It took me a while to get ahold of the narrative tone of The Hostiles, because, when it opens on a white family living alone on the frontier in 1892, I saw trespassers-not good honest people. And when the landowners ride up to ask you what you're doing on their land, and you answer the door with a gun in your hand, well, you can't really expect them to be very neighborly.
But then it's made clear that these aren't the "good" Indians, these are the kind who kill children. Director Scott Cooper wants you to think there are two kinds of Indians; the savage, bloodthirsty ones that haunt your nightmares, and the stoic, noble ones, who just want to be left alone. But that's nonsense-invented so his movie can have traditional Western movie bad guys while still ostensibly honoring Native people.
After its massacre opening, we meet aging Army captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale). We're supposed to side with this invader; some of his friends died while they were invading, and now he hates all of the defenders of their land because they dared to shoot back. (How uncivilized!) He is ordered to escort once-venerable war chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) back to his traditional burial grounds in Montana. Yellow Hawk is dying of cancer, and his children (Adam Beach, Q'orianka Kilcher and Tanaya Beatty) have come to join him on his long last journey home.
Blocker assembles his team of soldiers for the escort, and it's not hard to guess that each of them will die before they're done, though it might surprise you how tearful and drawn out each death scene will be.
Jonathan Majors is the wing-man Bale will have to say goodbye to; Rory Cochrane is the tearful, clinically depressed soldier who manages to apologize to a clearly befuddled Yellow Hawk for all white people everywhere and for everything they've ever done to the Indians. (Cooper clearly thinks this is a powerful and touching scene; I can almost hear my Native friends snicker as they watch it.)
Along the way, the company picks up Rosalie, the only survivor of that opening scene massacre, and she manages to function both as the woman Blocker must sacrificially protect from the mad brown horde, and the flattest, least energetic love interest possibly in the whole history of cinema. By the final, stupid scene, you really hope these two don't manage to get together; they might die from boredom trying to court each other.
I think Bale is a talented actor and really respect the work he does for David O. Russell, but he never manages to forge a believable character here. From beginning to end, he looks like he's doing his best impression of Sam Elliott.
Now, if you're going to pick a cowboy actor to emulate, Elliott's a pretty good choice, but acting and doing impressions aren't the same thing. Casting Studi (Cherokee), Beach (Salteaux) and Kilcher (Quechua-Huachipaeri) as family looks ridiculous; they look as much like each other as Joe Pesci, Brendan Gleeson and Daniel Bruhl (all white people, after all.) It might help if they had something to do in the movie besides sit around and "look Native," but only Studi has more than five lines, and his aren't very interesting.
Above all else, Hostiles is slow. It's not slow in the sense that there are long stretches of nothing happening; if anything, it could use a few stretches like that, to give it some levity and us a chance to breathe. It's that each heavy emotional scene is drawn out, draaaaawn out and then drawn out some more. Cooper directs like every scene in the movie is the most important scene in the movie.
Over and over, the music swells, the camera slowly zooms on the actor's face, and some truth of utmost importance is uttered. In. Every. Scene. And frankly, there are a lot of really good scenes. You can see why the dailies produced Oscar buzz. But when they're just piled one on top of another like they are here, they amount to an almost unwatchable movie.
It's not just that Cooper mistakes darkness for seriousness, but that he mistakes seriousness for drama.
Director: Scott Cooper
Genre(s): Adventure, Drama, Western
Rating: R
Runtime: 134 min
Will Krishchke and his wife work with InterVarsity in Durango, Colorado, where his wife directs Native Ministries for InterVarsity.
