Hostiles, 8/10
This is a 2017 western about a group of soldiers tasked with escorting a dying indian chief back to his homeland, facing peril and self-discovery along the way. It's got quite the cast: Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, Wes Studi, Jesse Plemons and Stephen Lang among others. It's a very somber, contemplative and subdued film. The dialogue is relatively spare, the acting is restrained and subtle, and the soundscape drifts in and out almost unnoticeably. The acting, score and cinematography are the highlights here. Christian Bale mostly speaks in a hushed half-whisper, but you can glean an ocean of emotions hiding behind his eyes. He honesly has some of the best acting of his entire career here. There's a particulary compelling scene where he's saying goodbye to one of his soldiers, and his facial acting is just marvelous. He's basically the focus, and the rest of the cast are there mostly to support him, which they do excellently across the board.
This has some of the most beautiful landscape cinematography I've ever seen. Whenever there's a scene of the characters traveling through some landscape, you're treated to some of the best eye candy this type of film has to offer. The environments become characters in themselves, and lend the film an interesting quality where all the sorrow and guilt of the characters is contrasted against vistas of eye-watering beauty. DP Masanobu Takanayagi knocked it out of the park, and I'm very interested to check out his other work now, which includes quite a few decently high-profile releases.
The score is also excellent, and actually the reason why I checked this film out to begin with. There's an instrument featured here called a
yaybahar, of which there exists only one in the entire world. In the video you can hear it producing a sound quite unlike anything else. It's just unfortunate that either the instrument was featured less prominently than I expected, or I don't have the ear to properly distinguish it among other instruments, but to me the score ended up sounding rather traditional. It's still excellent: very subdued or just nonexistent for most of the movie, swelling up only right at the end when it's been earned. But for being the sole reason why I was interested in the film, I was left expecting something different.
There's two knocks against the film that keep it from being something truly phenomenal: the handling of the themes and the nighttime scenes. While the film is subdued, it's not exactly subtle with its themes of guilt, the spectre of native genocide, and the lingering tensions between the survivors on both sides. There's multiple scenes where the dialogue feels just short of "subtle as a brick", and there's one character whose dialogue feels mostly particularly on the nose, which stands out in such an otherwise beautifully understated and mature film. I feel cutting most of that dialogue and letting the acting speak for itself would have made it both better and more intelligent. The other flaw in this film is the nighttime scenes, which again stand out more due to contrast than their outright badness. For all the stunning beauty of the landscapes during daytime, the nighttime scenes feel mostly rather stagey and artificial, with plenty of "Hollywood light" lighting everything and everyone perfectly even in the middle of the night.
Still, it's a very good time. Despite the slow pace I was never bored, and the ending was particularly affecting. I never knew that
a man simply stepping on a train could be so moving.
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