Starring Christian Bale

Highly decorated U.S. cavalry officer Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) is given one last assignment before retirement: to escort the dying Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family from a military prison in New Mexico to their ancestral home in Montana. This is not a happy occasion for the captain, who really, really hates “Indians”, and Yellow Hawk in particular. See what happens, circa 1892, when you put a Republican in the White House? (Namely, Benjamin Harrison, a liberal reformer when it came to Native American affairs. His signature decorates a letter given to Blocker to ensure safe-ish passage.)

To put all this another way: here’s an exceptionally timely neowestern that goes out of its way to press all the right buttons, and ends up being tremendously entertaining in the process. That’s assuming viewers can stomach an intense opening scene in which a family is slaughtered, children and all, by Comanches in Darth Maul face paint. Still clutching her baby’s corpse when she’s swept up by Blocker’s detail, Rosamund Pike’s traumatized widow, Rosalie Quaid, thus provides writer-director Scott Cooper (Out of the Furnace) with one more complicated POV in a tale that seeks to understand all sides.

In that sense, Hostiles—adapted by Cooper from a decades-old treatment by Missing screenwriter Donald E. Stewart—is also unforgivably heavy-handed. The travelling party includes a master sergeant in a losing battle with “the melancholia” (Rory Cochrane) and a Buffalo soldier (Jonathan Majors) who turns out to be Blocker’s closest friend, both of whom are given scenes with a true millennial’s-eye view of 19th-century politics and society. (It’s perhaps revealing that Timothée Chalamet’s luckless Frenchie is treated with way more ambivalence.)

The real meat here is in the film’s attempts to make the fine distinction between a good soldier and a racist with the licence to kill—symbolized too obviously by a psychopathic war criminal Blocker picks up along the way (Ben Foster)—offering in turn a somewhat convenient way to beard-stroke over American genocide, past or current. (Plus, The Searchers.) Still, with Masanobu Takayanagi’s widescreen vistas and Bale’s remarkable ability to telegraph acres of conflict from behind a stoic walrus mustache, Hostiles offers all manner of incidental pleasures beyond the big liberal group hug.

Georgia Straight, January 2018