A western blunt, bleak and resonant
There are one-note films, and then there is Hostiles
– a vintage work of
cinéma du foghorn that lows away sombrely for two-hours-plus without changing tone or tack. That’s not a criticism so much as just fair warning: if you’ve an itch for a bleak and bonechilling western whose idea of a hero is someone who used to be busily engaged in state-sponsored genocide until he lost his taste for it, then this film is guaranteed to scratch it raw. But stacked up against some rivetingly sophisticated recent high points in the genre – from John Maclean’s outstanding Slow West to Tommy Lee Jones’s still-underappreciated The
Homesman – it can feel as blunt as a snooker ball sheathed in a sock, and likewise aims to pulverise.
The place and time is the Territory of New Mexico, 1892, where a longimprisoned Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) has been granted compassionate release so he can return to his reservation in Montana and die on tribal ground. His escort for the trip is Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale), a callous and embittered army captain weeks from retirement. He has the blood of a thousand redskins on his tunic and is said to have taken “more scalps than Sitting Bull himself ”.
Accepting the job only on pain of losing his pension, Blocker reluctantly hits the trail with a handful of younger white officers, who escort the chief and his family across a thousand miles of untamed land, where bad hats of both races seem to lurk in every gorge and thicket. En route they meet Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), a widowed homesteader whose family have been graphically slaughtered by a Comanche war band and whose presence further complicates the simmering group dynamic.
Writer-director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) is working in the revisionist tradition of Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood here, where even the good guys aren’t much to root for, and have to grasp what salvation they can from the unforgiving landscape. But rather than seriously trying to uncoil the bloody spiral of colonial violence and native retribution, the film ends up copping out with a Trumpy shrug – it’s made clear there are very fine people on both sides, and that’s about as deep as Cooper’s script, adapted from a manuscript by the late screenwriter Donald E Stewart, seems prepared to probe. The American Indians are regrettably meagrely sketched, which doesn’t help, while Bale’s dials are turned so low, his performance sometimes feels as if it might be about to drop into sleep mode, and you find yourself instinctively reaching for the mouse to wiggle him awake. (The film technically reconnects Bale with Q’orianka Kilcher, his co-star in Terrence Malick’s The New World, but her character is so thin it barely qualifies as a reunion.)
Amid the glowering gruffness, Pike’s brilliantly played traumatised widow is something of a standout, though Peter Mullan also makes a strong impression as a former army buddy of Blocker’s, whose wife (Robyn Malcolm) takes a dim view of the settlers’ violent land grab, and lets in a shivery blast of 21st-century hindsight. The sequence sticks with you partly because the frontier township where the couple live looks so unnervingly brand new and out of place, as if it had been thrown up overnight in secret, while the mountains slept. Cooper’s regular cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi gives every landscape an unvarnished majesty, from dark, towering forests to golden grasslands that stretch to the horizon and beyond. The influence here isn’t Peckinpah or Eastwood but John Ford – and particularly the western master’s 1956 classic The Searchers, in which John Wayne played another former soldier on a perilous quest across Comanche turf.
Cooper clearly knows Ford’s film inside out, and pays tribute to its iconic closing “doorway shot” of Wayne stranded outside the snug domestic existence his heroism made possible with a bobby-dazzler of his own: a superficially happy ending that quietly calls attention to America’s ongoing refusal to face down the crimes and horrors that underpin its own creation myth. It’s a heavy note to send an audience out on, but Cooper’s film is heavy going and proud, and for those tuned to its plangent frequencies, it will strike a rich and resonant chord.