Hos­tiles

There’s seri­ous, there’s high­ly seri­ous, there’s I’m scared to be in the same room as that guy over there pick­ing a fight with a vend­ing machine, there’s unmar­ried tax offi­cer, and then there’s Chris­t­ian Bale in Scott Cooper’s Hos­tiles. If noth­ing else, you can’t help but admire the fact that Bale whol­ly inhab­its each role he accepts, phys­i­cal­ly rel­ish­ing the roman­tic con­cept of movie act­ing as a type of psy­cho­log­i­cal home away from home.

He is an actor for whom there must be motion in still­ness, where he has to make the view­er aware that his mind is skip­ping over and that thoughts are being processed. And he’s reached that point where he’s not think­ing how he should act, or what his next line is, or how long that pause should be, but he’s leached the actu­al thought pat­terns of the fic­tion­al form he inhabits.

Watch­ing him work is at once awe-inspir­ing and infu­ri­at­ing, as he strives for a real­ness that is almost too real. There’s a poet­ic banal­i­ty that’s anath­e­ma to Bale’s style, one which he did man­age to cap­ture as a lovelorn com­e­dy writer Rick in Ter­rence Malick’s majes­tic Knight of Cups.

In Hos­tiles, he’s on the screen for bare­ly five min­utes before his pati­na of cool is shat­tered and he’s chew­ing out a col­league while inter­rupt­ing him­self to demand the tyrant wipe that smile off his faces. As Cap­tain Joseph Block­er, cav­al­ry man for the US army and state-sanc­tioned slaugh­ter­er of Native Amer­i­cans, he’s seen some dark shit that no pince-nez-wear­ing quill-push­er could ever hope to fath­om. Hav­ing been ordered by Uncle Sam to escort a small band of hand­i­ly benign Cheyenne back to their sacred Mon­tana home­stead, he exits the bunkhouse to let out a silent scream dur­ing the mag­ic hour.

While the immac­u­late­ly coif­fured bureau­cra­cy might not com­pre­hend the grav­i­ty of their humil­i­at­ing demand, Ros­alie Quaid (Rosamund Pike) sure­ly does. The film opens as she’s home school­ing her beloved brood on the sub­ject of por­ten­tous adverbs, and with­in a flash, a hoard of Comanche war­riors mosey on up with mur­der colour­ing their dead eyes. Patri­arch scalped and daugh­ters slot­ted, Ros­alie quick-steps it to the near­by brush where she man­ages to evade her poten­tial killers. But she doesn’t man­age to evade the crip­pling emo­tion­al tur­moil that comes from wit­ness­ing your entire fam­i­ly dis­patched on the plain. Bale’s Block­er picks up the mad-eyed Ros­alie and she joins his small wreck­ing crew, and from thence the jour­ney prop­er begins.

This hand­some, dead­en­ing­ly earnest, ​’90s-style oater shoots for (and hits) the tar­get of galaxy-top­pling high seri­ous­ness as it slow­ly unfurls its tale of the long, hard road to civic com­pas­sion. Though Block­er is a man who has admin­is­tered his fair share of killing, it takes a close-quar­ters road trip to learn that, while some of the Natives may be hos­tile, there are oth­ers who are not hos­tile. In fact, they’re quite the opposite.

Coop­er pep­pers lengthy dia­logue sequences with sharp, vio­lent inter­ludes in which death is framed as sud­den and undra­mat­ic. Pike is decent as a plucky female foil, but there’s nev­er any doubt that this is first and fore­most the Chris­t­ian Bale Agony Hour, and he’s con­sis­tent­ly favoured in terms of plot, screen time and char­ac­ter detail. There’s prob­a­bly more footage of his pal­pi­tat­ing cheek mus­cles than there is of the female lead. Just as the mae­stro him­self per­forms in a man­ner which light­ly per­verts a sense of real­ism, the film itself draws on clas­sic Hol­ly­wood tra­di­tion while smug­gling a con­tem­po­rary man­ta preach­ing peace, love and under­stand­ing. It’s prob­a­bly more an ele­giac dra­ma in the vein of Dances with Wolves than it is a dis­tant rel­a­tive of John Ford’s The Searchers.

Loop­ing back to Ter­rence Mal­ick, it’s worth adding that the great young actor Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met has a role in Hos­tiles, though it’s not dis­sim­i­lar to that of Jared Leto’s in The Thin Red Line. Eep!