The Movie that time forgot: The Revenant.

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A good yarn has a life of its own – even if few parts may be true.

There is a real story behind The Revenant.

In French, “revenant” is the word for a person who returns or is reborn.

In 1823, Hugh Glass was an American frontiersman on a fur trapping expedition up the Missouri River when he is attacked and mauled by a bear. Abandoned for dead by his companions, Glass crawls and floats many miles over many weeks to reach Fort Kiowa in present day South Dakota, USA.

Hugh Glass returns and is reborn as The Revenant, and his story is told, retold and grows into legend in paper, book and film since the days of its actual happening.

The most recent retelling is The Revenant movie that last evening at the Golden Globe Awards won Best Film Drama for director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio who plays Hugh Glass.

In real life, Hugh Glass sought out the two erstwhile companions who had taken his gear and left him for dead. History does not recount why he did so. Revenge may have been a factor, or maybe he just wanted his old rifle back. In any event, Hugh Glass cornered both parties on separate occasions and . . . he forgave both. He did not chase them with a hatchet or stab them with a knife. He forgave both men.

Hugh lived on in the Old West. He continued to hunt and fish and trap and have close-calls and real get-aways. The life of The Revenant was a life of true adventure.

Attributed to the Milwaukee Journal, I found this account of Hugh Glass’ final hour: “Old Glass with two companions had gone to Fort Cass to hunt bear on the Yellowstone, and as they were crossing the river on the ice, all three were shot and scalped by a war party of 30 Aricaras.”

In a sense, the bear was there at the story’s true ending.

Hollywood loves the exaggeration of retelling. Like Gollum in the cold pool at The Return of the King, they sink their teeth in the rawness that makes us cringe and turn away. With the pain of embellished experience, they would have us like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back hide in the warm carcass of the slain beast. Unlike Jimmie Braddock in Cinderella Man, we do not choose but are forced to endure the long slow crawl back to life – and the place we reach is not a cottage in New Jersey. With the sweep of Maria in The Sound of Music, these western hills are not just alive, they are overly alive with the clash of chase, fight and the bad business of mean men. We search for Mr. Peabody & Sherman and the validating historicity of the Wayback Machine to lend credence and meaning to a landscape run amok and find none. Yes, the scenery is beautiful, but disheveled and disassembled, in a tinted miasma of surreal season.

There is little to encourage in this retelling, and, at its heart, there is little hope.

At show’s end, I searched for the printed scroll to tell me the long struggle would not begin again for Hugh Glass. I found no such words crawling down the screen. To their finish, I watched to read but a brief paragraph on the new life of Hugh Glass. I waited not to see more red on white snow, but to view bridges built and crossed and the real story beyond show’s end.

I watched in vain, and for that we are both the lesser.

Grandpa Jim