"The Revenant"--Back from the Dead? Or Dead in the Water?

          It was twenty-six years ago now that a still-young Kevin Costner swooped off the prairie in an epic western to win best picture and best director Oscars for a sloppy sentimental movie called Dancing with Wolves.  I was barely able to sit through it.  However, now that I forced myself to sit through Leonardo diCaprio's performance in Alejandro Inarritu's western, The Revenant, which has just won the 2016 best actor, director, and movie Golden Globes, the Costner movie is looking a lot better.
          Based on a true story, which doesn't mean it happened at all like the way we see it on screen, diCaprio is mauled by a bear and left to die by his treacherous traveling companions.  It's a brutal movie with scalping Indians shooting fur trappers through the neck and eye with arrows, the trappers two steps below human on the evolutionary scale, and the bear doing a credible job as an angry mama protecting her cubs and taking out her frustrations on one of the trappers who wants to skin her alive.  It isn't pretty. 
         The work of director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki, however, goes beyond pretty to beautiful  and should result in the one Oscar that the film has earned.  Beyond that, there isn't much to pause over in The Revenant.  It starts out as a bloody survival story, which has limited appeal in general terms, and turns into a run-of-the-mill revenge story that would turn Dirty Harry into Mr. Clean.  And at two and a half hours, it doesn't even have the virtue of being tightly concise.
          DiCaprio has an actor's dream in this movie as he can overact to his heart's desire and get away with it just fine.  What's more, he didn't even have many lines to learn.  And when he does speak, it's in grunts and screams that are mostly indecipherable.  My guess is that he'll get his first Oscar for the role, only because the Academy won't be able to vote for it as best picture.  Inarritu, who won best director last year for Birdman, won't even be considered seriously this year.  The Golden Globe buzz is grossly undeserved.
          Wolves gave Costner overnight credibility in the film industry and allowed him to make mostly bad movies over the next twenty-five years.  The Revenant, which means back from the dead, should ironically bury DiCaprio.

Addendum:  DiCaprio did win the Best Actor Oscar, and Emmanuel Lubezki did win the Oscar for Best Cinematography.  Inarritu unfortunately won for Best Director for the second year in a row, but the Best Picture Oscar went to Spotlight, a heavily freighted account of Catholic priests as sexual predators--good theater that blurs the line between artistic film making and responsible journalism.  It was illogical to give the Best Director award to one man then decide that the picture he directed wasn't the Best in Show.  In this case, though, Academy voters knew in their hearts that The Revenant was razor thin and built on tired movie cliches.  Spotlight wasn't much better in its moral superiority and relentless preaching, but this was more a statement about the weaknesses of The Revenant than the virtues of Spotlight.