Bone Tomahawk | Little White Lies

Bone Tom­a­hawk

18 Feb 2016 / Released: 19 Feb 2016

Man in cowboy attire atop a black horse in a mountainous landscape.
Man in cowboy attire atop a black horse in a mountainous landscape.
3

Anticipation.

The Descent with cowboys.

3

Enjoyment.

Tombstone with cannibals.

3

In Retrospect.

A precariously balanced, genre-literate oddity with something to say.

Sher­iff Kurt Rus­sell gets more than he bar­gained for in this hor­ror-west­ern hybrid from S Craig Zahler.

The hook of Bone Tom­a­hawk – Kurt Rus­sell fight­ing can­ni­bals in a fron­tier town – may sug­gest a com­i­cal romp, but nov­el­ist and first-time direc­tor S Craig Zahler’s ambi­tions are far lofti­er than low stakes revival­ist exploita­tion. It’s an unpre­dictable, off­beat pic­ture, which places the myth­i­cal notion of the West at the point of con­ver­gence between hor­ror and the western.

Zahler shows him­self to be an adroit nav­i­ga­tor of both gen­res, and Bone Tom­a­hawk is at its best when it exploits the com­mon ground between the two. The sto­ry con­cerns local sher­iff Franklin Hunt (Rus­sell) and his three com­pan­ions – lame tough guy Arthur (Patrick Wil­son), dandy killer John (Matthew Fox) and dim-wit­ted Chico­ry (Richard Jenk­ins) – on a jour­ney to res­cue a group of cap­tives from the lair of a can­ni­bal­is­tic tribe.

While the pic­ture does riff on Russell’s genre cre­den­tials, it large­ly eschews the self-con­scious brand of B‑movie nos­tal­gia one would expect from such a premise, opt­ing instead for a patient, almost somber unrav­el­ling. The pace can be leisure­ly to the point of pon­der­ous­ness, but the fre­quent digres­sions yield dark­ly com­ic grace notes, which have a deli­cious­ly macabre, Coen­sian edge. Cov­er­ing every­thing from the mechan­ics of cut­ting veins in the neck to the intri­ca­cies of read­ing in the bath, each sto­ry is rife with delib­er­ate anachro­nisms, deliv­ered with dead­pan relish.

How­ev­er, while these con­stant con­ver­sa­tion­al detours may give the film some flavour, they put it in a pre­car­i­ous com­mer­cial posi­tion; too lan­guorous for the genre crowd per­haps, and too lurid for the art house. As soon as the abduc­tion is dis­cov­ered, the locals, igno­rant of their own com­plic­i­ty in the chain of events, scram­ble to blame the Native Amer­i­cans, thus set­ting off the film’s nar­ra­tive of impe­ri­al­ist reckoning.

Each mem­ber of the search par­ty embod­ies a dis­tinct strand of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism, be it the blind moral pur­pose of Hunt or the insid­i­ous­ly impas­sive brag­gado­cio of Jack, decked in colo­nial white as he boasts of killing 116 Indi­ans. Each man is dri­ven by a sense of man­i­fest des­tiny, eager to impose his own val­ues onto a hos­tile, bar­ren land (“We’ll make sure all of this has val­ue”). They fail to see that they’re alone in their cru­sade. As Arthur says, semi-opaque­ly, when speak­ing in his sleep, Big James would shed a tear if any calves went astray.”

Both hor­ror and the west­ern deal, to vary­ing degrees, with the fear of the oth­er – typ­i­cal­ly a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the anx­i­ety of the age. Zahler’s stroke of bril­liance is in appro­pri­at­ing an antag­o­nist typ­i­cal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with hor­ror into the west­ern milieu, and using it to cri­tique the impe­ri­al­ist impuls­es of the lat­ter. The can­ni­bal brings chaos to the set­tlers’ frag­ile, decrepit order, and they are too ensconced in their own world to stem it.

It is no coin­ci­dence that the film’s key line is spo­ken by one of the only women fea­tured – This is why fron­tier life is so dif­fi­cult. Not because of the Indi­ans… but because of the idiots.” If the stu­dio era showed us how the West was won, then Bone Tom­a­hawk posits a bold argu­ment for why it was lost – to put it very blunt­ly, ram­pant male stupidity.

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