Hostiles

Hostiles

Written by Donald E. Stewart and Scott Cooper

Directed by Scott Cooper

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer"

-D.H. Lawrence

Those words from the famous English novelist begin the film as the camera opens to a quiet, remote, almost idyllic farm somewhere in the American West in the late nineteenth-century. A man is hard at work tending to the farm while his wife is teaching her two daughters and caring for her baby. We see several Comanche raiders on horseback, their faces covered in war paint, descend upon the farm. The father rushes inside, instructs his family to run, and grabs a rifle to try and hold off the war party. In a hail of gunfire and war cries he is gunned down and scalped before the mother and her children become targets. To spare the gory details, she narrowly escapes the war party as the sole survivor.

Cut to our reveal of Christian Bale, a Union officer who sits on his horse watching as a small family of native Americans are rounded up by his men and the father is lassoed and dragged behind their horses like cattle, thoroughly dehumanizing them.

These are the first few minutes of Hostiles. 

This is not a happy movie. It immediately does away with the action packed heroics of a loner cowboy gunning down outlaws or navigating the politics of the Wild West, a la many of Clint Eastwood's classic Westerns or the well-received HBO show Deadwood. This is a film about the ugly history of America and it's treatment of the native peoples. It is a film about not only the atrocities that the Union and it's citizens inflicted on the natives but also the atrocities the native peoples committed against the Union and it's citizens and the bitter hatred that struggle created on both sides.

While hardly the first film to do so, I remember this being touched on in Clint Eastwood's fantastic The Outlaw Josey Wales and being one of the main themes of the also fantastic Netflix show Longmire, I haven't yet seen anything that offers such a dark, cynical, but ultimately hopeful message in the way this film does so effectively.

The film follows Army Captain Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale), a veteran of the American Indian Wars who has a reputation for being as violent and perhaps more so than his native counterparts. He is given a task by Colonel Abraham Biggs (Stephen Lang) to escort Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) to the Valley of the Bears in Montana as part of a media stunt back East, and attempt to improve relations with the citizenry who object to the treatment of the native peoples at the hands of the government. Blocker at first refuses but is near retirement and the Colonel informs him that he will be court marshalled and lose his pension if he does so. Blocker is forced to accept and gathers a unit to bring Yellow Hawk and his family, who have been prisoners for several years, to Montana without incident.

After they set out they come across the burned homestead of Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), the sole survivor of the raid at the start of the film, and bring her along with them so they can drop her off at the nearest Army fort for safety. What follows is arguably one of the darker films to come out recently and sees the band get repeatedly attacked and having to overcome the hatred and animosity that plague them to survive.

I'm aware that the basic plot has been done countless times over in several different mediums and genres but I think that it is especially effective here. The treatment of the native peoples is one of, if not the most, shameful legacies of the American people. It is a thing that we are still feeling the effects of today and it is unlikely that we as a country will ever be able to forget. Perhaps we never should forget.

I was concerned going in that the film would be very one-sided in this regard. I for one think that the actions of my country in this regard are completely deplorable, one need only do cursory research on the Battle at Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears to see this, but some of the more heavy-handed portrayals of the conflict paint it as very black and white, ignoring atrocities and war crimes committed on both sides. This film focuses soley on this grey area, and is a refreshing take on the subject matter.

Apart from the grim but oh-so-interesting subject matter, the film also succeeded in keeping me on my toes throughout the entire runtime. The opening scene's brutality hinted at a subversion of several war movie tropes that have come to be expected in the genre and the rest of the film delivers. One of the first scenes of actual combat subverts a trope I didn't expect it to and afterwards I no longer made assumptions as to what would happen. It's a breath of fresh air I think when a film keeps me guessing and makes it stand out among a sea of predictable plots that feel as though the scripts were written on auto-pilot (looking at you, almost every horror movie ever made).

The interactions between the characters I think serve as the strongest point of the entire movie. Blocker is a man who has seen more combat than any person should and is haunted by that. He's a bigot who sees the natives as savages and has lost too many friends at their hands to ever forgive those people he sees as the enemy. The same can also be applied to Chief Yellow Hawk I think, an aging, cancer-ridden war chief who wants only to die in his native land with his family by his side. Unlike Blocker, he has no desire to act on his hatred anymore and wants to embrace the peace he likely never knew. These two characters are the main driving force of the narrative and of it's emotional backing. This isn't to downplay the role that Rosalie and the other characters play, all of them contribute to the emotional weight of the film and it is fantastic.

Rosalie is a grieving mother who tries to figure out how to continue living with a tragedy that would rightfully break the spirit of most people. Master Sergeant Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane) is the closest thing to a friend blocker has and has also seen and done things that he cannot forget and desperately tries to move on but cannot. A soldier, Sergeant Charles Wills (Ben Foster), plays a kind of reflection of Blocker; he's done unspeakable things to people but instead of being haunted by them he only lets it dehumanize the native people more in his eyes, he begins to rejoice in the killing. These supporting characters play a vital role in the narrative, emotional, and thematic elements of the film and are absolutely essential.

I think the only criticism I have of the story, perhaps my only serious problem with the entire picture, is the relationship between Blocker and Yellow Hawk. While what is present is good, there isn't as much interaction between them as I would have liked. We get a lot of time focused on Blocker but not as much on Yellow Hawk, I think this was a bad choice. We hear about Yellow Hawk's career and about some of the atrocities he committed but I would have liked a more thorough examination of his character, I think fleshing him out more would have had a great impact on the story and themes.

As I have stated, the acting is nothing short of superb. Christian Bale gives what just might be his best performance yet, comparable to his role as Dicky Eklund in 2010's The Fighter (also a really good movie). He also did something that I find very rare for big stars like him, I had trouble seeing the actor and not the character. Much like how someone like Daniel Day-Lewis completely disappears into his roles Bale completely become Captain Blocker. He is a cold-blooded killer who is haunted by what he's done. In an interview on CBS, Bale said that Blocker was a bigot whose job was to commit genocide and that's as apt a description as I can think of. I think my favorite scene of Blocker's is when he is given orders to escort Chief Yellow Hawk and describes to a slimy Eastern reporter why he is reluctant to escort him.

"I saw what happened to the 4th, and when Yellow Hawk and his dog soldiers got done with them; and there wasn't... don't you dare laugh. There wasn't enough left of those poor men to fill a slop pail. Understand, that when we lay our heads down out here we're all prisoners. I hate 'em, I got a war bag full of reasons to hate 'em."

Bale is flawless in his role and the film is worth watching just for him alone. His character ark is believable and one of the most effective scenes doesn't have any dialogue at all and minimal music, just shots of him crying and wailing in the desert that perfectly sums up his regret and sadness in an absolutely flawless display of acting talent.

Wes Studi's Chief Yellow Hawk is another flawless performance. While there isn't as much of it as Bale's, he doesn't need much in the way of dialogue or screen time to convey his character. An aging, sickly warrior who just wants to put the killing and bloodshed behind him and die in peace. Studi give such a weight to his performance with minimal effort, you believe that he is a proud Chief just by the way he sits on a horse and you can see the years of conflict on his face in every wrinkle and gaze. It is a very subtle but perfectly executed performance.

Perhaps the performance that struck me the most was Roasmund Pike as Rosalie. She had a lot of work to do in her role and she pulls it all off without missing a beat. She is at first a grieving mother and wife, her entire world ripped violently and suddenly from her. She is traumatized by it and tries to find some way to move on. It is completely believable and unfortunately I can't talk about it much without major spoilers, so you'll have to take my word on just how good she is in this movie.

The rest of the supporting cast is also phenomenal. Rory Cochrane is exceptional in his role, you can see the weight of his life crushing him and he delivers it all in an effective and heartbreaking way. Ben Foster is excellent as he always is and while he doesn't have much screen time he manages to wring every drop from his presence and shows just how good a supporting actor he is (he is even better in Hell or High Water, if you're interested in seeing him in a much larger role).

At the risk of overusing the word, the cinematography of this film is flawless. The cinematographer, Masanobu Takayanagi, captures every mountain range, forest, and valley perfectly. It captures the environment in such a way that sells the time period and draws you into it's world not unlike the work of Roger Deakins. The colors pop in all the right ways and the beauty of the landscape is contrasted with the horrible violence done by the characters. I think my favorite shot of the entire film is a raid on a fur-trapper camp at night where the attackers charge into the enemy tents but the camera stays outside, only allowing us to hear the carnage and bloodshed on the inside and the tents flap wildly as the men battle. It is an effective use of cinematography and sound that blends perfectly to make almost more of an impression on the audience then the battles that are actually shown on screen.

The soundtrack scored by Max Richter mixes perfectly with the film. It is at the same evocative of that classic and unique Western sound as well as set itself apart in it's darker and moodier tracks. The song "How Shall a Sparrow Fly" by Ryan Bingham is perhaps my favorite track. Check it out, the whole soundtrack is great listening to all on it's own.

I think the element of the movie that keeps me coming back to it is it's themes. This may be a spoiler so if you don't want to risk it I would suggest you skip this section, just know that I think that it's incredibly relevant not only to it's subject matter but to the modern day and to the world at large.

I think the film is about moving on from tragedy but acknowledging it's place in history. Blocker is the best example of this theme at work. He begins the film almost a broken man, tortured by the memories of the things he has done and the things that have been done to him. He is a man who knows nothing other than conflict and hatred, a reality he's know for most of his life. It is when he meets his hated rival, Chief Yellow Hawk, and is forced to survive with him and when he meets Rosaline that he begins to change. In Rosaline he sees the effects that hatred can have on other people, how this conflict can destroy the lives of innocent people who are otherwise uninvolved. The Comanche devastated her home and family and while he wasn't responsible for that, I think Blocker realizes that the hatred he and his people shared for them played a factor in the raiding of innocent people's homesteads. In Yellow Hawk, he sees a man that, like himself, has known killing and slaughter all his life but tries to move past the bloodshed and carve out a space in the world where he can be at peace and leave the fighting and killing behind.

Similarly with Metz, he sees the toll that a lifetime of fighting and killing can take on a person. Metz is being eaten alive by his guilt and trauma, unable to move on from what he's done. I think this comes to a head with Wills, as Blocker sees that Wills is unapologetic in his hatred. He hates the native peoples and relishes in their slaughter, I think it's a wake-up call of sorts for Blocker. He sees in Wills what he could become if he gave in to his anger.

The movie, I think, serves as an allegory not just for the American people's relationship with the native Americans but for the relationship between all warring groups of people. The film isn't saying forget about the past, I think it's saying that to find peace people need to recognize the horrors and atrocities of the past and work together to try and heal from it. It will always play a part in history, just as the killing will play a part in Blocker's life, but the way forward is to recognize that and take that knowledge forward, try to overcome one's differences and see them as people. I think it is a deep and very relevant message, one that is sorely needed in a lot of places today.

I was shocked by how much I liked Hostiles. I didn't expect the stellar acting, the stunning visuals, the moving score and the profound themes. This is a must see if you can handle very dark, depressing and violent subject matter. It is a movie that highlights the atrocities of two groups that fight a bloody war fueled by a mutual hatred that allows them to dehumanize each other and the effects that has on several different peoples and offers a bright, brilliant ray of hope for peace and understanding to prevail. This is an important film, and one I think everyone should see.

"I don't know how you done it all these years. Seeing all the things you seen, doing all the things you done. Makes you feel inhuman after awhile."