Butler's Cinema Scene

Christian Bale

“HOSTILES” My rating: B-

133 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Westerns have always been a guilty pleasure (violent melodramas aimed at little boys and grown men who still think like little boys), but one cannot recall another Western that so openly oozes guilt as does “Hostiles.”

Written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace,” “Black Mass”) and based on a 20-year-old manuscript by the late Donald E. Stewart (“Missing” and three of the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan films), this revisionist oater unfolds in 1892 when the Indian wars are winding down and the frontier is giving way to civilization.

But not quite yet.

Capt. Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) rounds up renegade Indians.  His methods are matter-or-fact brutal. He nurses a slow-burning racial hatred fueled by the ugly deaths of comrades over the years and the atrocities he’s witnessed.

So he’s furious when for his last mission before retirement he’s ordered to accompany Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a dying Cheyenne war chief, from a New Mexico prison to his tribe’s hunting grounds in Montana. No sooner does their little expedition get out of sight of the fort than Joe claps irons on the old man, less to prevent escape than to humiliate the cancer-riddled warrior.

Wes Studi

Joe is, of course, a direct descendant of Ethan Edwards, the Indian-hating antihero of John Ford’s great Western “The Searchers.” Both films are about a character on a moral and geographical journey.

The difference is that everyone in “Hostiles” is being eaten alive by hate or regret.

Joe’s second-in-command is Sergeant Metz (Rory Cochrane), who’s been diagnosed with “melancholia” but more accurately is being consumed by his conscience after decades of dogged persecution of Native Americans.  Then there’s Corporal Woodsen (Jonathan Majors), a black buffalo soldier who found acceptance in the white man’s world by hunting down another minority.

A young lieutenant (Jesse Plemons) straight out of West Point is about to get a crash course in frontier justice. And then there’s the military convict being taken to another outpost for hanging after butchering a local family. An old colleague of Joe’s, the prisoner (Ben Foster, naturally) wonders why he’s going to swing when he’s seen Joe do worse.

Finally there’s Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), traumatized almost to insanity after witnessing her husband and children slaughtered by renegade Comanches in the brutal episode that opens the movie.

Rosamund Pike, Christian Bale

Few of these individuals suffer in silence…no, they bare their souls in stilted, portentous dialogue often delivered in a method-y mumble.

Which is too bad, because plotwise “Hostiles” has a lot going for it.  The long horseback ride to the north is fraught with dangers, everything from that roving band of Comanches to fur trappers with kidnapping and rape on their minds and, finally, an imperious rancher (Scott Wilson) who doesn’t want any goddamn Indians buried on the land he claims as his own.

And there’s the slowly changing dynamic within the party, with captive Yellow Hawk and his immediate family (Adam Beach, Q’orianka Kilcher) showing kindness to the distraught Rosalie and finally proving their humanity even to the bitter and unforgiving Joe.

“Hostiles” opens with a quote from D.H. Lawrence about the hardness of the American soul, and spends the next two-plus hours hammering that point home. This is the most funereal Western ever. By comparison “The Wild Bunch” is a lighthearted romp.

But if you can get past Cooper’s penchant for overstatement, there are pleasures to be had.  The performances are solid despite the distraction of all that oversensitive dialogue, the landscapes through which the party rides are beautiful, and the film’s attention to detail is exacting.

In the end “Hostiles” casts its net too wide.  It’s hard to get money for a Western nowadays, but that doesn’t mean that when it does happen that you’ve got to touch all the bases.

| Robert W. Butler