Hostiles

Scott Cooper's Hostiles is a brutal and depressive but otherwise fairly traditional (as opposed to revisionist) Western, less an examination of the dynamics of European conquest of indigenous peoples than yet another story of another taciturn white guy who learns to respect the innate nobility of individual American Indians.

That's a story we've seen before, and that -- if the adventure is exciting enough -- we can almost always abide, even if it's troubling that none of the Cheyenne characters in this film ever transcends the tropes that were firmly established by the 1930s. Wes Studi is the sage, noble chief Yellow Hawk who is not afraid of death. Adam Beach makes almost no impression at all as Black Hawk, his earnest but not-quite-as-sage son. And Black Hawk has a wife (Q'orianka Kilcher) and a son, both of whom feel sorry for the pretty white lady whose family got wiped out by a Comanche raiding party.

Cheyenne war chief Yellow Hawk fought the Americans for years until he was captured. Now, in 1892 after seven years in the stockade, President Benjamin Harrison has ordered that Yellow Hawk be released in order that he can die of cancer on his home turf in Montana. It's an obvious public relations move, and Capt. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale), the officer ordered to escort Yellow Hawk and his family home, wants no part of it.

But he's a soldier, and soldiers follow orders. So the experienced Indian fighter selects a detail that includes his loyal second Sgt. Metz (an excellent Rory Cochran), a lieutenant fresh out of West Point (Jesse Plemmons), and a sacrificial French immigrant (Timothee Chalamat) to escort Yellow Hawk and his family. (About a mile into the journey, he offers the old chief a quicker way out, but the old man surprisingly declines.)

Along the way they come across the ruins of a burnt-out cabin, with fresh widow Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) quivering inside, clucthing a dead infant. (We know what happened to her family; we watched it in the film's harrowing opening scene.) Yellow Hawk allows that the raiding party was Comanche -- the villains of John Ford's The Searchers, a film from which this one takes a few cues and a final shot -- who are murderous sub-humans and nothing at all like the Cheyenne. Mrs. Quaid, in the wake of her trauma, can perhaps be forgiven for not appreciating the difference. Still, they drag her along.

After a few run-ins with the Comanche, Capt. Blocker seems to realize what he should have known all along -- Yellow Hawk is still a formidable fighter, and Black Hawk is an able brave. He begins to allow them a little more autonomy, removing their shackles so they might be more helpful in a fight.

Cooper doesn't rush things, and there's plenty of time on the road to Montana to ponder the difference between a professional killer and a freelancer. Along the way, they pick up a new prisoner, soldier Sgt. Wills (Ben Foster) who once served under Capt. Blocker and knows exactly what atrocities the good captain is capable of committing. Why, if things were only a little different, it could be Blocker they were dragging back to the scaffold for murdering the natives.

While it's full of little history lessons and moral reversals (spoiler alert: turns out the real savages are white males), the real reason to watch Hostiles is to bask in the movie star presences of Bale, Pike and Studi, all of whom embody old-time Western characters more than credible people from the past.

Sure, it's a bit ponderous and obvious. It curiously avoids giving Yellow Hawk and his people human traits. But I'm not sure it doesn't give audiences hungry for a Western exactly what they think they want -- Bale in a droopy mustache, coming off as a dispirited Sam Elliott and Studi as the stoic Native American Morgan Freeman who exists to save the soul of the disillusioned, racist cavalry officer.

MovieStyle on 01/26/2018