"Hostiles"

Tonight's movie was "Hostiles" (2017), a recent Western that came up during a search of the Library database. It must have had a theater release (unlike many movies available on dvd, ala Redbox), because the director is a guy named Scott Cooper, who also made the Oscar-winning "Crazy Heart" and also "Black Mass", the movie about that fugitive hoodlum whose name I can't remember right now. Johnny Depp gave his best performance in that movie, and both of these previous efforts by Cooper were major theatrical releases. So "Hostiles" must have been, too. I don't remember hearing of it, but then I don't pay total attention to current motion picture releases.

The year is 1892. Christian Bale stars as a war weary U.S. Cavalry Captain, a career soldier who is nearing retirement. He fought in the Civil War and has been fighting Indians ever since, out West. The violence has sapped his spirit, but not his determination to do his job as he finishes out the last weeks of his service.

He is given one last commission : to transport a family of freed Apache prisoners from an Army fort in New Mexico all the way up to their tribal home in Montana. The Apache family has been imprisoned for seven years because of the war crimes of the father, Yellow Hawk (played by famous Indian actor Wes Studi), who is also a Chief. But President Benjamin Harrison has ordered their release and repatriation to their sacred homeland, as part of a program to end the centuries-long tension between the United States and the Indian peoples.

Bale's character, Captain Blocker, at first wants nothing to do with transporting these "savages", as he sees them. He has fought in many Indian conflicts, and against this particular Chief, and according to him, Yellow Hawk has committed unspeakable violence against Cavalry soldiers. However, Captain Blocker is reminded by his Colonel that he, too, has killed many Indians - men, women and children - in equally terrible ways. Blocker still refuses to take the Indian family home, until the Colonel threatens to cancel his military pension. With that threat hanging over his head, he reluctantly agrees to carry out the mission. It is to be his last before retirement. He chooses a team of trusted Troopers to accompany him and the prisoners, and they are off on their journey to Montana. Not long after departing, they come across a young white woman (Rosamond Pike) in a burned out homestead. She is half crazy, cradling a dead baby in her arms as if it were alive. Her whole family, husband included, has been massacred by Comanche Indians at the start of the movie. Comanches were known as a truly savage tribe, even by other Indians. In the film they are portrayed as psychopaths, and from what I have read in books and seen in movies, that is the way they have always been portrayed, so it may be legit. I trust the testimony of other tribes because they would have no reason to lie.

At any rate, this slaughter at the start of the film sets the tone for the entire movie. "Hostiles" lives up to it's title in that it is relentlessly grim and foreboding. Something bad is always waiting ahead, because of Comanches, or white landowners, or an extra prisoner who is added to the load, a white soldier who also must be taken on the journey because he has been convicted of killing an Indian family by himself.

Does this sound grim enough for you yet?

If you recall a book I reported on last month, called "An Indigenous People's History Of The United States", well.....this is like somebody made a movie out of that book.

It is grim, slow, and brutal. The acting is excellent throughout, but the problem is that "we get it".

The amount of story does not justify a 134 minute excursion into violence.

I can read a book to understand the full story. Don't try to depict it on screen without adding some redeeming quality.

To be fair, there is quite a bridge of friendship that develops between Bale and his Indian prisoners, and between Rosamond Pike and the young children of the Indian family. The director Cooper gets his point across, of necessary peace and cooperation. But for me, raised on Old Westerns, I found the violence to be over the top. Also the language. I am not certain that soldiers in 1892 would use the F-Word in the same way it is used now. Not that the word didn't exist then, but it just seems out of place in the context of the dialogue.

"Hostiles" still gets two thumbs up from me, just because it is so well made and acted, and because the story of American violence against Indians needs to be told. It actually has been told in many Westerns from the 1950s, and told much better, without the gruesomeness.

And though I give "Hostiles" a positive review, I cannot recommend it to any but the most hardened viewers, because it is not a pleasant experience.

I am glad I saw it, but I prefer the old Westerns myself. They seemed to have a better grasp on the situation and were much more entertaining.

See you in the morn.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)