The fifth time was the charm. After being nominated four times for ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’ (1994), ‘The Aviator’ (2005), ‘Blood Diamond’ (2007) and ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (2014), Leonardo DiCaprio was finally able to take the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles to collect his first Oscar confirming what everyone on Planet Earth already knew: that he is one of the best actors of his generation. Then came another nomination for ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’, also unsuccessful, for the film that earned him his only Oscar Award and that It is available on Netflix until next Sunday, June 30, 2024 It is his most successful performance to date.
The well-deserved recognition came to him for his long-suffering performance in ‘The Revenant’, a film that put him to the limit both physically and psychologically and for which DiCaprio sacrificed himself body and soul. “I can point to about 30 or 40 scenes in this film as the most difficult shots I have ever shot.. From entering and exiting frozen rivers to getting inside the body of an animal and even what I had to eat on the set,” the actor said about the difficulties he experienced during filming. And all ‘thanks’ to the vision of Alejandro González Iñárritu, winner of the Oscar for Best Director for the second consecutive year, and to the revolutionary work by Emmanuel ‘El Chivo’ Lubezki, who made history by winning in his category (Best Photography) three years in a row.
DiCaprio plays a fur trapper from the wilds of Dakota who, in the year 1820, is attacked by a bear and left for dead. However, ‘The Revenant’ Hugh Glass (that’s his name), survives and embarks on a journey against nature with a single objective: to take revenge on the men who left him behind.
“Iñárritu reproduces a story of revenge, survival, faith, mystical flashbacks and a portrait of nature as a living, indecipherable entity,” commented Fausto Fernández in our review of ‘The Revenant’.Nature as the raging, primal god of the Old Testament. […] The odyssey of Hugh Glass is a sacramental car of extreme crudeness where illumination (the essence of Iñárritu’s cinema) takes on the appearance of a unique experience, of bloody communion.”
And it is that the Holy Trinity between DiCaprio, Iñárritu and Lubezki It is a prodigy comparable to an alignment of stars of those that only occur every several dozen years, but we cannot forget the work of Tom Hardy, who is still angry with the director for not freeing up his schedule by shooting the film in a strictly chronological order. , delivered a performance also worthy of nomination, and the work of a team that had to face “the living hell” of filming ‘The Revenant’‘, one of the most tremendous and exhausting productions in the history of cinema.
The best option to see ‘The Revenant’ is always a movie screen but, if you don’t have that possibility right now, we inform you that Once it disappears from the Netflix catalog in the next few hours, it will be available on the Disney+ platform.
Fran Chico is an expert in cinema and series, specialized in cultural dissemination and film criticism. He is a recognized critic on Rotten Tomatoes and Filmaffinity. Although his favorite genre is horror, the same thing tells you about the new blockbuster from Marvel’s MCU and about an auteur film to claim from the festival circuit. There is no series from Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video or Disney+ that escapes its radar, delving into the catalog of each platform to recommend and analyze its best content.
Fran has been writing in Fotogramas for more than a year, but his beginnings date back almost two decades ago in film forums and blogs such as Planeta Claqueta or Moviementarios. He was founder and part of the board of directors of the digital publication of film criticism and analysis Revista Mutaciones and a member of the Association of Cinematographic Informants of Spain (AICE), the organization that awards the Feroz Awards, as well as a voter for the Blogos de Oro al indie movies. After completing the Master of Film Criticism at the Madrid Film School (ECAM) taught by Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, he has collaborated and/or covered film festivals such as San Sebastián, Sitges and Filmadrid as a specialized press for more than 10 years, along the way interviewing relevant directors, actors and actresses from the national industry such as Penélope Cruz, Carlos Saura, Ana de Armas, José Luis Cuerda or José Sacristán and internationally such as James Wan, Edgar Wright or Dario Argento.
His knowledge and experience have led him to become a film video blogger for Fnac Spain and director and presenter of the podcast Holocausto Zinéfago, with more than 150 programmes broadcast and available in which cinema and humour are mixed from a unique and original point of view.
