Writer-director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart,” “Black Mass”)
tells the brutal story of the American West with his harsh, bloody, and
uncompromising “Hostiles.” The film begins with horrific scene, as a Comanche
raiding party descends on the New Mexican homestead of a family of white
settlers. In short order, the family is picked off: the father scalped, three
children — one of whom is just an infant — shot dead, and their mother only
barely managing to escape by scrambling into the nearby woods.
By opening
with the most horrific of its many horrific moments, the movie provides its
audience with a litmus test: if you can make it through the gruesome prologue,
you’ll have some idea whether you can stomach whatever else Cooper has in
store. However, the filmmaker fails to mount a convincing justification for why
we should bother suffering through the self-consciously dour two hours that
follow.
“Hostiles”
is another in the long line of revisionist westerns, descended from classic
films like 1956’s “The Searchers” — movies that have attempted to flip the
script on what the genre has traditionally told audiences about the nature of
good guys and bad guys on the wild frontier.
Christian
Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker, a cavalry officer who reluctantly accepts a
mission to shepherd the aging Cheyenne chief, Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family (Adam Beach and Q’orianka Kilcher) back to their people’s sacred tribal land in
Montana. A bitter, angry man, Blocker nurses an unyielding hatred of the Native
American people, justified — he believes — by the horrors he witnessed the
“savages” commit while in battle. As a soldier, we’re told he’s “taken more
scalps than Sitting Bull,” and Blocker is unremorseful, seemingly more than
ready to give Yellow Hawk the same treatment.
The rest of
Blocker’s party is filled with recognizable faces, including Jesse Plemons, Timothรฉe Chalamet, Rory Cochrane, and Jonathan Majors. Unfortunately,
the actors don’t have characters to play so much as roughly sketched types, and
as a result they mostly end up delivering variations on the same gruff, mumbly-mouthed performance.
Along the
way the group encounters Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), the
woman left widowed in the film’s harrowing opening sequence, and after the
soldiers help lay her family to rest, she joins their party. Pike is an
immensely talented actress, but here Cooper’s direction fails her completely,
allowing her to deliver a sometimes cringingly overwrought performance as a
woman completely consumed by grief. The fact that she continues to carry around
the lifeless body of her baby is, well, it’s a lot.
But as the
Comanche raiders continue to track them, the two sides are forced to put aside
their differences if they have any hope of fending off the enemy, and fine some
begrudging commonality in their fight for survival. The long trek allows plenty
of opportunity for Blocker to confront his prejudice, amidst the men’s many
heavy-handed conversations about what it means to take a life and the toll it
ultimately takes on one’s soul.
“Hostiles”
is beautiful to look at, filled with those classic John Ford-style vistas,
gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi.
The scenery is undeniably breathtaking, as the country’s natural beauty
contrasts with the savagery on display.
The result
is well-intentioned, but hollow. Life on the frontier was terrible, and telling
us so is hardly anything new. In telling this stark, bloody tale, “Hostiles”
attempts to grapple with the endemic violence that American history is built
upon. But Cooper does a great disservice to these aims by flattening out the
Native American characters, never bothering to develop them beyond stoic, noble
stereotypes.
Without
allowing us to learn the motivations that drive their actions, the narrative
becomes frustratingly one-sided. It’s telling that the slaughter of Rosalie’s
family is immediately followed by a scene in which Blocker brutalizes an Apache
family. It’s clearly meant to underline the similarities between their
situations, but by showing the second scene entirely from Blocker’s
point-of-view, the intended effect is lost completely.
Stripped of
any interiority, Native American characters are treated simply as plot devices
to enlighten the white characters and offer a path toward some sort of
redemption. The film offers a somber meditation on the possibility of
reconciliation, but stumbles along the way by sacrificing the story’s necessary
complexity and mistaking a relentlessly grim tone with saying anything of
substance.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2018.
