Hostiles (2017)

Scott Cooper's Hostiles arrives with the solemn bearing of a film that knows it has something to say, and it says it at length. A cavalry captain named Blocker, played by Christian Bale with a face like a closed fist, is ordered to escort a dying Cheyenne chief across Montana in 1892. The arrangement is meant to be intolerable. It becomes a slow, grudging education in shared humanity, delivered across two hours of mud, rain, and gunfire. The photography is handsome. The message is not subtle.

Where the film earns its cultural credit is in its treatment of its Indigenous characters. Wes Studi, Adam Beach, Q'orianka Kilcher and Tanaya Beatty are given real roles, not scenery, and the production consulted closely enough on language and custom that the National Congress of American Indians offered public praise. The frontier myth takes a beating here: the cavalry is frequently monstrous, the dispossession is shown plainly, and the chief is a man rather than a symbol. This is a western that has read the last forty years of scholarship and wants us to know it. One TIFF programmer found the whole enterprise racist and resigned in protest, which suggests the film's positioning satisfies no one entirely, a reliable sign of ambition.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. There is no interest in sexuality, class, environment, or the body as a political site. Rosamund Pike's widow survives and endures, which is something, but the camera studies her grief instead of her agency. The moral arrives through drama and the occasional thud of a speech, and critics who found the sermonizing heavy-handed were not imagining it. What remains is a well-made, well-intentioned, slightly exhausting piece of moral accounting, impeccably photographed and convinced of its own importance.