[wpdevart_youtube]vJz5l5ru7ws[/wpdevart_youtube]
HOSTILES | FILM REVIEW
**
Dir: Scott Cooper
Starring: Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike
15, 2hrs 13mins
It’s been said that if you wanted to make a film about America, you would make a Western. Certainly that’s partly why the genre has remained so steadfast in Hollywood’s history, forever a reliable go-to for the auteur looking to make a grand statement on the American Dream, its wild frontiers, and the violence and brutality that tore it into creation throughout the 19th century. The genre’s glory days of John Ford and Howard Hawks may be long ago, but it remains a reliable backdrop for directors looking to make overbearing statements about the nature of the American soul—hell, Hostiles even opens with a quote from DH Lawrence commenting on such a matter.
Unfortunately, for all its self-centred seriousness and handsomely-mounted grimness, Hostiles manages to be a two-hour-plus bore. At its core are a few fine ideas; the story tells of Captain Blocker (Christian Bale), a US army cavalry officer with a long and deep-seated hatred of Native Americans, being forced under threat of court martial to transport his old (and now terminally ill) nemesis, Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), to his homeland. There’s plenty of dialogue and forlorn looks as Blocker reflects on his long history of brutality and violence, seeing a mirror of himself in Chief Yellow Hawk, whom others frequently comment has done equally bad things. Along the way they pick up Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose family and home we see burned down in the opening scenes by Comanche raiders, enemies of Yellow Hawk.
Scott Cooper, thus far still best remembered for directing Crazy Heart, which won Jeff Bridges an Oscar, does continue to show talent behind the camera, and there are fine moments sprinkled throughout Hostiles—a sumptuous shot here, a poetic image here—not to mention uniformly fine performances. Even Bale, who for all his qualities is so often given to showboating displays of method-actor twitchiness, gives a powerfully toned-down performance here, channeling the years of violence and hatred built up internally within Blocker with subtlety and nuance. Yet it is all for nought. Blocker’s interactions with the Native American characters are rife with moral ambiguity, and Hostiles should rightly be applauded for refusing easy answers to this always thorny issue, but it doesn’t change the fact that those same Native American characters (played by fine actors such as Wes Studi and Q’orianka Kilcher) are ultimately used as little more than crutches for Blocker’s broadly redemptive arc.
Above all, the biggest flaw with Hostiles is that none of its seriousness feels earned, or even intriguing. The script is repetitive, with numerous scenes of actors sitting around a campfire talking about bad things they did (in hoarse whispers, to designate how terribly Serious this all is). There is potential here; buried somewhere in the script is a rumination on the violent relationship between Native Americans and the people that took over their land that brings to mind John Ford’s The Searchers. There’s even a few direct visual quotes here from that classic, but where that film rested on a lyrical complexity that added depth to its material, Hostiles sits lame, as dry and airless as the desert plains of the American West.
words Fedor Tot