably by CGI mostly), but the bear itself merits an acting nomination especially when it returns to the already wounded Leo and continues to bully him. Another fantastic scene is when the beautiful horse Leo is riding on plunges into a ravine (the shot is continuous) and he later disembowels it to protect himself from the harsh coldness of winter. The movie also offers rape, castration and a lot of brutal on-cam violence and suffering with Indians and Frenchmen, all presented without flinching and with much indulgence for, no doubt, more commercial appeal.
But in our humble opinion, the ones more deserving this year are Bryan Cranston as blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo in “Trumbo” and Michael Fassbender in the title role of “Steve Jobs”. They’re just awesomely amazing. And before any Leo fan complains, watch these films first, okay? And like what we’ve said, it’s still Leo who’d win anyway because it’s finally his time after he went through so much in the movie where he was attacked by a bear, victimized by his own colleague who killed his son, buried in a shallow grave while still alive, suffered from extreme cold and lack of food, attacked by Indians, fell off a cliff while on top of a horse which he later opened up so he could sleep inside its carcass. In terms of physical survival alone, what more can you ask for? Kaya utang na loob, ibigay na diyan ang Oscar, please!
