★★★½☆
13 December 2017
A movie review of HOSTILES. |
“Things have changed. Before long we’ll be giving them their land back,” Philip Wills (Ben Foster)
For a long time, one was ambivalent towards this film. As I write up my thoughts, I have come back to the beginning to re-write. The film has grown in my mind as I dissect it and contemplate. Few films do such, because their merits and flaws are usually pretty clear. There are exceptions. See also MY GREAT NIGHT and SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS. Though, this experience is still not perfect.
CRAZY HEART, OUT OF THE FURNACE, BLACK MASS, Scott Cooper keeps nearly making good movies. It is frustrating, not only because kernels of thoughtfulness do not blossom, but also because Cooper is clearly an actor’s director. He marshals excellent performances, from Johnny Depp’s malevolent turn in BLACK MASS to Christian Bale’s achingly sad character in OUT OF THE FURNACE. Cooper attracts starry casts. HOSTILES is wall to wall names. It is that rare thing, virtually every speaking part in a large ensemble are recognisable.
For a long time, one was ambivalent towards this film. As I write up my thoughts, I have come back to the beginning to re-write. The film has grown in my mind as I dissect it and contemplate. Few films do such, because their merits and flaws are usually pretty clear. There are exceptions. See also MY GREAT NIGHT and SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS. Though, this experience is still not perfect.
CRAZY HEART, OUT OF THE FURNACE, BLACK MASS, Scott Cooper keeps nearly making good movies. It is frustrating, not only because kernels of thoughtfulness do not blossom, but also because Cooper is clearly an actor’s director. He marshals excellent performances, from Johnny Depp’s malevolent turn in BLACK MASS to Christian Bale’s achingly sad character in OUT OF THE FURNACE. Cooper attracts starry casts. HOSTILES is wall to wall names. It is that rare thing, virtually every speaking part in a large ensemble are recognisable.
When you get past the conveyor belt of character actors, the subgenre is of the pared back variety: the mobile siege movie - protagonists on a journey/mission are beleaguered by others thwarting progress. 1892, Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) is dying and given clemency. He is in prison for warring on the invading Caucasian soldiers stealing Native American land. His family, including the young, are despicably in prison with him. Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale), a bitter veteran of the conflict is coming up to retirement. Tasked, against his will, to escort Chief Yellow Hawk home, from New Mexico to Montana, across dangerous country, Blocker must comply with the orders or face a loss of his pension.
Christian Bale is one of my favourite actors. As Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring, surely he is in line to take the mantle as greatest working male thespian? Here, in hate mode, he showcases a thousand yard stare that Batman would be jealous of. However, his rage comes from his character’s barely concealed racism. There is no self-awareness, no understanding of why Native Americans defend their land, and no empathy. Over the course of the runtime his outlook shifts slowly. While he never admits to wasting his life soldiering for the wrong cause, one might interpret he realises. That his contrition does not go far enough is one of the negatives of the film.
Wes Studi, as Chief Yellow Hawk, is one of the stars of my favourite film, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. His Magua is maybe the best antagonist of all time. There is no outward bile from his character here. Instead he is an elder statesman beaten by overwhelming odds. It is profoundly disheartening to see his people no longer in charge of their destiny, and the audience knows it is only going to get worse as time progresses. The United States of America is founded on the genocide of Native Americans, and the slavery of black Africans and their descendants. This is just not being addressed properly. It does not seem to have seeped into the psyches of the wider population. Racism is rampant. The past can start to be healed when it is acknowledged, and compensation offered. HOSTILES starts to go in the right direction, but then peters out.
The band of soldiers and Native Americans grow. First is Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike). HOSTILES opens with Rosalie’s family murdered by “bad” Native Americans, as opposed to “good” Native Americans. Is this a clumsy analogy to the modern world, bad Muslims and good Muslims? The “bad” Native Americans here are faceless and voiceless. Is the movie using them as cyphers, hate begets hate?
Dehumanising the adversary makes it arguably easier to kill and mistreat when waging war. A heavy price on a person’s soul is likely to be felt when fighting on the wrong moral side. We see the psychological toll on Blocker and his peers. On the Odyssey-like journey, the group also has to escort Blocker’s former colleague, Philip Wills (Ben Foster - doing his usual good malevolent. He was the standout in the 3:10 TO YUMA remake). He is due to be hanged. Wills killed so many unjustly that he has become a psychopath, murdering as easily as breathing. He represents another facet of Native American persecution and its aftermath. HOSTILE’s most interesting character is Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane), who is suffering from post-traumatic stress and unsolvable guilt for all the Native American lives he immorally took. At a dinner scene, involving Lieutenant Colonel Ross McGowen (Peter Mullan) and his wife Minnie McGowan (Robyn Malcolm), it is spoken explicitly how the land was stolen from the Native Americans and they have been vilified for defending it from the white invaders. The Native Americans were there first, yet they have been dispossessed and starved.
The fast editing perhaps tries to soften the violence, but all it does is hamper the potential to raise the pulse in combat sequences. Deaths also happen off screen; not in enigmatic badassery (think Takeshi Kitano in SONATINE or Billy Bob Thornton in season one of FARGO), but in a NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN way – we are not meant to get catharsis. Characters perishing off camera here are in turmoil.
The conclusion is deeply problematic. There is no sense of irony to what happens to the grandson. Is this meant to signal the way of peace? The future of this tribe is annihilation and unsettling assimilation? Or is it saying when there are refugees of war, when there has been bonding in trauma, and there is no one left to turn to, then you take in the children of that conflict?
HOSTILES is filled with oblique white guilt, but does not go far enough with it. The film will not sate those with righteous fury at the mistreatment of Native Americans.
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