Hostiles, A Film Review
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”By Dakota Wind
Hostiles. Directed by Scott Cooper. Produced by Scott Cooper, Ken Lao, and Jon Lesher. Screenplay by Scott Cooper. Based on a story by Donald Stewart. Music by Max Richter. Starring Wes Studi (Mystery Men, Last of The Mohicans, Geronimo), Adam Beach (Suicide Squad, Windtalkers, Cowboys and Aliens), Q'orianka Kilcher (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The New World, Longmire), Xavier Horsechief, and Christian Bale (Empire of The Sun, Batman Begins). U.S.A.: Waypoint Entertainment / Le Grisbi Productions / Bloom Media, Dec. 22, 2017. Film. 133 minutes.
American Western films have a checklist, and Cooper’s Hostiles keeps to the basics. Long panning shots of an undeveloped landscape of open plains, streams, and mountains. Guns, cowboys, soldiers, horses, Indians. Check. Unrepentant violence and moody discourse. Check. The anonymity and mystery of The Man with No Name are almost gone in this narrative. The only ones without names or identity beyond who they are are the Comanche. Their presence serves only to offer up a slice of motiveless Indian depredation.
Hostiles is a movie in the tradition of Last of the Mohicans, that is to say, that it is set in a world of political change and violent conflict. As Daniel Day-Lewis learned Mohican, Christian Bale learned Cheyenne for this film. Like Day-Lewis, and by the laws of Hollywood’s western genre, Bale “out Indians the Indians.” He speaks more lines in Cheyenne than all his native counterparts combined. Blocker is a better shot, a better fighter, a better killer. He’s the protagonist so bullets miss him. The only hurt Blocker receives is a guilty conscience, but tell him he’s a good man and he falls apart.
Hostiles is largely about Blocker. How can he live in a post Civil War, post Indian Wars, America? His paternalistic needs are indulged twice: taking care of the widow Mrs. Quaid and taking care of the last Cheyenne prisoner, a boy named Little Bear. Rosamund Pike’s Mrs. Quaid can wail. She’s allowed. Mrs. Quaid’s pain and fears are fully explored. Blocker’s and Quaid’s growing affection for each other is chaste.
Cooper delivers a fine western film, but he’s paralyzed with what to do with its native cast. Studi’s Yellow Hawk and Beach’s Black Hawk, are little explored. Their narrative is constructed only from interaction with Blocker. Their narrative isn’t even their own to tell. Their struggle, their imprisonment, their pain, their recovery, and their deaths need Blocker, and that’s what hobbles what could have been a great story.
At one point Blocker says, “When we lay our heads down out here, we’re all prisoners.” There is a difference in his imprisonment and the Cheyenne’s. Blocker’s prison of obligation comes to a conclusion. Maybe he lives in a mental and emotional prison. The Cheyenne are prisoners, even when they are set free.
Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s presentation of the vast open landscape is poetry. He captures the majesty of Studi’s Indian Head Nickle profile from the Cheyennes' concentration at Fort Berringer in Arizona to his burial at the Valley of the Bears in Montana.
Max Richter delivers a spooky, ambient, and minimalist western score. Richter’s “Scream at the Sky,” sounds like a broken heart should, shattered and desperate. “Never Goodbye” is an emotional punch, brimming with the soul of peace and sadness.
The highlight of the film rests on the shoulders of the innocent. He too is given very little narrative in this story, but at the conclusion of the film, when Little Bear has lost his family and he’s under the care of Mrs. Quaid (paternalism), Blocker gifts him with a book about Julius Caesar. Before Little Bear accepts Blocker’s western token, he raises his hands and offers Blocker the traditional Plains Indian sign of gratitude.
Little Bear has no words, perhaps at Cooper’s direction, perhaps because Cooper wouldn’t know what Little Bear should say, but this single moment is more beautiful, powerful, and perfect than Blocker’s and Quaid’s changing resolve to the Indian plight.
I don’t know Cooper’s intended audience. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be me. The story’s narrative revolved around two characters and their struggles with redemption, but this wasn’t enough. I like western films. I also like to ask, “Where're the Indians?” when watching westerns, but Hostiles left me wanting more than Cooper could deliver. It would make a good rental.
