Legends of Western Cinema Week || Hostiles {2017}

{The Plot}

Close to retirement, Native American-hating army captain Joseph Blocker is given one last order:  to escort a dying Cheyenne chief, Yellow Hawk, back to his home in Montana along with the rest of his family.  Early on in their journey, the troop stumbles across Rosalee Quaid, a grieving homesteader whose husband and children have just been slaughtered by Comanche raiders.

{My Thoughts}

Hostiles is a haunting, outstanding, and deeply meticulous Western.  Director Scott Cooper (who, I was delighted to realize, also starred as Heck Gilpin in my beloved Broken Trail) crafts a profoundly evocative film that conveys exactly what it's intended to convey:  namely that, as the tagline states, we are all "hostiles".

From the very beginning, the tone of the film is firmly and irrevocably set.  A woman's children are literally shot out of her hands, leaving her utterly alone, clutching corpses in shell-shocked silence on the floor of a fire-blackened cabin.  A tribal leader who has been imprisoned for years is finally released — only to make a long and arduous trek back to the land that his captors now claim as their own, with nothing better to look forward to than several more months of cancer's slow decay, followed by a (theoretically) peaceful death in his own home at the end of it all.  A man who sold his soul for his country's military is threatened with the loss of the one thing it owes him in return — the chance for an undisturbed retirement via pension — if he refuses to immerse himself in a situation tailor-made to trigger his PTSD.

It's a story predicated on sorrow.  Permeated by it.  Grounded in it.  But what saves the movie from being an unwatchable exercise in mere sadness is that this sorrow has a direction.  This narrative has a trajectory.  The thematic destination may not be reached until the last few minutes, but it is reached honestly and fully.

We know from the outset what the movie intends to do with itself — or, at least, we think we do.  And we're right, in part.  This isn't the first time we've been presented with the "overcoming prejudices" plotline, after all, and it isn't likely to be the last.  But the fact that it's an age-old and unoriginal premise doesn't mean that it's a bad one; nor does it mean that its execution in this particular iteration is doomed to be useless or gimmicky.

What sets this film apart, however, is not its handling of racial bias and reconciliation — although that handling is deft and noteworthy.  Instead, it's the long, slow, painful journey that almost every character must undertake in order to make peace with their own stained selves.  The story has some significant things to say about self-forgiveness and self-advocacy, and it says them in an extraordinarily profound way.

The presentation of Joseph and Yellow Hawk as foils to each other is particularly interesting to me on a symbolic level.  Both men are driven by their respective senses of duty, and both have deceived themselves into thinking that the execution of that duty mitigates the guilt they bear for the innocent blood on their hands.  Both must come to a place where they can simultaneously repent the sins they have committed — repent them truly, with full understanding of their magnitude — and relinquish the urge to punish themselves in consequence.

As Joseph says to Yellow Hawk at the end of their journey, "I lost many friends, and you have lost many as well."  And as Yellow Hawk replies, "They are a great loss for us both."

For them, it is enough.

Visually, this movie is breathtaking.  The cinematography is gorgeous and stirring, just as integral to the telling of the story as the script.  As the film winds down to its conclusion, I am especially struck by two specific shots.  I didn't realize it until after the fact, but these are actually mirror images of one another, reinforcing the mirrored nature of the relationship between these two men.

*SPOILERS*

Yellow Hawk stands before the Valley of the Bears, dying.  His silhouette against the landscape is sure, dignified, ageless.  We don't know whether the time is meant to be sunset or sunrise, but either one holds narrative significance.  If it's sunset, then the evening symbolizes the death of his physical body, a noble and peaceful ending.  But if it's sunrise, then the morning suggests a new life of the spirit, one that's only beginning. 

Joseph's scene, too, represents both ending and beginning.  It is clear and sunny midday in his picture, albeit disrupted by violence and death.  Where Yellow Hawk's backdrop is level and serene, Joseph's is tilted off-kilter, reinforcing the turbulence of what is happening inside him.

Bale's acting in this sequence is extraordinary from start to finish, and I think this moment is particularly stunning.  He reels around, panting, an expression of shock and disorientation rippling across his face as he looks back at Rosalee and Little Bear.  This expression could be interpreted in a number of ways, but this is what I think it means:

When Joseph killed that last attacker, he was really killing his old self — he was killing the last of his racism, the last of his bitterness, and the last of his bloodlust.  Everything about his body language before, during, and after the encounter — the intentionality, the clarity, the exhaustion, the doggedness of it — not to mention the staging and scoring of the scene itself — everything coalesces into a clear and explicit symbolism.  The person Joseph used to be has died a forceful, final death.  Now he has to decide what kind of person he is going to be moving forward.

It leaves him gasping, as if unsure of how to proceed in this new reality; as if coming up for air after decades of drowning.   That, after all, is what he's doing:  finally surfacing into an unfamiliar atmosphere as one of the burdens he's carried for ages is ripped violently off him.  The oxygen here is rarefied, painful to breathe — but it's going to be his salvation.

The visual emphasis on Joseph's turn is also, I think, a nod to the last conversation he had with Yellow Hawk before his death.  After making peace with him, Joseph took Yellow Hawk by the hand, looked him in the eye, and said:

"Don't look back, my friend.  Go in a good way.  A part of me dies with you."

And Yellow Hawk did.  He went in a good way, and he did not look back.  And, sure enough, a part of Joseph was buried along with him, buried when he killed the rancher.

But Joseph himself — despite all the loss he's already endured, despite the irreversible stains on his record, despite the unbelievable weariness of his soul — Joseph has to live.  Joseph has to continue.  Friends have left him, taken by death or taking death for themselves.  Sin has wrecked him, scarred him, mangled him.

But he's not done yet.  

He still has living to do.

And so, though Yellow Hawk didn't look back, Joseph needs to.

Joseph needs to return.

It's thematically gorgeous, not gonna lie. 

Especially when it's followed by what has got to be one of the most moving endings I've ever seen in a Western — or in any genre of film, for that matter.  As one YouTube commenter put it, "It sounds like such a Hollywood ending on paper," but the way it's acted, staged, and scored makes it something else entirely.

*STILL SPOILERS*

I wasn't sure which direction they were going to go with it, you guys.  And boy, did they drag me along, right. up. until. the very last few seconds.  

I was preparing myself for a bittersweet ending, understand.  I was ready for it.  I was psyching myself up.  I was telling myself, "Nope, he's not going to go with them; it doesn't always happen that way; and however much you might want something different, the bittersweet angle fits the tone of the movie.  It does.  So you have to accept it."

But then they did the thing.  

At the very, very, very last minute.  They Did The Thing.

Reader, it moved me.

When I tell you about the smile that split my face when Joseph reached out and grabbed that railing and stepped on board that train — when I tell you about the emotions that I experienced watching him standing there, head down, hand grasping the railing, breathing heavily before taking the step to open that door, finally giving himself permission to make a deliberate choice to be happy — well, let's just say that the more I watch it and the more I truly think about it, the closer I come to tears. 

*END OF SPOILERS*

Toward the end of the film, a soldier makes a confession to a chief.  

"Our treatment of the Natives cannot be forgiven," he admits, acknowledging his nation's guilt as rainwater pours over his face.  Then, still standing in that rain as the chief watches him wordlessly, he asks simply:  "Have mercy on us."

Have mercy on us.

That is the rallying cry at the heart of this movie.  For its entire runtime, the story sits quietly with insurmountable grief flowing out of insurmountable evil, the consequence of atrocities committed by both settlers and Natives.  And in the end, it asks us to have mercy on each other.

But this is no self-serving plea.  This does not read as an attempt to sweep political corruption under the rug.  This does not read as an attempt to do away with America's responsibility to acknowledge and make reparations for her sins.  

At its heart, this story is intimate.  It is interpersonal.  At its heart, it wrestles with the question of how individual human beings are to interact with each other in the face of mutual guilt and betrayal.  Not government body to citizen populace, but soul to soul.  How do individual Americans live with themselves and with each other, in light of their history?

In the end, the movie simply asks us to try.  In the end, it simply asks us to have mercy on each other, recognizing that no one walks this land with truly bloodless hands. 

Have you seen Hostiles?