Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal (Original articles contains a clip from the film.)
image from film from
As the Indian Wars wind down, a battle-hardened soldier played by Christian Bale escorts a dying Cheyenne chief to his ancestral lands.
The beginning of “Hostiles” is dark in its external aspect and darker still as a spiritual landscape. The time is 1892, when the Indian wars have started to wind down, and the place is a U.S. Cavalry fort in New Mexico, where scores of American Indian prisoners languish in cages. If that’s not appalling enough, two soldiers reminisce at length about “the good days” of the conflict, when savagery was a way of life and one of the men, Capt. Joe Blocker—a remarkable portrayal by Christian Bale —may have taken more scalps than any of his enemies did. Scott Cooper’s fourth feature, which goes into national distribution next week, is most powerfully about what violence does to the soul: Joe is almost dead to the world, and to himself. Not quite, though. This harshly beautiful film is equally about his regeneration during the course of a journey that amounts to a parable of humanity trying to climb out of the pit of endless slaughter and retribution.
What precipitates the trip is a goodwill gesture from Washington. One of the prisoners, a Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hawk ( Wes Studi, superb as always), is terminally ill with cancer, and President Benjamin Harrison wants him and his family escorted back to their ancestral lands in Montana before the old man dies. When Joe is chosen to lead the escort party, he refuses at first; far from dancing with wolves, the veteran Indian fighter would be riding with mortal enemies. But Joe is a soldier who has always obeyed orders to kill, so he comes around to obeying this one too, especially since he’s about to retire and his pension is on the line.
“Hostiles” expands its emotional horizons when the escort party crosses paths with Rosalie Quaid, a woman who’s been driven to the brink of madness by an Indian attack on her family; she’s played by Rosamund Pike, who finally has a role worthy of her gifts. (Physical beauty can be limiting for movie actresses.) Mr. Cooper’s screenplay, which he adapted from a manuscript by Donald E. Stewart, is nothing if not ambitious, with echoes of classic westerns including “The Searchers”—most specifically in an inspired variation on a single shot at the end.
The pace is deliberate, though it’s punctuated by shocking spasms of violence, and the radiant cinematography, by Masanobu Takayanagi, does full justice to magnificent vistas along the way. (I can say that because I saw the film as it was meant to be seen at the Telluride Film Festival last fall. When I revisited it last weekend at an AMC multiplex in Santa Monica, the projection was so disgracefully dim that you might have thought the theater hadn’t paid its electricity bill. Poor projection is one more reason why increasing numbers of people are staying home and watching movies on their brilliant flat-panel TVs—even movies like this one that beg to be seen on big screens.)
The screenplay sometimes lapses into sermonizing, whether earnest (“Our treatment of the Native Americans cannot be forgiven,” a soldier tells one of the escort party’s Cheyenne charges) or sardonic (“Before long we’ll be giving them their land back,” says Ben Foster’s murderous Sgt. Charles Wills,” a prisoner himself being escorted back to civilization and the gallows). But the sermons are mercifully few and far between, and they aren’t needed in any case, for the dehumanizing rage on both sides of the racial divide is dramatized powerfully, and transmuted movingly, as the mostly white Americans—one soldier is black—and the American Indians make their way north along the Continental Divide.
Starting with a vision of the American West as a land ruled by brute force, “Hostiles” holds out the possibility of healing—of the aggrieved coming to see that their enemies have souls and consciences, just as they do; of unthinkable alliances being forged, if only temporarily, for the common good. (Distinctions are drawn between the Cheyenne, who have certainly done their share of killing, and other tribes that cling more fiercely to savage ways; Yellow Hawk says the Comanches are “not of sound mind.”) It’s played out fully on the taut face of Joe Blocker, a man who confronts the brute he’s become, only to discover that his insides haven’t died after all.
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