Hostiles, review: It’s Cowboys v/s Red Indians again; think again, and again

They have made hundreds of films on the Wild West, about cowboys and Red Indians, settlers from Europe and red-skinned native inhabitants of a continent that Christopher Columbus has mistakenly thought was the one he had sailed out to discover--India. He arrived in 1492, and settlements started taking shape a few decades later. The United States Bill of Rights was passed in 1791, and Hostiles is set in 1892, a hundred years later. Working backwards, we are watching a film set 125 years ago, written and directed and acted by white men, but featuring many Red Indian characters. Fiction indeed, but a very important film, even if history means only ‘dates’ to you.

The United States Army fought frequent small-scale wars with Native Americans as settlers encroached on their traditional lands. Gradually, the U.S. bought over the Native American tribal lands, forcing most tribes onto subsidised ‘reservations’ (reserves). According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), from 1789 to 1894: The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate. Cut to a bunch of ‘hostiles’, who rode the West in 1892.

A Comanche Red Indian group of raiders descends on the home of Wesley Quaid and his family, even as the home is being given finishing touches. Quaid (Scott Shepherd) is killed, as his wife and three children attempt to escape, as was the contingency plan. All three children are hit and killed by gunfire. Quaid's wife, Rosalie (Rosamund Pike), runs into the woods and hides, still holding onto the youngest child, a baby, who is dead. The Comanche search for her, but fail to find her, and leave.

In nearby Fort Berringer, New Mexico, Captain Joseph ‘Joe’ Blocker (Christian Bale) captures members of an escaped Apache family and brings them back to the fort. Later he has a drink with old friend Master Sergeant Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane). Metz appears weary from his long years of service, and has had his guns taken from him after a diagnosis of "melancholia." The men recount battles they have fought and friends they have lost. Joe does not talk much, but is a well read man, with his own ideas about justice and law.

Blocker is called to the office of Colonel Abraham Biggs (Stephen Lang), who informs him that the President has ordered that Cheyenne Red Indian war chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), who is dying from cancer, and his family, be released, so that they can return to their ancestral lands, Valley of the Bears, in Montana, where he wants to breathe his last.

Initially, Blocker refuses the Colonel's order, even when faced with a court-martial, recounting terrible things that he has personally witnessed the younger Yellow Hawk do. Blocker also exchanges words with Jeremiah Wilks (Bill Camp), a journalist with Harper’s Weekly, who is also in the room, when Wilks points out that the Captain has also done some horrible things to natives. The Colonel warns Captain Blocker, who is set to retire, that his pension will be at risk if he refuses his duty, and so Blocker reluctantly agrees.

Who got there first? Who were the native inhabitants of Western America, known to us today as the United States of America? That’s no secret. It has been public knowledge for 500 years. But for over 400 of those 500 years, tales have been spun in books, comics, in films, radio and on TV that the tribes got only what they deserved, being scalp collecting, idol-worshipping and totem- pole dancing brutes. Many films were made based on episodes and legends, but two were shaped as compendiums. One was called How the West Was Won (1962) and had three directors: John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, a purely pioneering settler account.

How the West Was Lost is a TV saga about the Indian side of American history, spares no one, including George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Told unhesitatingly from the P.O.V. of the Native American, the first two episodes pull no punches.These excerpts are from the review appeared in Variety, in January, 1995.“Members of the Iroquois Confederacy helped soldiers at Valley Forge, which is all the more startling considering the ordeals they suffered at the hands of the French, British and colonists. Washington even more startlingly saw to it that Gen. John Sullivan scorched the Indians’ land; as an elderly Indian is quoted about the coming of the colonists, “It was like a black cloud rolling over the land.”

Jackson’s called to account in the second hour, “The Trail of Tears,” in which, as president, he insisted on Indian removal to the west as the white settlers pushed their boundaries onward. Onetime owners of the land that would become Tennessee and Kentucky and parts of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, the Cherokee National Council, under the leadership of part Scot-part Cherokee John Ross, was forced to give in.

For $ 5 million, the whites bought all the Cherokee land east of the Mississippi. Docu details the sad story of their movement in 13 groups on a treacherous trail to what would become Oklahoma. No one knows for sure how many Indians died in stockades or on the trail, which was bloody from the often shoeless trekkers; the estimate’s about 4,000.”

A third reference is a must, and that is a film titled Soldier Blue (1970), directed by Ralph Nelson. A young woman and a young US soldier are joined together by fate when they are the only two survivors after their group is massacred by the Cheyenne. The Soldier is devoted to his country and duty while the woman, who has lived with the Cheyenne for two years, is scornful of him and calls him Soldier Blue derisively. As they travel through the desert with very low supplies, hiding from the Indians, they are spotted by a group of Kiowa horsemen. Under pressure from the woman, the soldier fights and seriously wounds the group's chief, but finds himself unable to kill the chief. After a cavalry charge decimates the Indian men, the soldiers enter the village and begin to rape and kill the female survivors. The soldier protests, and attempts to disrupt the massacre, to no avail. The woman attempts to lead the remaining women and children to safety, but her group is discovered and massacred.

Scott Cooper’s screen version of Donald E. Stewart penmanship shows great sensitivity and application. Expanse and incidents, scale and narrative are strictly kept within bounds. None of the ‘behemoth’ aspects of How the West Was Won are even attempted. So slick is the cutting and the dialogue that the even wafer thin back-stories could easily have been dispensed with. Many people die in the film, usually killed, but nobody dies wondering. Scott Cooper’s 2018 take on an inconvenient truth is not an apology, a travelogue or an endorsement of How the West Was Won, neither is it a bloody indictment of the most humungous and bloodiest colonisation and decimation in modern history, as is the thrust of How the West was Lost. If anything, Hostiles (what an understated title!) appears closest to Soldier Blue.

Grim, cast in granite, Christian Bale makes you blink when he breaks into self-conscious chuckles on a couple of occasions. If this is not the epitome of method of acting, what is? You needed a faintly erotic Madonna for the role, and you have her in Rosamund Pike. As a Chief who has seen the world and is now dying of cancer, Wes Studi remains distant. Rory Cochrane is the only character who can share memories with Bale, and the two pull it off rather well. Imagine the army resting a soldier because he has melancholia...in 1892! All of ‘one take’ scene, and you root for Scott Shepherd, against all odds. Looking the part, with an attitude to boot, Bill Camp could not be anybody but a journalist.

A few things detract. Rosalie’s escape, Cooper’s extra subtle handling of the scene where he offers two knives to the Chief, the suggestion that the Chief and his family went out alone at night and killed all the  Cheyenne, the complex layers in Joe’s character, the mushy, predictable end... and a few more. Let none of these keep you from watching an amazing, visually breath-taking film about two warring sides that only lets a couple of characters get into outbursts yet takes no sides. It does not need to. We know where the heart of the writer and director lie. How often do we get to see an American film that has as its prologue quote, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” --British novelist 

Rating: *** ½

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M5cj4UmscE

Coming up: Black Panther, The Shape of Water