Scott Cooper’s western is handsomely shot and honestly grim, and Rosamund Pike is remarkable in it. But it is a story about a soldier and a Cheyenne chief in which only one of them is written as a person, and the ride repeats itself long before it is over.
Scott Cooper’s western opens with a raid and does not stop grieving for the next two hours. A Comanche war party rides down on a homestead in New Mexico, and Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike) runs into the scrub with her dead baby in her arms. Some miles away Captain Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale), a cavalry officer who has spent his career killing Cheyenne, is ordered to escort the dying Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family home to Montana. He refuses. He is told what the refusal will cost him, and he goes. Hostiles is a film about that ride, and it is serious, handsome and about half as good as it means to be.
The land is the best thing in it. Masanobu Takayanagi shoots in wide frames that keep the column small and the country enormous: a line of riders threaded through pines, a river crossing in flat grey light, the fort a smudge of timber on a plain. Donald Graham Burt’s forts are raw board and whitewash, and Jenny Eagan’s uniforms have been worn until most of the blue has gone out of them. Max Richter’s score is mostly low strings held under the wind, and he has the sense to stop altogether when the shooting starts. When Tom Cross cuts an ambush it is quick, close and without ceremony; men fall off horses and stay fallen.
Bale plays Blocker as a man who has locked everything away and thrown out the key. He speaks Cheyenne, keeps his hat on and his jaw set, and lets us see the hatred only in how carefully he does not look at Yellow Hawk. It is disciplined work and it is also, for long stretches, the same shot of the same face. Rory Cochrane’s Master Sergeant Metz, who has done the same killing and cannot lock it away, gives the film its most honest account of what the job costs. Jesse Plemons and Timothée Chalamet fill out the column as a keen lieutenant and a frightened private, and Ben Foster joins it in chains as Philip Wills, a soldier bound for the gallows for crimes not so different from the captain’s own.
Pike is the reason to see it. The morning after the raid she is found in the burned house still holding her children and insisting they are asleep, and when the soldiers finally dig the graves she will not let anyone else lower the baby in. We were not prepared for it. It undid us in a way the rest of the film never manages again, and it did so because Pike plays it as a practical woman trying to do one last practical thing. Her Rosalee spends the journey putting herself back together a piece at a time, and the film is at its best whenever the camera remembers she is there.
The trouble is Yellow Hawk. Studi has a face that can carry a scene without a word, and Cooper’s script gives him little else. The chief is sick, dignified and wise, and he stays sick, dignified and wise; his son Black Hawk (Adam Beach) and the rest of the family get even less. A film about a soldier learning to see his enemy as a man needs the enemy to be one on screen, and the script never gives him the chance. Blocker changes over the miles. Yellow Hawk waits for him to.
The ride itself settles into a pattern: they travel, they are attacked, they bury someone, Blocker stares at the horizon, they travel. Cross cuts each leg in the same shape, and well before the halfway mark we could feel the next stretch coming. Peter Mullan turns up at a fort on the way as Lieutenant Colonel Ross McCowan for one warm dinner scene, and we were sorry to leave the table. Cooper writes better in rooms than on trails, and the film has a great many trails.
The western has done this before and done it better. The Searchers let its hatred sit unresolved; Ulzana’s Raid let the enemy be as clever as the cavalry. Hostiles wants the reconciliation and has only done the work on one side of it. Worth an evening for Pike, for Takayanagi’s frames and for that dinner, if you are in the mood for 134 minutes that rarely raise their voice. It carries a 15 certificate for violence that is brief and ugly, and that is the right way for it to be.
