Hostiles

This classic Western dramatizes its opening quotation from D.H. Lawrence: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” 

Trump’s America shows no sign of its having melted yet. On the contrary, that racist, violent soul-less “soul” now holds sway. And yet, pockets of the true, great America, the land of equality, freedom and community, persist. And so does the nation’s hope for redemption. 

Writer/director Scott Cooper avoids any comfort of partisanship. If the racist, murderous rancher at the end represents the extreme of the Republicans, the simple-minded, cliched Harper’s journalist/photographer at the beginning represents — and equally diminishes — the naive “useful idiots” on the Left, aka the Democrats. The preferable idealist is the fort commander’s wife, who at the dinner table articulates her anger at the government’s abuse of the Native American — but even she is here insensitive to her guest Rosalie’s trauma.

The world-weary hero Captain Blocker has the bloodied hands and traumatized memory of the true soldier, but he reads Julius Caesar in Latin. With a leap of humanity and trust he bestows the book on the little Indian orphan about to start a new life in the paleface Chicago. 

Unusually for the genre, there are no religious figures. The Bible is read over the white people’s burials and the Native American rites are respected for theirs. But there are no church people. Without religious institutions, faith operates strictly on the personal level. Rosalie and Blocker both believe in God. As Rosalie, who moves from seeing her family slaughtered by Indians to being raped by white trappers, admits: “If I did not have faith, what would I have?”

Rosalie’s essential faith is not based on any church or God but in the recognition of common humanity. Her initial hatred of the “Redskins” (Washington NFL fans take note) grows from reflexive hysteria and hunger for revenge to her sense of shared vulnerability. She’s touched when the Indian woman gives her a dress. Ultimately Rosalie will pick up a rifle to defend the Apaches against the white landowner. 

This softening, this advent of empathy, grows out of life experience, either despite our through the suffering that drives people apart. After all, the title “Hostiles” refers to the entire rainbow of cultures in this film. Thus Rosalie: "Sometimes I envy the finality of death. The certainty. And I have to drive those thoughts away when I wake.” To carry on, we have to carry on, preferring the challenges and complexities of life over any relief from our mortality. 

Blocker is the central moral barometer. As a soldier he has had to suspend his moral conscience: "I've killed everything that's walked or crawled. If you do it enough, you get used to it.” He begins so full of hatred that he refuses the assignment to escort the murderous Apache chief home to die. As he  gets to know him, however, he comes to appreciate the old enemy’s character and dignity. 

It is possible to accept an enemy, by acknowledging his humanity. Difficult, but possible, in the face of our moral clashes. Blocker knows that the bigotry and violence inbred in our world preclude any easy freedom for anyone: “Understand this: When we lay our heads down here, we're all prisoners.” 

That grows ever clearer as the battles — mental as well as physical — shrink Blocker’s troupe. The last scene suggests Blocker might be the Cain figure, the cursed killer doomed to rootlessness, forbidden community. That’s the typical American outlaw hero — Shane, Ethan Edwards (of The Searchers), Tom Doniphan (the man who really shot Liberty Valance) and so on. Society needs that killer in order to survive but cannot accommodate or accept him if it is to claim to be civilized. 

As he bids Rosalie and the boy goodbye Blocker seems to feel disqualified from happiness, from love, from a normal family life. But as the train pulls away he leaps on. He has rejected the finality of damnation and death, has shucked the shackles of his murderous career, and in an act of true faith resolves to join Rosalie for Chicago. 
     As the film opens with Rosalie losing her first family, it ends with her assumption of a new one. Rosalie, Blocker and the boy now have a new love and self-respect forged in the heat of the brutality and savagery they have suffered, yet managed to keep their humanity intact. Both are freed from their horrible experiences by their power to forgive.