No bigger frontier than love
REVIEWS
HOSTILES Starring Christian Bale. Rated 14A
Highly decorated U.S. cavalry officer Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) is given one last assignment before retirement: to escort the dying Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family from a military prison in New Mexico to their ancestral home in Montana. This is not a happy occasion for the captain, who really, really hates “Indians”, and Yellow Hawk in particular. See what happens, circa 1892, when you put a Republican in the White House? (Namely, Benjamin Harrison, a liberal reformer when it came to Native American affairs. His signature decorates a letter given to Blocker to ensure safe-ish passage.)
To put all this another way: here’s an exceptionally timely neowestern that goes out of its way to press all the right buttons, and ends up being tremendously entertaining in the process. That’s assuming viewers can stomach an intense opening scene in which a family is slaughtered, children and all, by Comanches in Darth Maul face paint. Still clutching her baby’s corpse when she’s swept up by Blocker’s detail, Rosamund Pike’s traumatized widow, Rosalie Quaid, thus provides writer-director Scott Cooper (Out of the Furnace) with one more complicated POV in a tale that seeks to understand all sides.
In that sense, Hostiles—adapted by Cooper from a decades-old treatment by Missing screenwriter Donald E. Stewart—is also unforgivably heavy-handed. The travelling party includes a master sergeant in a losing battle with “the melancholia” (Rory Cochrane) and a Buffalo soldier (Jonathan Majors) who turns out to be Blocker’s closest friend, both of whom are given scenes with a true millennial’s-eye view of 19thcentury politics and society. (It’s perhaps revealing that Timothée Chalamet’s luckless Frenchie is treated with way more ambivalence.)
The real meat here is in the film’s attempts to make the fine distinction between a good soldier and a racist with the licence to kill—symbolized too obviously by a psychopathic war criminal Blocker picks up along the way (Ben Foster)—offering in turn a somewhat convenient way to beard-stroke over American genocide, past or current. (Plus, The Searchers.) Still, with Masanobu Takayanagi’s widescreen vistas and Bale’s remarkable ability to telegraph acres of conflict from behind a stoic walrus mustache, Hostiles offers all manner of incidental pleasures beyond the big liberal group hug.
> ADRIAN MACK THE FINAL YEAR A documentary by Greg Barker. Rating unavailable
The final year here is actually the last three fateful months of Barack Obama’s presidency. When filmmaker Greg Barker was allowed access to the White House and some of its key occupants in 2016, there was little expectation that this was more than a valedictory exercise, with one mildly progressive Democratic president about to hand over the reins to another one. Boy, was everybody wrong!
The focus in this tightly edited, globetrotting doc is less on Obama— who remains an enigmatic figure, gliding through major events—than on a small group of top officials. These are led by then secretary of state John Kerry, who carries his experience (glimpsed in archival footage) as both a soldier and a leading antiwar protester on a historic trip to Vietnam.
The filmmaker travels more extensively with Samantha Power, then ambassador to the UN, seen visiting Nigeria to meet parents of missing girls there, and officiating at a swearing-in ceremony for new citizens—doubly significant, since she is herself an immigrant from Ireland, which was called a shithole by white Americans only a century ago. And he spends considerable one-onone time with Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief speechwriter. Rhodes talks of his “mind meld” with the president, and there’s definitely some humble-bragging in his complaints of long hours and frustrating turns of events—some self-inflicted, as when it comes to his boss’s ineffectual handling of Syria and other Pentagon-led entanglements.
Rhodes’s resemblance to Rob Corddry and to Veep’s Tony Hale underlines the film’s walking-and-talking West Wing tone, which can feel like parody at times. The kidding sure stops when Power, sitting with Gloria Steinem and Kerry predecessor Madeleine Albright, watches those shocking election results roll in. The rest of the film is devoted to Obama’s crowd trying to shore up international accomplishments—in Iran, Cuba, and elsewhere—they never expected to be undone by a racist grifter.
Hopefully, what happened in 2016 is sui generis, but all partisan loyalties aside, what’s most striking here is not the specialness of this crew as much as their now quaintly ordinary professionalism. They talk to each other, their bosses, their families, and their underlings with dignity, candour, and kindness. Most of all, they seem to know what the hell they’re doing.
> KEN EISNER MARY AND THE WITCH’S FLOWER Featuring the voice of Kate Winslet. Rating unavailable
Animation director Hiromasa Yonebayashi was part of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli before starting his own outfit, Studio Ponoc, and launching it here, as a follow-up to his solo features, The Secret World of Arrietty and When Marnie Was There. While he’s rightly seen as carrying the anime torch for the now-retired master, Yonebayashi lacks that certain something—the edge of offbeat experimentation, perhaps—that made Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro international hits.
Based on The Little Broomstick, a 1971 children’s book by English author Mary Stewart, Mary and the Witch’s Flower fuses elements of Kiki’s Delivery Service with the Harry Potter series and other magic-academy tales. Stewart, who also wrote The Moon-spinners, the basis for a classic Disney movie, specialized in plucky young heroines who must overcome loneliness and tremendous odds to prevail in perilous situations. The Mary of the title here isn’t alone long enough for that to matter.
Voiced in the A-list English edition by Ruby Barnhill, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s The BFG, Mary’s one of those temporarily parentless tweens you find so often in Japanese cartoons. In this case, the girl, who vehemently despises her own red hair, has gone ahead to start school near her great-aunt (Lynda Baron), whose expansive country garden borders on mysterious woods. Her very first outing has her encountering strange blue flowers exuding a sticky substance that somehow gives wings to an abandoned broom. Quick as you can say “Dumbledore”, she’s transported to a mountain lair that actually holds a secret college of advanced witchery.
The place is overseen by the seemingly bubbly Madame Mumblechook and absent-minded Doctor Dee, voiced by Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent, no less. Ewen Bremner and Rasmus Hardiker are also aboard for this riotous mix of regional U.K. accents, and Louis Ashbourne Serkis—son of Andy, by golly—is a local boy who attempts to help Mary but must instead be rescued by her. There’s delightful scene-setting in the first half of this 100-minute adventure, with special attention to colourful line work. But after Madame realizes Mary’s not a legit witch but an accidental horticulturist, it turns into one noisy chase scene after another, and the occult elements fade. That makes
this quasi-ghibli fare mostly suitable for youngsters to watch—without their parents, of course.
> KEN EISNER FOREVER MY GIRL Starring Alex Roe. Rated G
Alex Roe, who plays a country-music 2 legend in this bland family drama, is such a squarejawed small-town American boy, you just know he has to be English. But that’s the least of the incongruities built into the Cmt–styled Forever My Girl.
In the YA novel from which this was taken, Roe’s character, Liam Page, deserted his girlfriend and all his local pals in order to pursue his dreams of rock-arena glory. He found them, only to discover that he left behind a son, now 10 years old.
Writer-director Bethany Ashton Wolf, who traffics in profanity-free clichés, narrowed the gap to eight years, made the child a cuddly daughter, and turned Liam into a country singer. Because, let’s face it, there are no rock stars under 60. Wolf posits him as a hard-drinking, groupie-boffing, and essentially irresponsible muso who somehow found instant success, can still fill stadiums around the world, and is on the cover of every major magazine when he drops a tour to head back to his fictional hometown of St. Augustine, Louisiana, for the funeral of an old friend. (And all this without being a judge on a televised singing competition.)
He returns to the disapproval of his widowed preacher dad, played by the cast’s only seasoned pro, John Benjamin Hickey (whom we know as the slick tech giant from The Good Wife). Worse glowers come from ex Josie (Happy Death Day’s Jessica Rothe), loath to introduce him to her kid, named Billy, after both Liam and his late mother, we learn. (Young Abby Ryder is charming in a part that’s too precociously written.) He faces another obstacle in Josie’s protective brother (Tyler Riggs), although in the book this was her new beau, a popular doctor. (Take that, hippie!)
The expected stuff happens, in the manner of cheaply made cabletv movies that work like late-night sleeping pills. Aside from the product placement of Gibson guitars, mandolins, and basses in a tale that eschews any details about what might go into creating what supposedly made its hero a millionaire (in this digital day and age), what’s interesting is the social context. The movie models positive values to a pointedly Christian audience, and you can imagine that many white folks in the American South see themselves as they are pictured here: healthy, slim, drug-free, gainfully employed, and with a sprinkling of black friends who remain politely silent in the background. The characters have problems, all right, but none that can’t be solved by well-timed hugs and the odd private jet.
> KEN EISNER