Writer-director Scott Cooper's "Hostiles," opening Friday, is a bleak but moving excursion along the closing Western frontier. It's an ambitious film that will remind its fans of John Ford's 1955 classic "The Searchers," and its critics of Michael Cimino's bloated 1980 box-office flop "Heaven's Gate."
"Hostiles" stars one of American film's most inscrutable leading men, the Wales-born actor Christian Bale. Originally cast by Steven Spielberg as a teenager surviving the WWII Japanese occupation of the Far East in 1987's "Empire of the Sun," at 43 Bale has disappeared into a remarkable number of starring and supporting roles, including two outings as Bruce Wayne or Batman.
The new film can be likened to "The Searchers" because director Cooper, like the great Ford, gives us a Far Western frontier where savage acts became the normal standard of behavior for Native American tribes and for the US military forces dispatched to tame and/or culturally and physically annihilate them. There are marked differences, too: unlike Ford's racist/Indian-hating protagonist (scary-good John Wayne), Bale's Captain Joseph J. Blocker is reluctant to take on the assignment of escorting a few Cheyenne Indians back to their former homeland in 1892 Montana. It takes a presidential order from Benjamin Harrison, and some screaming by his commanding officer, to get Captain Blocker to saddle up for what proves to be a very violent mission.
Along the way, Blocker meets a brave woman, Rosalie Quaid (potential Oscar talk for Rosamund Pike), whose near-death encounter with a tribe who killed her husband and children has imbued her with a rather stoic philosophy. "Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I wake."
The mission is as lethal as promised, the dangers and high body-count giving the Lady and the Captain a bond in religious faith.
Rosalie Quaid: "You believe in the Lord, Joseph?"
Captain Joseph J. Blocker: "Yes, I do."
Quaid: "If I did not have faith, what would I have?"
Warning: The film's two-and-a-quarter-hour running time can go by very slowly if you're not a fan of large doses of hyperviolence. As Blocker sees it, "I've killed everything that's walked or crawled. If you do it enough, you get used to it. Understand this: when we lay our heads down here, we're all prisoners."
"Hostiles" may be a long shot for Oscar gold, but the film does present a picture of the violence at the heart of the American experience that seems both ironically and sadly apt for our own violent times. Those with a penchant for connecting the dots between the production of "realistic" depictions of the "taming of the West" and the nation's political climate at the time may appreciate that John Ford directed "The Searchers" during the middle of the Eisenhower Administration, "Heaven's Gate" preceded the Ronald Reagan years, and "Hostiles" arrives at the beginning of the second year of the reign of Donald J. Trump.
Along with Bale and Pike, "Hostiles" features Wes Studi (a Native American actor known for lending authenticity to screen stories about America's original settlers, beginning with 1996's "Dances with Wolves"), Jesse Plemons, Adam Beach, Rory Cochrane and Ben Foster.
Scene from director Scott Cooper's "Hostiles." Photo: Entertainment Studios