“Hostiles” was probably the best movie of 2017 that you never heard of, despite featuring some big names. It barely got a theatrical release, earning $29 million -- short of its $39 million production budget. But it’s a spare, bleak gem.
It’s a throwback-style Western that very much has Things to Say about this day and age.
Christian Bale plays Joseph Blocker, a famous Indian hunter who’s about to retire when he’s given the proverbial one last job. And it’s a doozy: escort his longtime enemy, a Comanche war chief named Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), back to his ancestral home in Montana so he can die in piece.
Blocker is racist, alcoholic and prone to violence. Yellow Hawk is proud and reserved. His son, Black Hawk (Adam Beach), tries to broach a peace between them, but old enmities die hard.
Along the winding journey they pick up other forlorn figures. Rosamund Pike plays a frontier woman who’s just had her entire family wiped out by native warriors. Yellow Hawk and his family take her in like an adopted daughter. Seeing this, Blocker recognizes human warmth in his old enemy, possibly for the first time in his life.
The inimitable character actor Ben Foster plays a disgraced former soldier, a former comrade of Blocker’s, who’s been sentenced to die. In him, Blocker sees a reflection of himself that isn’t easy to look at.
Writer/director Scott Cooper also made the wonderful “Crazy Heart” a few years ago. He’s a filmmaker who refuses to cram his characters into neat stereotypical holes, letting each person travel their own journey in a way that feels organic.
In a time when so many movies put service to the plot above building believable characters, “Hostiles” is the sturdy exception that sees the horizon beyond.
Bonus features are limited to a single item, a comprehensive making-of documentary, “A Journey to the Soul: The Making of Hostiles.” It includes three parts: “Provenance,” “Removing the Binds” and “Don’t Look Back.”
There is dour. Then there is grim. Then there is
bleak. Then there is despair. Then there is "Hostiles."
Last year's film slate (of which this is technically part) was noted for its raft of downbeat, depressing movies. Even against that yardstick, though, "Hostiles" still must be assessed as one of the most intensely melancholic. If it's possible to have an uplifting cinematic experience while mired in tragedy, then here it is.
Christian Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker, a weary cavalry soldier and legendary Indian hunter who is about to retire. He's virulently racist, alcoholic, burnt out. Absent circumstances presented in the course of the story, he'd probably drink himself into a lonely, hateful death within a year or two.
But his commander orders him to perform one last service: escorting Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a Comanche war chief who is now dying of cancer, and has received permission to take his family to their ancestral home in Montana to be at final piece. The kicker: Blocker and Yellow Hawk were bitter enemies during the Indian wars, and each can count many friends and loved ones who perished at the other's hand.
Their journey begins in silence and defiance. Others are picked up along the way. Ben Foster plays Charles Wills, a disgraced soldier who has been sentenced to be hanged for his crimes. Blocker knows him, too, from the old days.
More affecting is the presence of Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), a frontier woman whose husband and children were just slaughtered in front of her eyes. When the group first encounters her, Rosalie is squatting in the burned-out wreckage of her home, the cold corpse of her baby clutched to her chest. Slowly-- very slowly -- she comes out of her shell of despair, and starts to make meaningful new connections.
Adam Beach shines as Black Hawk, son of Yellow Hawk, who is always his father's son but also reaches out to the bitter white man who hates his kind. The rest of the background players fill their places with conviction and purity, among them Jesse Plemons and Timothee Chalamet.
Writer/director Scott Cooper ("Crazy Heart") has given us a beautiful, spare vision of the American West on the cusp of the 20th century. Though it is a story of specific people, they are dealing with many of the issues we still face today: tribal conflict, racial enmity, gendered roles, etc.
In many ways, "Hostiles" is a portrait of all the capacities America holds, both for greatness and for wretchedness. This story, of two men who have every reason to hate each other, finally grants us a tiny nugget of hope.
Johnny Depp is expectedly magnificent in "Black Mass," the tale of Irish-American gangster Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger and the unholy alliance he forged with the FBI.
Icy stillness. Searing rage. Dead gaze. A man who exists almost as an energy form: pure malevolence and terror.
It's a terrifically commanding performance. I'm not certain it's a terribly complex one.
Depp holds our every attention every second he's on the screen, as we witness Jimmy's dark, violent saga over a 20-year period. What his character does not do is change one iota over the course of that span.
He arrives in 1975, fully formed and unspeakably evil. We leave him in 1995 without any notable alterations.
His circumstances do shift: initially a small-time hood fighting to control just his hardscrabble Southie neighborhood, Jimmy winds up as Boston's kingpin -- with the unwitting (and witting) help of the local feds. Countless murders are attributed to him or his henchmen, the dank river bridge piles serving as his personal well-stocked graveyard.
He came, he saw, he buried.
The unnerving physical transformation is what first grabs our attention. With stabbing blue eyes, scant, slicked-back hair, corpse-like pallor and a dead tooth, Depp looks like he was dug up out of the ground 10 minutes ago and ensorceled back to rotting half-life.
He seems at once ancient and virile, strutting Mick bravado encased in a body that reflects the soul's irreversible decay. Notably, his appearance does not change as the other actors' faces thicken with increasing layers of age makeup.
Based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, "Black Mass" aims to be a sprawling gangster saga a la "Goodfellas," showing how absolute corruption seeps everywhere like an oil spill. The plot tends to wander, piling up secondary and tertiary characters, and compounding scenes of Jimmy facing down adversaries that begin to blur into each other.
Director Scott Cooper debuted with the amazing "Crazy Heart," then got caught in a family crime ramble with 2013's "Out of the Furnace." He seems to be a filmmaker who's a master at evoking vivid figures, but is less adroit at assembling a raft of characters and events into a coherent, compelling narrative.
Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth craft some great individual scenes, but the connective tissue has a Frankenstein feel. I wouldn't so much say that "Black Mass" is too long, but that it allocates its 122 minutes unwisely.
The focus of the story is, or should be, Jimmy's two decades as an informant for the FBI. He found a partner in agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), a fellow Southie who grew up idolizing Jimmy. Connolly offers to protect him if he'll feed information about fellow mobsters. Jimmy's reptilian mind immediately sees an opportunity to use the feds to take out the competition.
Since Jimmy was notoriously vicious toward "rats" in his own organization, this would seem a ripe area for exploration -- how he justified in his own mind the act of informing on other criminals.
But this movie does not get into those sorts of interior monologues. "Black Mass" witnesses Jimmy Bulger only at external angles.
The supporting cast is bulging with talent and, well, just bulging. The sheer number of names and faces to keep track of is overwhelming at times.
Dakota Johnson and Julianne Nicholson play the long-suffering significant others of Jimmy and John, respectively, given little to do but cry and kvetch. David Harbour is John's tainted wingman. Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott are skeptical FBI honchos who crave the intelligence Jimmy provides but suspect they're being played.
Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane and W. Earl Brown play Jimmy's core crew, whom we first meet as aged turncoats giving testimony against him. Corey Stoll is the upstanding new prosecutor who finally starts to ask questions about the Jimmy/FBI arrangement. Juno Temple is a wide-eyed streetwalker who shows up just in time to leave. Peter Sarsgaard turns up as a twitchy accomplice who practically seems to have the mark of doom etched on his forehead.
Most ill-used is Benedict Cumberbatch as Jimmy's brother Billy Bulger, a state senator a political power player who somehow managed to maintain a close relationship with his mobster sibling while (the film would have us believe) staying completely and deliberately oblivious of his business.
All these people waltz in and out of the frame, wah-wahing through Boston accents that seem lacquered on like all the dark wood constantly occupying the movie's backgrounds. Each actor has a scene or two to establish their character's bona fides, then dissolves into the other furnishings.
"Black Mass" was built as a movie to feature Johnny Depp in a dominating, unforgettable performance. At this it succeeds, but to the detriment of the total cinematic experience.
Not long ago I was watching an old Jeff Bridges movie (1972's "Fat City") and blogged that he "is quietly having one of the great film acting careers."
And this was before I saw "Crazy Heart," perhaps the finest performance of that 50-year run.
Never winning, Bridges has been nominated four times for an Oscar -- for "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot," "The Last Picture Show," "The Contender" and "Starman" -- and should have been nominated at least four other times -- "The Fisher King," "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," "Seabiscuit" and "The Fabulous Baker Boys." (Probably "Fearless," too.)
"Crazy Heart" will earn Bridges number five, and perhaps the elusive golden statuette.
He plays Bad Blake, a once-famous country singer who has reached the bottom of the barrel, and just kept burrowing downward. As we first meet him, he arrives to play a gig at a bowling alley, pouring out a jug of urine from the long drive in his battered '78 Suburban: Bad is literally pissing his life away.
He's 57, with a Dunlop belly spilling over his Texas-sized belt buckle, a scraggly beard and a face creased like aged leather. He smokes persistently, drinks whiskey prodigiously, and sings mournful songs about regret and loss to the few diehard fans who care to show up.
"I used to be somebody, but now I'm somebody else," goes one of his typical lyrics. A crowd favorite is, "It's funny how falling feels like flying ... for a little while."
Bridges embodies these songs (by Stephen Bruton and T-Bone Burnett) the way he does the role itself: With an easy, vanity-free grace that never feels like it's trying to impress for its own sake.
Bad is a man with no illusions about his has-been status, motoring from one tiny Southwestern town to another, taking any gig he can get, happily obliging any female fan who wants a roll in the sack with a once-legend -- even if the groupies are rougher-looking than they used to be.
In Santa Fe, he's surprised to find a good piano player to back him, and even more surprised by the pianist's niece, a newspaper reporter who wants an interview. Played by Maggie Gyllenhaal -- in a full-bodied turn worthy of its own nod come Oscar time -- Jean is a single mom with a 4-year-old, who's had a run of bad luck with men.
She convinces herself, against her better judgment, to green-light Bad's syrupy, well-worn come-on ("I wanna talk about how bad you make this room look") and eventually enter a relationship with a man whose notion of commitment is measured in the distance to his next town and the price of his next bottle of rattlesnake hooch.
"Crazy Heart" was directed by first-timer Scott Cooper, who also penned the screenplay from the novel by Thomas Cobb. I loved the authentic little details with which Cooper infuses his film -- like Bad, who treats his own body like a cesspool, polishing his guitar with reverence.
The supporting performances are similarly tidy, with Robert Duvall (also a producer on the film) as Bad's lone friend/bartender, and Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet, a former protégé whose star has greatly eclipsed that of his mentor, much to both men's dismay.
But there's no mistaking who the frontman is of this ballad, so sad and so true. Jeff Bridges' masterful portrayal of a man who used to be somebody is pitch-perfect.
