WESTERN MOVIE GREAT
Hostiles will join pantheon
If you dig a good western, you need to wait donkey’s years for one to come around. Top 10 lists for the genre don’t generally include anything this side of the 21st-century divide, although some (fairly) recent standouts include 2010’s Meek’s Cutoff, remakes of True Grit (2010) and 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and, if you want to broaden the field, last year’s superhero movie Logan.
Saddle up. Hostiles is the next great western, sure as shootin’.
It stars Christian Bale as Joe Blocker, an army captain stationed in Fort Berringer, N.M., in 1892. But we first meet the film’s other main character, Rosalie Quaid, played by Rosamund Pike in a career-high performance; and yes, I saw Gone Girl.
In the opening scene, Rosalie’s family and farmstead are wiped out by Comanches, leaving her balanced on a knife edge between all-consuming grief and utter madness.
Scene 2 sees Joe’s men making sport of a “red man” as they round up his family for resettlement; so this is how the west was won.
Joe has no great love for Indigenous people — he’s seen too many of his men killed in battle with them — but when ordered, he grumpily agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family back
to their tribal home in Montana. Along the way, they collect Rosalie and help her bury her family. This also tips them off that the Comanches can’t be far away.
Hostiles is based on a screenplay drafted by Donald E. Stewart in the 1980s (they really don’t make them like they used to), and discovered after his death in 1999; director Scott Cooper shares a writing credit. One of the script’s many fine subtleties is the way it refutes the myth of an Indigenous monoculture. Joe’s Cheyenne companions don’t like the Comanches any more than he does.
And while Joe insists on transporting his charges in chains, an early scene finds them nonetheless willing to help fight off a Comanche attack. This, along with their smaller acts of kindness toward the bereaved Rosalie, gradually forges a bond between the reserved army captain and the equally stoic chief. They’ll need it to complete a northward trek through four states that will take a toll on life and sanity before it’s done.
Bale’s character is a paragon of reticence and discretion, while Pike has never been so steely on the screen; the image of her character calmly unloading a sixshooter into a dead Comanche in an act of posthumous vengeance is chilling. And Studi, who’s been representing First Nations cinematically since Dances with Wolves, turns in a fantastic portrayal of a tired but still-tough warrior.
But Cooper, a former actor whose directing credits comprise the thespian-friendly titles Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace and Black Mass, stocks his cast with powerful performers in even the minor roles.
To give but one example, there’s Rory Cochrane as Joe’s longtime friend and fellow soldier, Thomas, now suffering “the melancholia” after a lifetime of killing. He mentions that his first was at age 14, when he fought for “the greys” in the Civil War, and he talks another of their party (Jesse Plemons) through the emotional aftermath of a first kill. These are not standard lines of western dialogue, but they seem to flow naturally from the events of this film.
We also get ample reminders of, to be blunt, who was here first. There are no good guys or bad guys in Hostiles — its pointed tagline is “We are all hostiles” — but there are those who have committed violent acts in response to the same.
And after a few cycles of killing and counter-killing, culpability starts to blur. When Joe agrees to transport a deserter and murderer to justice along his journey, the man (played by his 3:10 to Yuma co-star Ben Foster), reminds him that they once fought together. “We’re all guilty of something,” he says. “We know it could just as easily be you sitting here in these chains.”
All of this takes place against an ever-changing, always-gorgeous landscape, as the party moves from dry scrubland north to rainy forests, backed by a sparse score that sounds like a western that’s been poorly tuned on purpose. Like everything else in the film, it’s equal parts brutal and beautiful.