Christian Bale, face lined and partly obscured by a huge moustache, plays Captain Joe Blocker, an ageing soldier whose past is filled with tales of war and murder. Possessed by a deep-seated hatred of Native Americans, Blocker is briefly incensed when he has an escort mission forced on him by his superior, Colonel Biggs (Stephen Lang): take an elderly and deathly ill Apache chief, Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) from a fort in New Mexico, where he’s been imprisoned for years, and shepherd him back to his home soil in Montana. After years of state-sanctioned genocide, the powers that be appear to have softened their stance on Native Americans like Yellow Hawk, who in his younger days killed a number of white men close to Blocker – hence the latter’s 100 kilowatt stares and reservoirs of hatred. Threatened with a court martial, Blocker swallows his pride and sets off with his men – among them his hollow-eyed, traumatised subordinate Thomas (Rory Cochrane, who’s terrific) – plus Yellow Hawk and his family, who were also captured years earlier. So begins a beautifully shot but inordinately long plod across the Old West, in which Blocker meets and earns the trust of a bereaved woman, Rosalee (Rosamund Pike) whose entire family was horrifically wiped out by a gang of Comanche thieves. From the opening 20 minutes, it’s possible to see Blocker’s redemption arc stretching out like a vast concrete bridge; as he and his group are beset by murderous Native Americans, cattle rustlers and more besides, it’s the central character’s growing respect for Yellow Hawk that ties the plot together. There wouldn’t be much wrong with this, except that Cooper, who adapts a story by the late screenwriter Donald E Stewart, gives the two characters precious few scenes in which to bond. Worse still, Cooper’s well-meant desire to make a film about the dehumanising effects of violence doesn’t extend to making his Native American characters seem particularly, well, human. S Craig Zahler’s brisk western-horror mash-up Bone Tomahawk was criticised in some quarters for the retrograde treatment of its non-white characters. For all its earnestness, Hostiles is no better: the Comanches that butcher Rosalee’s family are barely-glimpsed monsters; the great Wes Studi is given little to do as a stereotypically wise and noble chief. The film’s white characters vocally express their regret at the violence and maltreatment that has left Yellow Hawk’s people decimated and without a voice; how ironic, then, that the Native Americans in the movie are given so little time to express their thoughts on the matter. It’s like holding a seminar on sexism in the workplace and only inviting men called Dave. Some spectacular sequences, including a trudge through a monsoon where the slicks of rain and mud positively run from the screen, are a reminder of Cooper’s control as a filmmaker. But as a compelling story, Hostiles seems to wriggle from his grasp; the sentiments about racial and territorial divisions are all politically right-on, but the way they’re paid off is limp in the extreme. Blocker is open about the murders of men, women and children that blight his past; by befriending his sworn enemy and nobly defending his family from white landowners, Cooper appears to suggest that the character’s somehow redeemed himself. When the plot asks Yellow Hawk and Blocker to glibly agree that there has been tragedy on both sides, the lingering sensation is not of satisfaction, but quiet annoyance. Hostiles is out in UK cinemas on the 5th January.
title: “Hostiles Review” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-13” author: “Joseph Johnson”
Very much attempting to reach to the heart of the matter about the Old West’s once pristine new frontier, Hostiles is a movie that alternates between the lyrical and the visceral, the deliberate and the shockingly, swiftly violent. And its point is taken right from the beginning. The idea of starting anew on untouched land meant a slow-walking genocide that led to generations of war of attrition, and with this film we are seeing the final skirmishes after the conflict is already won. It’s the year 1892 when the movie begins with a heart-pounding Comanche attack. Taking a page straight out of Ford’s The Searchers—save with little left to the imagination—a family is brutally massacred by a rightfully aggrieved but nevertheless merciless and vindictive Native American force. Meanwhile, Capt. Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale) is only a week from retirement inside the U.S. Cavalry when he is forced to swallow his pride for the worst assignment he could imagine. Due to political pressure, Joseph is being assigned the duty of escorting a dying warrior chieftain named Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family to a holy site in Montana. Studi’s Indian leader was once the most feared man in the West, and he took the lives of many friends, whose gruesome deaths are as visible on Bale’s face as the thickly applied scars. Joseph wants no part in the mission, but he’ll have to discard his own bigotry and hatred for Yellow Hawk and all Natives if he wants his pension. And still, he and his small squadron of disposable subordinates quickly see everything go sideways. What works about Hostiles tends to work magnificently. Bale and Pike are at the top of their game in a film where they are the default leads, in part due to having multiple awards and nominations between them—and because they’re white. Yet the film intentionally depicts them with figurative and sometimes literal blood on their hands. Before the picture begins, they’ve been complicit in the repopulation of the West, and as such they are symbols of why the land is painted in a crimson red. Even so, both have just cause to be weary of Native Americans after losing so much, and both actors play the the weight of that loss with humane grace, even when Bale’s Blocker is at his most graceless. There is a sequence midway through the film where Pike’s Rosalie drops all pretense of her meager piety in the face of total loss to confess she thinks of suicide to Joseph, but like the wounded and stoic rock of granite Bale is personifying, she forces herself to carry on in her own guarded and uniformed manner. Their arc of accepting the past, as well as their Native compatriots on this journey, is predictable but played with the sincerest of delicacies. However, beyond those central emotional journeys and Cooper’s ability to use sudden atrocity to bewilder his audience into submission, all other attempts at deconstructing the Oater iconography of “good vs. evil” finds more dirt than gold. Studi and the entire Native American cast of Hostiles, including the always underused Adam Beach, is reduced to broad cliché as wounded, noble beings or nigh faceless “hostiles.” Attempting to mask minimalism for artfulness, Cooper’s movie underserves most of the supporting players to the point of their being ciphers, and this includes most of the remaining white cast too, such as Timothée Chalamet and Rory Cochrane, as well as Jonathan Majors as the only black man in Bale’s outfit. None escape a sweeping sense of wasted potential. The lone exception among the supporting players is Ben Foster, who portrays a malignant revenant with the same kind of welcome pathos the character actor can bring to almost any monster made human flesh. Yet his mirror to Bale’s Blocker is essentially a fun house reflection, for every set-piece and character they encounter underscores the either vile or virtuous deeds from a history that is ending when faced with the 20th century, as “the West” as they all know it has already begun to fade into memory and myth. While occasionally soulful, the repetitive nature of that point suggests the characters are riding in circles instead of due west or to any sort of grand epiphany. There is is an undeniably affecting melancholy that permeates the exquisite craftsmanship of Hostiles and its harrowing performances. But in its urgency to unpack the legend of a bygone age, the movie sadly sees too many of its real qualities pass it by, leaving only a turgid eulogy in its wake.
