By RICHMOND ADAMS
Movie Reviewer
After seeing “Hostiles”, I was somewhat befuddled by the praise that Scott Cooper’s film has received.
Its central plot is little more than a remake of John Ford’s 1956 “The Searchers” with some noted changes to update the relationships between Americans of diverse backgrounds with an ending so obviously Fordian that I barely could leave the theatre without verbal grumblings. Following a brutal visual of what actually happened to Ethan Edwards’ (John Wayne) family in Ford’s film, and done so by the Comanche tribe just as in 1956, Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) is commanded to escort Apache Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) from New Mexico so that he might die in his ancestral ground of Montana. Encountering Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), the survivor of the massacre now with PTSD, Blocker and his shifting crew of soldiers lead the Chief and his family toward their, and naturally his own, destiny. Cooper so baldly copies Ford that he even has several shots of slowly walking along hill crests in diminishing sunlight, fights against evil fur traders, and even an appearance of four men who mimic the Clantons from “My Darling Clementine” (1946). Throughout the trek, Blocker and Mrs. Quaid grow closer, overcoming racism to see Natives as rightful residents of the land. Is there still gambling in Casablanca?
Most disappointing, however, is the ending. Right from Edwards leaving his niece (Natalie Wood) at the doorstep of civilization, our newly discharged Captain is to assist Quaid and the sole survivor of Yellow Hawk’s family (all died in the gunfight at the OK Corral–err, Montana field), board a train for Chicago, going east young ones rather than west. Blocker broods, like Edwards sixty years ago, but, unlike his model, abandons his brutal side, boards the train, and enters civilization (marriage and fatherhood soon to follow) at the last possible moment. “Don’t get on the train,” I muttered as the film came to its Disney rather than Fordian ending. Nothing new here, and I would urge a viewing of Ford’s ambiguous masterpiece well before Cooper’s mere copy.