Hostiles

Hostiles (2017) is a bitter, lugubrious Western that is, I'm afraid, fundamentally pointless.  The film is beautifully produced and features exquisite Western landscapes -- I recognized the "shining rocks" around Abiquiu, New Mexico, Perdenal Mountain made famous by Georgia O'Keefe and the Rio Chama valley near Ghost Ranch.  The movie consists of whispered interludes, most of them of them similar to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" -- "the horror! the horror!" -- interspersed with increasingly futile gun battles.  It's an impressive movie but dreary -- for some reason, the film maker, Scott Cooper, wanted to make a Western that is, more or less, realistic but that denies to its viewers most of the pleasures of the genre.  The film's oddly ascetic aspect directly contrasts with its robust use of Western conventions -- the plot is derivative of a hundred cowboy pictures:  a ferocious gunman and killer is assigned the task of delivering non-combatants to a place on the other side of 500 miles of mountains and desert, all of which are infested by bad guys.  One of the non-combatants is a woman half-crazed as an Indian attack that has resulted in the murder of her family.  The other non-combatants are a group of hapless Cheyenne Indians being repatriated to their homeland somewhere in Montana.  (This repatriation is at the behest of the President and this plot point seems a bit problematic.)  As will be familiar to fans of the Western genre, one of the non-combatants (for half the movie) is a bad man who once rode with the hero and to whom the hero owes his life -- this outlaw has to be taken to face trial for some sort of atrocity (killings of the kind that the hero himself has committed) and will almost certainly be hanged.  This situation, of course, creates a conflict of loyalty in the hero.  All of this is good stuff and should result in an entertaining and exciting mixture of lovely landscapes, cowboy and Indian heroics, with a moral ultimately emerging -- White and Red men share more than separates them and they must be reconciled.  The people who made Hostiles earnestly desire to fit the picture into this classic mold and the first half-hour or so makes the viewer optimistic that this will be a great film.  Unfortunately, the movie bogs down in pointless violence and all the savagery ends up entrapping the director and his characters -- after all of this vicious killing a happy ending seems impossible.  (The film is utterly humorless:  no one so much as cracks a smile.)  So the director and screenwriter, Scott Cooper, doesn't really know how to end the picture and its last 20 minutes are pretty much unacceptable.  Christian Bale is excellent as the dead-eyed Indian-hater assigned the task of escorting his old enemies back to Montana.  Much of the exposition in the film seems to have been lost on the cutting room floor -- for instance, it is hinted that Cooper was with Reno at the Little Big Horn ( a place where the dignified Cheyenne chief also fought).  But nothing is really made of this coincidence -- an oddity since the film ostensibly ends in Montana near where the Little Big Horn battle was fought.  Rosamund Pike plays the sole survivor of the massacre committed by Comanche Indians in the film's first five minutes -- this is horrific stuff and, after the slaughter, we expect Pike's character to be so traumatized that she will be unable to recover.  But, in accord with good B-movie Western tradition, she seems to get better fairly quickly -- notwithstanding being raped in the middle of the film by some evil fur trappers -- and, by the end of the movie, grabs a Winchester and joins in the gun battle with the men.  Some of the final scenes in the movie have an impressive dignity -- there's a sequence involving the burial of the old chief that looks like it could have been staged by Eisenstein; the framing and compositions are both monumental and spectacularly beautiful.  But the film peters out in a gun-battle that comes out of nowhere.  In a classic Western, the film builds to a climactic shoot-out in which the audience knows all of the combatants and, therefore, is invested in them and feels some concern when the antagonists are killed or wounded.  In Hostiles, a bunch of heavily armed bad guys rides up out of nowhere just as the movie is about to end, make some absurd demands, and, then, everyone kills everyone else.  But we don't know who these bad guys are -- they seem to be nothing more than a plot device to end the movie with a gun battle.  Furthermore, the gun battle, which kills off almost all surviving characters, has nothing at stake.  The bad guys insensitively don't want a dead Indian buried on their property -- obviously, they are evil but is this really worth fighting over to the extent that, at least, seven or eight people die as a result of the quarrel?  One would  think that the world-weary Christian Bale would walk away from this fight. But to the contrary, Bale's character, more or less, provokes the confrontation.  This is a Western that proposes that the frontier was largely a place where murder was condoned and where everyone suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder -- it's a grim analysis of the situation and really not entirely believable; the film traffics in the nightmare theodicy of a much greater film Ulzana's Raid (and the TV show Godless):  the West is violent because God has abandoned the place to his demons..  (The film is set in 1892 and commences with a brutal Comanche raid on settlers -- but, of course, the last fighting with the Comanches ended with surrender of Chief Quanah Parker at Fort Sill in Oklahoma in 1875. By 1892, it would seem to me that much of the trip required by the story could have been accomplished by railroad.)  There's lots of good stuff in Hostiles but it doesn't add up to a successful picture.