Intent on Hostiles

[Warning: a few spoilers, tangled in unpredictably.]

At the beginning of Hostiles, this season’s Big Western, a man is standing outside his log cabin sawing a beam, for some reason that is not clear, the real reason being, pretty patently, to establish him as a hard-working nice-settler type, innocently tending to his land and the needs of his family, thus in no way deserving of the Indian vengeance that will overtake him in about 30 seconds. Even before the howling banshees show up, though, several problems are apparent. First, that beam, straight and smooth and square as it can be, is far too obviously a standard 4 x 4 from Home Depot. Second, the cabin behind has been made of other such beams, which is fine as far as it goes, but the building is too spacious and square and too large by half to have been conjured out of the stingy wilderness by Mr. Upright Settler (Scott Shepherd as Wesley Quaid) and his wife (Rosamund Pike as Rosalee Quaid). She, we find in a moment, as the camera ducks inside, has whelped three children out here on the frontier, though with no effect whatever on Pike’s matchless figure or bearing or complexion. As the indoors comes into view, Rosalee is teaching her two girls about adverbs, bravely keeping the civilized graces alive even in the godforsaken wilds of New Mexico. We get the point instantly, but still: adverbs? You’d think she might give the girls a break just now, since, judging by their sparkling clothes and the immaculate, spacious room, they have already finished the laundry and vacuuming.

Anyway, back outside, the third problem with that stinking beam is the way Mr. Upright is sawing at it. He has constructed a couple of superlarge sawhorses from rough-hewn timber, which okay let’s grant him, though they look like possible surplus from Gilligan’s Island. But anyone who has ever sawed a board will see instantly — instantly, I tell you — that Wesley is doing it all wrong. He has placed the end he is working on much too far out from the stand, so that it swings back and forth like an unsheeted boom, and will surely bind the blade of his saw, which in a spirit of forbearance I will not point out is the wrong kind of saw for this particular job. (It’s the frontier, after all, and this may be the only saw he has.) But if this is the guy who built the building behind him, he must have started in 1792, not 1892, which a subtitle gives as the time of the action. 

I quibble, you say; I am being madly pedantic and censorious. The Western is a form of romance, after all, and must be allowed its conventions and its liberties. Fair enough, up to a point. I spent a year in the Philippines in 1988-89, and came away with a vivid awareness that poor people in poor countries have very bad teeth. Since then I have trouble watching not just Westerns, but all kinds of historical fiction. The leading man or lady smiles, and I’m half done already, wakened right out of the dream by those straight and gleaming choppers. While the guy in the next seat is getting into the characters, all I can see is a well-off actor who wore a retainer in his youth and now has a dental plan that recently paid for a great whitening job. I read somewhere that there is a battle scene in Spartacus, the old Kirk Douglas sword-and-sandals epic that enraptured me when I was ten, wherein, for just the ghost of a frame or two, a city bus can be glimpsed quietly passing behind the ranks of what are supposed to be Roman legions. For me, state-of-the-dental-art teeth have much the same effect: sudden unpleasant jolting awake: de-suspension of the previously suspended disbelief.

Also, and this may be related somehow, the bad guys in futuristic scifi universes all speak with British accents, which makes no particular sense when you think about it.

So, okay, these are my problems, not the movies’. Still, in a Western or any other genre, it’s fair to require a certain basic physical plausibility, because that’s where everything else starts. If you can’t see and touch and smell your way into the characters’ world, you can’t get there at all. Later on in the movie, It’s hard to get into Christian Bale / Joseph Blocker’s grinding inner torment, though it is powerfully acted in most ways, if you are wondering why his uniform looks so spiffy and well ironed after days in the saddle. It’s hard to share Rosalee’s continuing crushing grief for her family, dispatched before the credits in that early raid, when you can’t tell where she got the dress she wears during the last third of the film, after a great deal was made of the origins of the two dresses before that.

Or take fire, always one of Hollywood’s great heresies from physical reality. Anyone who has camped even a little, or just burned a few leaves in October, knows something about the difficulties of fire: how reluctant it can be, how smoky, how unpredictable, how much in need of constant tending. In the movies, though, branches pulled out of a blazing bonfire are always cool on the end you have grabbed, while the other end blazes with quenchless energy, exactly like what it really is, a propane torch. (If you don’t understand the fallacy here, just try it sometime; you will be smarter afterwards than you were before.) Hostiles is not about to upset so distinguished a tradition. In almost every night scene, fires are roaring merrily away, usually to a height of four feet or so. There are two or three of them, even when one would clearly do. They have been built in big rock rings that would have cost the characters an hour’s work, after a long day’s ride. Fuel is always plentiful, even when we have seen nothing in the background, all day long, but treeless New Mexico desert. The fires do not flicker and flare, much less sputter or fume, but light up the characters’ faces with a steady, even, beautifying light, which of course is their real reason for being there. Someone has clearly asked, with eager intensity, what will give us a good shot here? No one has asked, do they really need a fire, and why would they go to the trouble, and would the fire they built really look like this? I missed too much of the dialogue in such scenes because I was trying to figure out where the propane cans were hidden.

Incidentally, the same addiction to unsound pyromancy haunts The Revenant, 2015’s multi-Oscar juggernaut, a Western in the same noir spirit as this one. In my lonely, unseconded opinion, mendacious flaming turns several particular scenes to hash and undermines overall credibility. Superior, more skeptical attention to physical detail, as I keep telling my therapist, is a big part of what makes 1971’s Man in the Wilderness, the lither and leaner Ur-film of The Revenant, a far better picture.

But what really got to me, in Hostiles, was the gear the characters always have ready to hand, no matter how far they have traveled from the last Cabela’s or Walmart. Again, this is an entirely traditional sin. In all the old sodbusters, the cowboys ride all day on horses encumbered with nothing but a slim bedroll just aft the saddle, then camp at night with all the accoutrements you would expect in a feature article in Trailer Life. Ditto in this case. The movie follows the characters’ horseback odyssey from New Mexico, up through Colorado to Montana (Wyoming seems to have missed its 8 AM call) as, in a spirit of cultural repentance and rapprochement, a contingent of white cavalry escort back to his homeland a Wise Old Chieftain, Yellow Hawk, like Bale / Blocker much haunted by the memories of past bloodshed but now relaxing into a serene old age of family affection and cancer. In depressingly strict adherence to the iron laws of the genre, the Chief invariably speaks as if he were the first draft of a freshman essay. “If you hunt for a rattlesnake, you may find him. But it can still happen that he strikes before you see him.” Etcetera, interminably. But never mind that, I am getting off track here. My point is that, early on, when Blocker’s party of soldiers and Indian captives meets up with Rosalee Quaid, with her three dead kids and husband, what do they have? Shovels, of course, exactly four of them. What else would you pack on an epic horseback journey, after all, but four shovels — twelve pounds each, easy — not otherwise needed? It would be unfeeling not to have them, ungentlemanly. If Pike’s character had chosen inurnment, the cavalry would have been carrying a portable crematorium. If one of her brood had been wounded not killed, they would be toting a M*A*S*H unit.

Elsewhere in the movie, we see that the characters have slickers, for when it rains. They have tin plates and big tin cups, with a coffeepot and a big sack of coffee lurking somewhere. They have a cast-iron kettle that must weigh thirty pounds. They have roomy high-ceilinged tents, with tentpoles and big planks that have to be rolled up in the canvas whenever camp is struck. They have an ammunition box the size of a footlocker, and a good thing, too, as there is the usual expenditure of ammo in scene after scene, via both carbines and six-shooters, a mere style choice apparently, as the director clearly believes the two weapons to have identical range and accuracy. They have razors somewhere, as no one ever develops stubble, and no doubt little shower caddies, with soap and shampoo, like the ones my wife and I carry when we go RVing, so that everyone stays fresh and photogenic. (The only bad hair anywhere is on Bale’s moustache.) Somewhere they must have feed and off-duty tack for the horses, but who ever thinks of that? Clearly, though, someone has an idea about how the rest of the stuff is getting from place to place. As the party of ten to fifteen riders (varying according to circumstance) stretches across the horizon in beautiful long shots, we see two pack mules down at the end of the queue, a light box or two bobbing on their backs. If the film is to get an Oscar, it should go to those mules, who accomplish the impossible in scene after scene, with never a word of thanks.

Such things are peripheral, you say? Flaws best and easily overlooked, or mended by audience imagination? But sometimes the bungled detail is right at the center of the action. Early on, in a scene that has not lost all that much since Fenimore Cooper, Bale bends over the body of Pike’s slain spouse. Grimly fingering the fletching of an arrow, he pronounces the weapon, and the deed, to be Comanche. He’s an expert, he would know. But the trouble, the thing that gives me pity-and-terror block, is that the arrow, filling the screen in tight close-up, has been machined to high standards of industrial efficiency. It should be labelled “Made in Guangzhou,” and Bale should be saying, “It’s the Chinese, they’ve been bad in these parts.”

No: there are no little things. Details are of the essence, at the center not the periphery. Once it is clear that the opening scene has been imagined by people who know nothing about beams, saws, or cabins, it comes as no surprise that the characters begin to make incomprehensible choices. So as the Bad Indians come charging across the yard, in a formation seemingly designed to make them perfect targets, Wesley goes and gets his trusty carbine from above the mantel. Does he then find a window and begin potshotting the thanatotic savitches, as you or I or any sane person would do? Of course not. He goes charging out into the yard, without cover, frantic to maximize the scene’s visual appeal, and gets rather conveniently killed there, clearing bedspace for eventual occupation by the more photogenic Bale / Blocker. Probably the husband knew that the Comanches were shooting make-believe, Hong Kong arrows, and that kept him from being properly afraid. Poor devil.

And then, all the way at the other end of the film, after two hours I spent mainly nitpicking, comes another killing scene that makes no sense. With the Wise Chief successfully delivered to home and to cancer, four new bad guys pop up so arbitrarily their first line might as well be, “Howdy, stranger. We’s here to have a big gunfight with y’all.” When the shooting starts a minute or two later, Bale obligingly takes out two of them (I think it is), then wounds a third. This guy has to be finished off, because, after all, the shootout began with a line of shocking political incorrectness, when one of the baddies taunted Rosalee, telling her she didn’t have the nerve to shoot the rifle she was holding. (She pulls the trigger instantly, of course. So there.)

So, okay, a bad job, but somebody has to. The villain turns to flee, making Bale’s task all the more harrowing. Eyes narrowed, he takes careful aim over the sights of his revolver, long enough for us to contemplate the full horror of what he is doing, to begin fearing or hoping he will miss. Then, kerpow! He nails the sucker. That will teach him to vote Republican! But the guy goes on thrashing in the weeds. So Bale shrugs, holsters his piece, outs with a skinning knife, walks with great deliberation the forty or so yards to the dying man, and finishes him off with cold steel. Nothing on earth can explain why the character as presented would do such a thing in such a way, except of course the obvious: it makes a good shot, an impressive shot. You can hear the film crew high-fiving just out of sight: “Dude! Oscar — Worthy!”

You’re right: I’m a sad little man, caught up in a fit of perverse fault-finding, pointlessly at war with my own possible enjoyment of a pretty good film. But I don’t want to be here either. Like everyone else, I really want to settle in, munch popcorn, and lose myself to the dream for a few hours. Only, Hollywood has to meet me halfway. Think about the world, people, the world at your fingertips, the physical world and how it works. Get the details right, or mostly right, or at least mostly not impossibly wrong, and I will try harder to do my part. Deal?