Hostiles is a great western.  According to the previews, an early reviewer declares it this generation’s Unforgiven, and perhaps it is.  The movie is deceptively simple, but there is much going on “behind the scenes,” and the film is rich in layers of meaning.  I won’t give away too much; perhaps in a few months I’ll do a more complete analysis, but for now just go see the film.

Hostiles is a classic western, and addresses the classic western themes of captivity and savagery.

At its core, Hostiles is essentially a captivity narrative.  The plot centers on the primary captivity of the aging Cheyenne Chief  Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family, who have been held prisoner for 7 years.  Yellow Hawk is now near death and has been granted his request to be returned to his native homeland to die, and his long time nemesis Capt. Joseph J. Blocker (Christian Bale) is assigned the detail.  But the movie does a marvelous job of examining all manner of captivities for many of the characters.

Capt. Blocker says in an early scene that “every time we lay our heads down out here, we’re prisoners,” and indeed, this remark proves prophetic.  Chief Yellow Hawk is a literal captive, being escorted in chains, and in turn Capt. Blocker is held captive by his duty and obligation to escort and protect his sworn enemy. Sgt. Charles Willis (Ben Foster) is literally a prisoner, and in spite of being a U.S. soldier he finds himself held in a captivity even more severe than the “savages” he’s traveling with.

Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) is held captive by the trauma she endures in the opening scene, and Capt. Blocker and his entire detail are held captive by their duty to assist her. Msgt. Thomas Metz (Rory Cochrane) is held captive by his “melancholia.”

And finally, the entire detail is held captive by the savage Comanche who threaten them throughout the film.  This captivity is central to the overall theme and connects viewers to the theme of savagery, which permeates the film.

The film destabilizes the issue of savagery almost immediately with the character of Jeremiah Wilks (Bill Camp), a Harper’s Bazaar writer who asks Capt. Blocker if it’s true that he has taken more scalps than Crazy Horse himself.  Capt. Blocker defines Chief Yellow Hawk’s savagery by his brutal treatment of foes and prisoners, but it quickly becomes apparent that the Capt. has as brutal a history as his opponent, begging the question of how savagery is defined.

Savagery is clearly demonstrated in the opening scene by the Indian attack, and when Mrs. Quaid is brought to the Army detail’s camp, she is upset by the appearance of the native prisoners - they are racially identified as “savage.” But shortly thereafter, the wife reaches out to her, and her status as a savage is destabilized through her charitable action.

In the same vein, when the entire party is threatened by the Comanche, the Cheyenne Chief Yellow Hawk tells Capt Blocker that “these people are rattlesnake people” and are dangerous, that they will not discriminate, and will kill them all.  Yellow Hawk’s message to Capt. Blocker throughout the film is that they must work together against a common enemy.

Their Army prisoner Sgt. Charles Willis (Ben Foster) appeals to the Capt.’s sense of common enemies in a different way, pleading for mercy and arguing that his guilt is no greater than the Capt.’s or any other Army soldiers’ from that time.  His argument is that they are all guilty, essentially that they are all savages, and it is hypocritical to condemn him for crimes that are fundamentally no different from what others have committed, yet he should hang while others go free.  Capt. Blocker says only “I was doing my job,” thus falling back on his commitment and the captivity of his will and conscience to the demands of his duty, wholly sidestepping the question of his savagery.  

The definition of “savage” is destabilized by several characters across several scenes, and in fact the movie directly addresses the “Indian question” through both its plot and the dialogue of several characters.  I have seen various people on social media criticizing the film for its “liberal” bias, but I found their criticisms ill-founded.  The dialogue representing differing perspectives on how natives should be treated by the govt, by the army, and who represents the real savage are all questions that were being actively debated in the late nineteenth century, and the film does justice to its characters, subject, and its viewers by presenting fully fleshed out characters facing a complicated period of history.





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Okay, so this title is a bit grandiose and frankly a cheap titillation to get you to read my review.  I’m leery of superlatives like this anyway, but the upshot is that Forsaken is a damned fine western, and I will say it’s one of the best of the breed.  It helps that it has some fine actors, most notably Keifer Sutherland playing the son of real-life father Donald Sutherland.  This made news as the first film in which both men acted opposite one another, and their performances make me hope they do so again.  Also notable are Demi Moore in the role of Mary Ellen, and Micheal Wincott as Gentleman Dave.

The action opens with John Henry Clayton returning to his old home to a cold reception by his father Reverend Clayton.  His mother has passed away, and the Reverend doesn’t take pains to hide his opinion of his “gunman” son.  John Henry left for the Civil War with promises to return to his family, and to his love Mary Ellen, but has been gone for years, with nothing but dramatic tales of his violent exploits returning home on his behalf.  Here is already a classic western motif, the Civil War soldier who was so scarred by battle that by the war’s end he knows no other life than one of violence.

John Henry claims to have put his guns away, which is also a standard motif for the gunfighter in many films.  His father has doubts, as do we, because of course, a peaceful man does not a western movie make.

As you might expect, there is a greedy rancher named James McCurdy (played by Brian Cox) who is forcefully buying up all the nearby properties, offering reasonable (or less so) payments, and bullying and forcing sales through violence when necessary.

Early in the film, John Henry meets his antagonists in the saloon, where he has gone to get a soft drink.  This scene plays out very similarly to the classic western Shane, which features a soda-drinking hero.  As an aside, Eastwood reprises this to a smaller extent in Unforgiven with the shootist who has given up drinking.  Here he meets Gentleman Dave, played by Michael Wincott.  The other gun hands think John Henry is going to be a pushover, but Gentleman Dave recognizes John Henry for who he is, and is not distracted by his apparent nonviolence. The Gentleman Dave character seems to me to be modeled on a Doc Holliday mold, and I am eager to see what else Wincott has played, or may play in the future.  Gentleman Dave is a hired gun, and is not afraid to shoot people, but he also distinguishes himself as being a businessman rather than simply bloodthirsty.

Forsaken follows a fairly genre standard approach in which John Henry stands up for a homesteader who is being bullied in town by McCurdy’s men.  He is beaten, but refuses to become violent himself.   This nonviolence will be tested, of course, and when McCurdy’s mean stab Reverend Clayton John Henry straps his guns on again.  He carries a Colt (of course), but before he heads to the saloon to confront McCurdy and his men he also stops in a gunshop and buys a second weapon.  Forgive my geeking out here, but he buys a LeMat, which was a French-made revolver that was used by the Confederacy during the Civil War.  It’s an impressive piece, with a nine shot cylinder and a 20 gauge shotgun barrel underneath the primary barrel. The inclusion of this piece is something of a historical anomaly, as these pistols were fairly rare and by the time of this film it would’ve been a highly unlikely choice for a secondhand purchase - but I’ll give it to them just because seeing one on film delighted me.

The fight ensues, and it’s a top-shelf, bar-jumping, table flipping movie gun battle. I won’t spoil too much, except to say that before it’s all over, only McCurdy himself (barricaded upstairs) and Gentleman Dave remain.  Gentleman Dave and John Henry find themselves on the street in what is shaping up to be a classic “high noon” kind of showdown.  John Henry tells Dave that he has no fight with him, that he could just walk away. Gentleman Dave counters that he accepted a contract with McCurdy, and his reputation would be ruined if he abandoned a client.  John Henry notes that he’s down to his LeMat, which is heavy and gives Dave an unfair advantage; he asks leave to go fetch his Colt.  Dave assents, and John Henry goes inside to get it. While there he encounters McCurdy and kills him, leaving only Gentleman Dave standing.

Here’s where the film subverts the audience expectations - now that his boss is dead, Gentleman Dave is free to walk away from the fight, and he does exactly this.  I think this is a brilliant twist on the genre and elevates this film above many others who simply tick off genre staples in predictable ways.

Finally, there is Mary Ellen, played by Demi Moore.  She plays this nicely, with understated makeup - while she is still a beautiful woman, she very much looks the part of an older frontier woman; the film resists the impulse to make her too beautiful.  She is married, having tired of waiting for John Henry to return, and the couple dance with the romantic tension that remains between them throughout the film.  Theirs is a beautiful story of unrequited love.

So Forsaken may not be the best western ever, but it’s certainly one worth watching, and if you’re a fan of the genre, probably owning. Go to Amazon and buy it now!

amzn.to/2ppjxPH​

​Well, let me say that I liked this film; I thought it a proper western. I’d heard some foul reviews from friends who thought it didn’t make the cut (pardon the pun), but in the end I thought it a well-done film that satisfied all the western genre expectations and also introduced a new twist.
 
Bone Tomahawk has been widely labeled a “horror/western,” and I understand the impulse to do so; like its brethren Ravenous and Cowboys and Aliens, it does cross genre boundaries a bit, although in the end, I think the horrific aspect of a cannibalistic tribe tucked away in the mountains stays much closer to the traditional genre boundaries than either of the earlier films do.
 
To address the complaints of some of my friends, who said there was one scene in particular that lost them; yes, I know which scene you mean, and I too found it gratuitous and, more importantly, pointless.  Once Deputy Nick is taken from his cell, viewers know exactly what will become of him, and seeing the violent end to this character on center stage does little to forward the plot or even heighten tension.  I feel it would actually have been more effective to have the tortuous action occur offscreen, allowing viewers’ imaginations to fill in the blanks. However, it is also a brief scene, and I think the rest of the film is effective enough to give it a pass.
 
Back to its assets.  One thing I think the film does really well is that by setting the antagonists as a mysterious “tribe” who are shunned and feared even by the local native tribes, the film is able to cast an “Other” as the enemy without complicating our contemporary attitudes toward westward expansion and the subjugation of native tribes.  There is a small but effective scene in which a native character (played by Longmire’s  Zahn McClarnon) advises the posse not to go, saying that his tribe avoids this canyon because they’re so dangerous.  This effectively establishes that the tribe is not Indian, and heightens their otherworldy aspect.
 
Had this film been made in the 50s or 60s, it would have been easy enough to make the bad guys “Indians” and be done with it, and no one would have questioned the choice. But westerns have evolved with our national consciousness, and we no longer uncritically accept Native Americans as the natural antagonist, even in a western.  So Bone Tomahawk is able to deftly recast the Other as an unnatural tribe of flesh eaters, maintaining the dichotomy of hero and villain without creating the cognitive dissonance of imperialism or conquest that older westerns may have to a younger generation.
 
Finally, this film (unlike the Hateful Eight), reifies an old genre staple and provides something close to a happy ending – well, happy for at least a couple of characters, anyway.  I won’t spoil it further, but the film concludes on a fairly positive note, giving viewers a satisfying resolution.  The film is gritty and even brutal, to be sure, but in the end it reifies the social construct that was disrupted by the antagonists, and finally privileges the values of heroism, loyalty, and ultimately the power of love.

Over the holidays I went to the theater; I don’t often go to the real theater since the advent of Netflix and DVR, but some things are still worth seeing on the big screen, and almost anything from Quentin Tarantino is a sure bet to be a visual extravaganza.  I was not disappointed.  Okay, I didn’t hate it; I was trying to be clever in my title and get you to read this, but I do have some bones of contention (stay tuned for my forthcoming review of Bone Tomahawk).
 
To be brief: I really liked the film, BUT I don’t know if I loved it  - or liked it enough to own it on DVD/blu ray/whatever comes out next.  I don’t think I’d pay theater prices a second time, either, but that has as much to do with my middle-aged stay-homeness and the rich tapestry of the current crop of movies as with my opinion of this film.
 
The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s eighth movie, according to its introduction.  I looked it up on IMdB and counted at least ten films that were exclusively his, as opposed to his writing credits, or directing television shows or the like, so I think he’s playing with viewers here.  I think that’s fair.  It’s visually stunning, with brilliant cinematography and a great use of setting to set the stage for his story.
 
Tarantino does a solid job in the western genre, which almost pleads for a subtle combination of traditional storytelling and groundbreaking genre-bending.  Tarantino stays close to the traditional mores here, and the cast and writing is first-rate.  Because he’s Tarantino, you know it’s going to be a very graphic movie, and it does not disappoint.  In fact, his graphic depictions of violence are not even new to the genre, and not because this is his second western (Django Unchained having come out two years prior) – Sam Peckinpah was shocking viewers with gritty violence back in the 1970s, and his was more realistic.
 
It is, however, Tarantino’s unrepentant penchant for graphic – I do mean graphic – violence that finally undoes the film for me in many ways.  His violence is gratiuitous and unrealistic*, and it ends up feeling like a Technicolor yawn rather than story-motivated violence.  This is the problem: when Tarantino, who has clearly restrained himself for much of the film, finally lets himself loose, the tightly-woven story he was telling virtually disappears into a melee of Tarantino … well, being Tarantino.  He gets in his own way in telling the story, for me, and I am jarred out of the suspension of disbelief and immediately I’m not worried about a character being shot, or hanged, or disemboweled … I’m suddenly no longer in his fictive world, but am once again sitting in a theater and thinking (perhaps with shock and dismay) at how graphic this film is.
 
Spoiler Alert
 
One other thing, as long as I’m grousing.  The other point about the film that bothered me is that everyone dies, and frankly, I’m not okay with that.  I understand that there are philosophical and narrative theories that can account for this, with omniscient third-person narrators and what-not, but I can’t shake my old university fiction professor’s admonition that if a writer kills off ALL his characters, the question remains unanswered about who lived to tell the tale?  This is not a small question, and creates a lingering problem for some viewers – like myself.  I concede that it’s not an insurmountable problem, and in our post-postmodern world viewers are likely unfazed by such a narrative wrinkle.   Perhaps my problem is that I’m essentially old-fashioned, and I want to see someone – almost anyone - make it out of this chaotic mess alive.  I want a good old-fashioned (see?) hero to rise above the violence and establish the moral certainty that grit can see you through.  But Tarantino doesn’t play that game, and maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
 
 
*I’m not normally dissuaded by graphic violence, but Tarantino’s use of blood and exploding heads is cartoonish, almost Monte Python-esque.  This is almost a signature style of his, but it worked in the Kill Bill series precisely because those movies were an homage to a B-film martial arts genre in which this approach was a better fit.