Mythologizing A Mountain Man Epic

Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu has made it plain that his movie “The Revenant”  mythologizes the saga of mountain man Hugh Glass. This is a good thing.

From Grantland:

“He was attacked by a bear, he was abandoned, and he had to go 300 miles to get revenge — this was what is known about him,” explains the 51-year-old Iñárritu, sipping something warm in the Santa Monica offices where he’s begun editing the movie. For him, the raw facts of Glass’s life were just the beginning, an opportunity to see Glass “as an example of the relentless possibilities of the human spirit against so many challenges: racial, physical, spiritual, social. I took that opportunity to create my own Hugh Glass: my interpretation of who he could have been.”

Myth has a couple of different meanings. One is something that is false, not true, a pernicious kind of cultural lie. The other, grander meaning, which demands a capital “M,” recognizes Myth as the stories a people tell to explain and culturally understand nature, history and the way humans behave. Sometimes there’s a fine and blurry line between mere myth and Myth. You recognize the Right Stuff when you see it.

I have NO problem with turning the Hugh Glass story into Myth. As Winfred Blevins, author of “Give Your Heart To The Hawks,” well understood, the mountain men lend themselves perhaps better than any other American figure (certainly more than the cowboy) to Mythology.

As John Maddox Roberts has pointed out here, the Western Fur Trade Era that spanned from the 1820s up to about 1840 was truly the Wild West. Ordinary men were larger than life — because they had to be. The landscape was huge and hostile; the tribes were not mere remnants of devastated peoples fighting for a last scrap of freedom and dignity — they were powerful warrior peoples, masters of the land. The mountain men were interlopers, small in number, and had to adapt to a non-white dominant culture and to a land of unprecedented scale, beauty and kill-you-dead ferocity.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Glass, seems to get it:

“I tried to capture — or emulate on film — a different type of American that I haven’t seen on film very often,” DiCaprio says. “This [was] an unregulated, sort of lawless territory. It hadn’t been forged into the America that we know yet. It was still sort of up for grabs.”

That’s a ripe arena for Myth. Shooting in the Canadian wilderness amps up the Mythic quality. The landscape does not resemble the prairies and rivers of now-South Dakota, the actual scene of Glass’s exploits. But the mighty mountains, icy rivers, and dark forests of “The Revenant” are iconic landscapes, the proper setting for a Mythic Mountain Man tale.

I love the attitude that Iñárritu exudes.

Shot only in natural light by two-time consecutive Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — known as “Chivo” — The Revenant is populated with performers playing Caucasian fur trappers and people of native tribes such as the Arikara and the Pawnee, all of them filmed amid the same brutal conditions as their 1820s counterparts.

“There was something very positive about shooting in those conditions, to understand what those guys [from the 1820s] went through,” Iñárritu says. “We don’t have adventures anymore. Now people say, ‘I went to India … it’s an adventure.’ No: We have GPS, a phone, nobody gets lost. Those guys really were in a huge physical, emotional adventure in the unknown territory. After you see what these guys went through, you understand what pussies we are: Our apartment is not at the right temperature, there is no ham in the fridge, and the water is a little cold … When did that happen?”

The material ease and comfort of our lives demands reconnection with fundamental Myths. “The Revenant” is Myth, not history — it is explicitly “inspired by true events.”

But if this Myth is presented as well as it looks like it’s going to be, it will be, nonetheless, True.

And in case you didn’t catch the earlier post, here’s that trailer again: