Revenant

The dictionary defines revernant as someone who has returned, as if from the dead.

Spoiler alert:  don't read any further if you want to see this movie without knowing parts of the plot.

Leonardo DiCarprio gets more appealing every single year.  He really does. It's uncanny.  Bear skin poncho and all, and I still wanted to sleep with him.

This movie had so much buzz around it, what with him finally getting his Oscar and all.  What I knew about it was that he was out for revenge because he was left to die by his own men; what I didn't realize is that he was grief-stricken and wanting  revenge because his son was killed.

So, yeah...there were a couple of scenes that did me in:

the one in which he laid his head on his dead son whose corpse has begun to freeze and cannot or will not move from him.  Yes, he had been mauled by a bear so maybe that was part of it, but let me tell you if your child ever dies, whether you are injured or not, the only place you will want to be is with  their body- not another place in the world.   Not one.

When he tried to explain how much he wanted to be the one to take the man down who killed his child.  Yes.  When he said, "I ain't afraid to die anymore.  I'd done it already."  Yes.  Because I haven't ever lived through a bear attack, starved to death in the woods, or had my body rot from the inside out, but sometimes I feel like I have.  It's a pretty accurate metaphor for losing a child, actually.  Grief comes with teeth stronger than any animal and it never stops gnawing...the attack is never completely over.  The only sustenance you desire is to see your child again. And something does die inside you when you put your child in the ground- and the anger, the jealousy, the misery that come with it...they do ruin everything that used to be whole within you.  It's a cancer of sorts.  You're still alive, but you don't always wish to be.

So when he's finally face to face with his son's "driver", Leo pulls back at the last second, and calmly declares "Vengeance is in God's hands." and turns loose of the person who took the one thing that mattered most to him,

Seriously??  I'm not buying it, folks.  Leo barely talked during this entire movie- he used his body, his posture, his facial expressions, and his eyes to give an Oscar winning performance, but that ending was not believable.  You expect me to watch Leo strip naked and crawl into a carcass on his impossible journey to kill his son's murderer, and after all of that, he just does the RIGHT thing?  He turns his cheek?

Leo, you are a better man than me.  I would've bashed his head in and bathed in his blood.