Hostiles
2017 (UK release 5 January 2018)
Written and directed by Scott Cooper
Soundtrack by Max Richter
Christian Bale – Captain Joe Blocker
Rosamund Pike – Rosalie Quaid
Wes Studi – Chief Yellow Hawk
with
Stephen Lang – Colonel Abraham Briggs
Rory Cochrane – Master Sergeant Thomas Metz
Joanathan Majors – Corpral Henry Woodsen
Jesse Plemons – Lieutenant Rudy Kidder
Timothée Chalmet – Private “Frenchy”
Ryan Bingham – Sergeant Malloy
Ben Foster- Sergeant Wills
Adam Bleach – Black Hawk
Q’oriana Kilcher – Elk Woman
Tanaya Beatty – Living Woman
Xavier Horsechielf – Little Bear
The Comanche raiders don’t get credited.
The opening screen of Hostiles is a quote from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature,
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer, It has never yet melted.
That’s long enough for an opening quotation on a screen, though Lawrence goes on (and on, usually):
America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and deep fear of what might be if they were not common-sensical … there is always a certain slightly devilish resistance in the American landscape, and a certain slightly bitter resistance in the white man’s heart. Hawthorne gives this. But Cooper glosses it over. The American landscape has never been at one with the white man. Never. And white men have probably never felt so bitter anywhere, as here in America, where the very landscape, in its very beauty, seems a bit devilish and grinning, opposed to us.
Lawrence certainly describes Christian Bale’s leading character. Christian Bale never ceases to amaze me. Like me, and my oldest son, he attended Bournemouth School, our local state grammar school in Southern England, though obviously not at the same time. He is the most seamless of actors in American English now, and in an incredible performance in Hostiles he creates the toughest hardest Western lead since Clint Eastwood hung up his holsters.
Christian Bale is Captain Joe Blocker
Every few years we hear that the classic Western has been revived. Candidates include Tombstone, Dances With Wolves and The Unforgiven though perhaps not the remake of The Magnificent Seven. Hostiles is the latest one to gain the acclaim, but we all know that the Western will never regain the dominance it enjoyed in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, when TV as well as cinema seemed wall-to-wall Westerns. I look back in nostalgia here, because it was preferable to our current wall-to-wall Superhero selection.
Hostiles running from New Mexico to Montana has the big skies, the fabulous landscape, the deserts, mountains and prairies. It’s set in 1892, or late for a Western, so sixteen years after the Battle of Little Big Horn, and references suggest the main male characters were all present there. It’s also two years after the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, considered the final conflict of the Indian Wars.
The story starts out at the farmstead of the Quaide family in New Mexico. Rosalie (Rosamund Pike) is gently teaching her two daughters English grammar when the Comanche raiding party arrives, and slaughters everyone except Rosalie. They scalp her husband.
Sole survivor: Rosalie (Rosamund Pike)
We switch to a group of Cavalrymen, led by Captain Blocker (Christian Bale) whipping and maltreating three Apaches … a man, woman and child. At the fort, the Colonel (Stephen Lang) introduces Blocker to a liberal journalist, and orders Blocker to escort a Cheyenne chief back to Montana to die. The chief, Yellow Hawk has been a prisoner for seven years (so pre-Wounded Knee) and has cancer. President Harrison has decided to let him return to his ancestral home to die. Blocker is assigned to escort him, and refuses point blank … he has fought Yellow Hawk in the past, one of several people in the movie alleged to have sliced their victim from “stem to stern.” Faced with court martial, he has to accept. A party is formed, with his oldest colleagues Sergeant Tommy Metz and African-American Corporal Henry Woodsen. Add a West Point lieutenant and a private, “Frenchy.” I thought the touches of French and Irish accent were authentic, as I have remarked elsewhere, Custer’s 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn had more Irish and German immigrants than American-born soldiers. The frontier was full of people with accents. Incidentally while we think of Little Big Horn as the Sioux (Lakota) under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the Cheyenne fought with them.
Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) & Blocker
Yellow Hawk is accompanied by his son, Black Hawk, grandson Little Bear, and their wives, Elk Woman and Living Woman. As soon as they’re out of sight of the fort, Blocker has the Natives chained. So the first thing they come across is the burnt out Quaide homestead with Rosalie deeply traumatized in the ruins with her children’s bodies.
Blocker leads the band
No more detailed story. It’s a long journey, with conflict with the Comanches, rapist fur trappers and finally vicious Montana ranchers. Throughout, the party gradually gels, and Yellow Hawk (a magnificently noble “savage” if ever there was) shows wisdom and compassion, so slowly the little band of enemies unite. A classic tale.
At a stopping point, at a further fort, Blocker and Rosalie dine with the Colonel and his wife, and listen to their liberal views on the Native-Americans. As with the journalist, the message is that it’s time to stop killing. Rosalie decides to continue with the escort party rather than listen to more of it. There’s an addition. The wounded Henry is left behind at the fort (after a touching inter-racial harmony farewell from Blocker). They now also have to escort the vicious killer Sergeant Wills (Ben Foster) with them. They’re taking him to be hanged, a rather forced plot point perhaps. Given the general disregard for life, it seems expensive to escort someone several hundred mile to hang him, rather than dispatch him there and then. However Wills is an old comrade –in-arms of Blocker’s, They, with Sergeant Tommy Metz, were all killers together when in uniform. Wills is a murderous psycho. What about Blocker? His riposte is “I was doing my job.” OK, but that defence didn’t work in the Nuremburg Trials.
Christian Bale with his co-star: the moustache
The Captain Blocker-Yellow Hawk relationship is the classic American tale of races meeting to co-operate, running from Natty (Hawkeye) and Chingachook in The Last of The Mohicans to Huck and Jim in Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael and Qeeqeg in Moby Dick, the assorted group of soldiers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked & The Dead, and The Chief and McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s a potent classic American storyline … or myth, or dream if you prefer. Writer / Director Scott Cooper’s choice of a quote from Studies in Classic American Literature had surprised me right at the start. In my day, it stood along with The American Adam by Lewis as seminal texts for Am.Lit students. He clearly knows and wanted to play out a mythical American story.
The integration of old enemies in reinforced because we learn that Tommy fought with “The Grays” i.e. The Confederates, while we assume that Blocker was in the Union army. That later grudging post Civil War friendship has been done so many times. Hang on, the war was thirty years earlier. How old are these guys? Well, we know that this is Blocker’s last task before a pension, and that Tommy killed his first man at the age of fourteen. Yes, it figures. The other union of opposites is Blocker and Rosalie … the grammar teacher widow and the action man. However, as we are reminded at the end, Blocker is a man who reads the histories of Julius Caesar … and in Latin. In all his dealings with the traumatised Rosalie he is sensitive and gentle. In reverse, Rosalie toughens up and becomes an enthusiastic shooter with pistol and rifle.
Rosalie (with dead baby) (Rosamund Pike) and Captain Blocker)
The violence hits hard because it’s sudden and sporadic, interspersed with long slower sections where among other things, we can marvel at the other star, the American landscape. There’s a lot of silent contemplation, which means the viewer can add their own interpretations to Blocker’s enigmatic face, and to Yellow Hawk’s perfect Native American profile.
It’s 2017, so the characters have to expound on this a little, and we do see that the women bond before the men. The script is excellent, and the only note that rang really false was when Tommy, the sergeant, feeling remorse for a lifetime of slaughtering Native-Americans solemnly tells Yellow Hawk Our treatment of your people cannot be forgiven. It’s compounded by him presenting Yellow Hawk with a gift of his tobacco. Hmm, I thought, tobacco is hardly the gift for a man with terminal lung cancer and a bad cough!
Rosalie & The Cheyenne women
Christian Bale tops off an Oscar prospect performance with the ending. I don’t want to give it away, but Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name was always left on his own at the end. Enjoy the last few minutes!
On Native Americans, we learn that Yellow Hawk mistrusts the Comanches and thinks them mad, but the Native tribes had distinct languages and cultures and only seem identical to Westerners. We have seen the Apaches getting pushed around at the start. Blocker mentions a Kiowa atrocity (another cutting stem to stern moment). Yellow Hawk seems to be Cheyenne – the ranchers in Montana refer to the Native group as Cheyenne.
Black Hawk (Adam Bleach) in chains
We never know why that band of six Comamches were so dangerous as late as 1892, though we do know the Quaid family had a drill for such an attack, ‘They’ve come for the horses!’ shouts the husband. I guess they’d been causing mayhem in the area. Lawlessness is a theme on this frontier, because the fur trappers think they can capture, beat and rape at will, and the ranchers have zero respect for an American army uniform, nor a presidential letter. So the Comanches are one of three violent, murderous lawless groups. Remember that Huck Finn fled the Mississippi and lit out for the West because of his fear of getting civilised? I had thought civilisation, to the moderate extent of being able to travel in a military party without fear of attack, would have reached that far West by 1892.
The costumes throughout get full marks for battered moth-eaten appearance of grubby authenticity.
HISTORY?
It doesn’t detract from the film, but let’s have a lttle nitpicking. This is 1892. The Comanches were confined to reservations by 1875. They were seriously reduced by then with the population down from 5000 to 1500. The Apaches had surrendered finally in 1886, though we only see them being pushed around. By 1884, the Cheyenne were on a reservation in Montana. The Lakota had been squashed finally just two years earlier in 1890. A Comanche raid in 1892? The last massacre of white settlers was actually in 1911 in Nevada when the Shoshone killed four ranchers. Before that there is little recorded after 1889.
FOOTNOTE
Studies in Classic American Literature must still be a set text. I Googled for an image, and there are several newer and older ones than my 1966 edition. There was only one picture of that. My copy’s much cleaner, but I couldn’t be bothered to scan it. The film starts in New Mexico, where D.H. Lawrence lived for two years on Kiowa Ranch, and allegedly his ashes are mixed into the concrete of the memorial there.
Soundtrack
By Max Richter