BEFORE: It's been a difficult week, to say the least, in terms of subject matter. I've taken on rich kids committing crimes, homelessness, slavery and the Iran-Contra affair. So what the heck, why not take on the complicated history of the Old West with regards to Native Americans? Might as well. But this sets me on the road toward my Summer Rock Concert series, so there is lighter fare ahead, just give me another 10 days or so to get there.
Jesse Plemons carries over from "American Made". Let's think of this films joining the two before it to form my version of Elvis Presley's "American Trilogy", OK? And hey, three posters in a row with flag designs!
THE PLOT: In 1892, a legendary Army captain reluctantly agrees to escort a Cheyenne chief and his family through dangerous territory.
AFTER: The tagline on the poster says it all - "We Are All...Hostiles". Westerns used to to be very simplistic movies, you knew who to root for, the guy in the white hat over the guy in the black hat. Which is stupid, because if good vs. evil were that simple then the evil guy would just buy a white hat so everyone would think he was good and noble. Or you rooted for the "cowboy" over the Indian, which is also stupid because neither of those terms are correct, not anymore, and I don't think that technically "cowboys", meaning ranchers, were the ones who fought the Native Americans, it was probably more like Army soldiers trying to protect the settlers. Right? But why confuse the U.S. history we see in the movies with little things like facts?
Well, at some point there was a shift, or a pivot, toward more modern Westerns, and the Native Americans stopped being the bad guys - maybe it was around the time of "Dances With Wolves", but some of the other Westerns of the 1970's seemed to show the shift as well - the villains in "The Outlaw Josey Wales" were former Union soldiers, after all. The U.S. government, represented by its soldiers, made a much better villain, anyway - that was true in the time of Watergate/Vietnam, and it's still playing out today. Rooting for the soldiers just because they're the ones in uniform reminds me about Jerry Seinfeld's routine about baseball - the players are constantly being traded and changing teams, so the only constant when you're cheering for your team is the clothing. You're basically rooting for laundry.
"Hostiles" features savage people on both sides, some of the Native Americans (Comanches) attack homesteaders, collecting scalps and shooting children. While the U.S. soldiers, on the other hand, are professional killers. Is there really that much of a difference? But of course the majority of Americans back then didn't see things that way, it was more clear cut - soldiers good, Indians bad. The set-up here is that one of the veteran soldiers, Capt. Blocker, is tasked with taking one of the more prominent Cheyenne war chiefs back to his tribal land in Montana. He assembles a team of both grizzled veterans and green rookies, and they set out to cross the country. Blocker doesn't really want the assignment, because of his history with chief Yellow Hawk, but he's threatened with the loss of his military pension if he doesn't comply.
On the journey from New Mexico up to Montana, the group encounters Rosalee Quaid, the settler woman who had her husband and daughters killed by Comanches at the start of the film. She's filled with grief, and doesn't act rationally for a long while, but this is understandable. She joins the group headed north after burying her family, but sharing the journey with a number of Native Americans doesn't seem like her first choice at that point in time.
When they reach Fort Winslow in Colorado, there's one character that stands out, she's the wife of the commander at Fort Winslow, and she "just hates" what the government has done to the Indian people, taken their land and forced them to move many miles away to reservations. It seems unusual only because it's so improbable that someone back then would be so "woke". While at Fort Winslow, the group is given another assignment, to bring a former sergeant who killed a family with an ax back to his post, where he'll be court-martialed and hanged. (This seems like a NITPICK POINT, why not just do that at Fort Winslow?) But then his presence couldn't shake up the group, and be another thing that's probably going to go wrong along the way.
The fur traders and homesteaders that the group later encounter don't fare any better, the traders kidnap the women from the party, presumably for raping or killing or both, and so the party has to track them down and kill 'em all. And then when they finally reach Montana, a man claiming to be the owner of the tribal land accuses them all of trespassing, and won't even look at the Presidential order signed by President Harrison. Another dispute that devolves into gun violence quite rapidly, but does anything go right at any point in this trip?
This highlights a number of points, the first one that comes to mind is how difficult it was back then to get news or information delivered across the country - if the President made a decree that allowed Native Americans to return to their lands for burial, it could be months before word got out to all of the homesteaders, so how were they supposed to know to allow these burials to take place, even if they were willing to comply with the new law? Similarly, you could send a team of soldiers out on a mission and it could be weeks or months before they checked in, because there simply was no way to get a quick message back to Fort Whatever. Patrols and missions probably went out on the frontier all the time and simply did not come back or send word, for a variety of reasons caused by the many dangers out in the field.
But I'm also wondering if this film was intended to serve as a metaphor for something, beyond the futility of trying to get anything done in the Western territories, where everything could kill you. Does this speak to the futility of government in general, with the fur traders representing Big Business, and the homesteaders representing the clueless American public? Are we forced to confront that our team is just as guilty than the other team when it comes to killing people? Some of the soldiers go through various crises of conscience, over the killing they've done, but they still remain killers to the end. Perhaps it's just that in an insane world, it makes no sense to be sane, but it does make sense to recognize one's own insanity, as evidenced by the futility of one's actions?
In the end, the few survivors of this pointless endeavor take the train back to Chicago - wait, there was a TRAIN that went to Montana? For God's sake, why didn't they all just take the train there in the first place? That could have saved everybody a lot of time, including me.
I also had some trouble telling the actors here apart, which is unusual for me. But I also had trouble the other night in "Birth of a Nation" because people really shouldn't cast Mark Boone Jr. and Tom Proctor in the same film - they just look too much alike, plus they had similar beards in that film. Here when I first saw Peter Mullan, I thought it was Stephen Lang's character again, but that made no sense because they left him behind in New Mexico, so he couldn't also be at their stop in Colorado.
So I checked the cast list and figured that the guy in Colorado had to be played by Scott Wilson, but nope, Scott Wilson played the guy they meet in Montana. So, to be straight, Peter Mullan played Lt. Col McCowan, the husband of the woke woman at the fort, and he was also recently seen in Season 2 of Westworld, in the prominent role of James Delos. I saw Scott Wilson earlier this year in "Junebug", but he also has a big role on "The Walking Dead" (which I don't watch) and also played casino owner Sam Braun on "CSI", which I did watch - and he had a key role in the 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby".
Also starring Christian Bale (last seen in "Shaft"), Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Pride & Prejudice"), Wes Studi (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Black Mass"), Adam Beach (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Stephen Lang (last heard in "The Dinner"), Peter Mullan (last seen in "War Horse"), Scott Wilson (last seen in "Junebug"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "The Revenant"), Jonathan Majors, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Truth"), Q'orianka Kilcher (last seen in "The New World"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Loving"), Tanaya Beatty, Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Ryan Bingham (last seen in "Crazy Heart"), Robyn Malcolm, Xavier Horsechief, Stafford Douglas, Austin Rising, Scott Anderson, Dicky Eklund Jr., Brian Duffy, Richard Bucher, Luce Rains.
RATING: 5 out of 10 shallow graves
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