Winning the West in blood and tears
(15, 133 mins)
RETRIBUTION and regret are saddle-sore travelling companions in writerdirector Scott Cooper’s gritty Western, set during the final years of the bloody war between the US Army and Native Americans.
Adapted from a manuscript by screenwriter Donald E Stewart, Hostiles cocks its pistol towards political correctness by apportioning blame for the slaughter to both sides of the conflict.
Cooper’s script doesn’t rigorously debate moral ambiguities and characters sometimes reinforce racial stereotypes for the sake of dramatic expediency. However, boundaries between conventional heroes and villains are intriguingly blurred, and justice is seldom granted to battle-scarred characters as they endure “the Lord’s rough ways”.
Christian Bale delivers a blistering performance as a world-weary army captain, whose humanity is revitalised by an unexpected encounter with the sole survivor of a Comanche attack. Played to the emotionally raw hilt by Rosamund Pike, this grief-numbed widow is both a victim and an angel of compassion, who lassos courage in the most devastating circumstances.
Captain Joseph J Blocker (Bale), a military man of few words and questionable deeds, grudgingly escorts his sworn enemy – Cheyenne tribal chef Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) – from a New Mexicoprison cell to the Valley Of The Bears in Montana.
Gravely ill Yellow Hawk wishes to die surrounded by family including son Black Hawk (Adam Beach) and daughter-in-law Elk Woman (Q’orianka Kilcher).
Blocker shepherds the Cheyenne prisoners south, accompanied by Master Sergeant Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane), Lieutenant Rudy Kidder (Jesse Plemons), Corporal Henry Woodson (Jonathan Majors) and Private Philippe DeJardin (Timothee Chalamet).
En route, the posse befriends Rosalie Quaid (Pike), whose husband and children have been slaughtered by Comanches, and accepts a new commission to escort murderer Sergeant Charles Wills (Ben Foster) to the gallows.
Tension grows between prisoners and escorts as they mosey through Comanche territory.
Hostiles trots when it could gallop, allowing resentment and rivalries to fester against the backdrop of the Mountain States, the harsh beauty of the locations contrasting with the darkness that takes root in the hearts of men for whom violence is second nature.