Lessons learned along the trail in good-intended ‘Hostiles’

“Hostiles” wears its good intentions on its well-weathered cavalry-blue sleeve.

The movie tracks an ill-starred odyssey of a handful of horse soldiers escorting a captive Cheyenne family across the American West of 1892 from New Mexico to the family’s ancestral home in Montana.

In command is a grizzled Army captain named Blocker, played by a bleak-eyed Christian Bale. Chief among his prisoners is an actual chief named Yellow Hawk, played with solemn formality by Wes Studi.

Blocker has spent years at war with Yellow Hawk, hates his guts and hates even more the mission imposed upon him by political higher-ups to give his longtime enemy safe passage home.

The chief is dying of cancer, and Washington officialdom (right up to the president) deems it a nice let-bygones-be-bygones gesture to allow him pass his last days in familiar surroundings.

And so, the odyssey. It takes the party through spectacular country (locations in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado are beautifully photographed by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi), a landscape dotted with a succession of graves as the group is set upon by murderous Comanches, white rapists and get-off-my-land racists.

Besieged, with their numbers whittled down by successive attacks, soldiers and captive Indians are obliged to make common cause and thereby acknowledge their common humanity.

In the mix as well is a bereaved homesteader woman played by Rosamund Pike, whose family has been massacred by the Comanches.

Writer-directer Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart” and “Out of the Furnace,” which also starred Bale) intersperses scenes of bloodshed with long scenes where characters have Very Important Things To Say about racism, vengeance and soul-corroding guilt.

The dialogue in these scenes could never be mistaken for the conversations of ordinary people as they sound awfully portentous. Often delivered in the dark, illuminated by candlelight and firelight, the talk forces Blocker to confront his prejudices.

In a line that seems lifted from “Unforgiven,” Blocker acknowledges, “I’ve killed everything that’s walked or crawled,” and slowly an unspoken sense of remorse descends upon him.

This story was originally published January 5, 2018 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Lessons learned along the trail in good-intended ‘Hostiles’."