Tallahatchie, Onondaga, Wononscopomuc, Monongahela, Appalachia. A-ho! We Americans love the romance of our Native American names, strewn across this great nation like eagle feathers on bridges, counties, lakes, rivers, and mountain ranges. What would America be without summer camps named Camp Ton-A-Wandah and Camp Tamaqua? Apple pie-American blond cheerleaders with a touch of Native ancestry take pride in the high cheekbones their Lakota Sioux or Chickasaw great-grandmothers blessed their lineages with. Of course, all of the above aspects of American culture have currently been declared “racist,” but that’s an entirely different article.
Warriors Escorting Warriors
It’s 1892. Military prisons are stuffed with native families. Cavalry officer Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale) is about to retire but is forced to escort Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family from New Mexico back to his birthplace in Montana. Yellow Hawk is dying of cancer.
Blocker’s fought natives for decades, hates them with a vengeance. New Mexico to Montana is a heck of a trek, and he despises the thought of it. He’d prefer a court-martial, but his orders come directly from the president, meaning that if Blocker disobeys—no pension.
After a brief soul-search, Blocker resigns himself to his fate and musters a small troop of soldiers he’s fought with before and trusts. He certainly doesn’t trust the Cheyenne family he’s now responsible for.
Settlers Had It Tough
On the way, they come across a Comanche-ravaged homestead, with a lone frontierswoman, Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), swaying between catatonia and hysteria amid the cinders: three dead children and a kidney-shot dead husband.
The long journey to Montana is interspersed with more hostile Comanche, hostile frontiersmen, abduction, assault, mutinous musings, despair, suicide, hangings, and various other forms of frontier mayhem.
But as time passes, Capt. Blocker and Chief Yellow Hawk, sharing the common cause of survival and doing battle together, eventually reach that place that men who’ve been through a war together reach—rendering them, if not exactly brothers, then well-respected brothers-in-arms. And a stoic attraction between stoic frontierswoman and stoic Army captain stoically burgeons.
Racism in 1892
America’s had Caucasian–Native American racism since day one. “Hostiles” is a 2017 neo-Western about 1892, depicting combinations and permutations of the circumstances of who’s a racist, and why, and how it’s possible to be racism-ridden and still be a fundamentally decent person.
Among them is a master sergeant (Rory Cochrane) riddled with PTSD and regret from too much killing of natives (he refers to it as “The Melancholia”) and staggering under the weight of his karmic load.
A further permutation: While Blocker’s a racist, he’s got a moral compass. Halfway through “Hostiles,” Blocker’s crew is further burdened with yet another escortee—a sociopathic war criminal and prisoner charged with savaging a Native American woman (Ben Foster playing his stock-in-trade, oily, guilt-tripping psycho).
Compelling
The action is compelling, and the John Fordian Western landscapes are likewise compelling. Rosamund Pike’s anguished utterances are novel, disturbing, and utterly compelling, and Bale’s veritable come-to-life classic tintype photo of an emotionally battened, gaunt-faced, haunted-eyed, walrus-mustachioed Civil War soldier is thoroughly compelling.
Secondly, the Comanches are designated as pure evil. That’s a bit facile. While indeed a fiery warrior tribe, the Comanches worshiped Great Spirit, Earth Mother, the brothers of sky and water, the four-legged’s, the two-legged’s, and the creepy-crawlies the same as the rest of their tribal cousins; we needed to see what settler actions sparked their ire.
But all in all, the message is that we'd all do well to cultivate our tolerance and compassion. Life’s too short for hatred, hostility, and death. Death by cancer. In fact, prolonged hostility causes cancer. “Hostiles” instructs us to release our hostility.
