Scott Cooper’s Hostiles shares a
substantial amount of DNA with old school westerns of bygone eras. It’s the
direct descendent of John Ford and John Wayne, in both positive and negative ways.
Sweeping and grim, it attempts to shine a light into the deepest, darkest
corners of a man’s soul; it’s also dicey in a Searchers way
when it comes to the ingrained racism of its protagonist and this particular
era of American history.
In the hands of cinematographer Msanobu Takayanagi
(The Grey, Black Mass),
Hostiles practically fetishizes the natural world of the
western frontier. It’s all wide vistas and harsh but gorgeous landscapes, swept
by wind, sparsely inhabited by a few hardscrabble and hearty souls. And the
plot reflects this spare, barren locale.
Set in 1892, Hostiles tells the story of
Captain Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale), an Army officer legendary for his
ability to kill Indians. Because Blocker is a good company man and never defies
an order, he reluctantly agrees to transport the dying Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), Blocker’s long-time nemesis and a mirror image as far as brutality and
murder go, back to his ancestral home.
What follows is a grim, Heart of Darkness
style journey through the wild west that attempts to plum the depths of
humanity and reveal some hidden truth about the effects of a lifetime of
killing and hate and carnage, and how underneath it all, we’re all the same. The
problem is, we’ve seen it before, and the narrative never shovels away enough
dirt to peer below the surface or offers anything interesting to say.
Bale and Studi both give fantastic performances as
stern-faced western archetypes. They’re tired, ground down, and coming to the
close of violent lives forced upon them more by press of circumstances than by
anything else. They’re killers because that’s who they are, what they do, and
what the situation demanded, and neither stopped much to think about it before
now. Despite the nuance and layers given to what could easily have been
spiteful, stock, virulently racist cowboys and Indians stereotypes, the film
still offers little in the way of conclusion, little more than two dudes able
to look at each other and think, “You’re not who I thought you were after all.”
Cooper’s narrative twists itself into knots trying to
reconcile its attempts to be a classic western tale with more modern sensibilities,
and the result plays awkward and tone deaf. There’s a cringe-worthy scene early
on between the bleeding-heart journalist and overly pragmatic military man that
attempts to paint the story in terms of current liberal vs. conservative terms
that does not work.
Yellow Hawk and his family (including the woefully
underutilized Adam Beach and Q’orianka Kilcher) even team up with their
captors/chaperones when confronted by more immediate threats, like a cadre of
rapey fur trappers or a crew of renegade Comanche. But somehow, in trying not
to stereotype Native Americans as either stoic vessels of wisdom or wild
savages, it paints them as both.
Again, they hang a lot on showing that everyone is fucked
up, but it fails to have any more coherent point than that. And in pursuit of
this goal, the film meanders around the wilderness, randomly killing off
members of the party and picking up new strays along the way. They inherit
Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), a woman whose entire family is slaughtered by
Apache in the opening scene. Pike is strong given what she has to work with and
that she, like the Native American characters, primarily exists to prop up the
white dude’s redemption arc. There’s a thread with Ben Foster, a disgraced Army
sergeant who took things too far—he’s there to point out the arbitrary,
realistically nonexistent line between Blocker’s atrocities and his own,
between legal and illegal, between hero and villain.
The pace rambles all over—sometimes tense and edgy, others
dull and plodding. Orchestral music swells over the epic landscapes, ominous
numbers tighten the reins in terse moments. Max Richter delivers a fine score,
but while it hits all the right notes, it feels obvious, on the nose, and paint
by numbers. It’s really a reflection of the movie as a whole. It’s fine, but…
Hostiles has all the pieces in place, but
in the end, more than anything, it leaves the audience wondering why they
should care about this latest grim western tale with all the grim western
trappings. A too-tidy conclusion leaves the lingering question of what’s the
point of it all? And after watching the movie, I don’t really know.
[Grade: C]
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