Three movies on a theme
Sep. 29th, 2018 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironic
From worst to best.
Hostiles (2017)
1890s U.S. soldier Christian Bale is sad because he likes killing Indians but now he's been ordered to escort aging Cheyenne war chief Wes Studi and his family home to Montana. Oh no, I thought, this had better not be a movie about how Christian Bale gradually, grudgingly realizes that Indians are people too, while we are forced to stare at his face. Alas, that is exactly what transpired, Dances with Wolves moustache and all.
(How sad is Christian Bale? So sad that he goes into the desert to cry to heaven about it while the score swells and thunder booms.)
**spoilers**
There was not even a coherent or convincing arc demonstrating why he changed. (That could have to do with a handful of scenes I gave up on and fast-forwarded through during this two hour and fifteen minute movie because I didn't care about soldiers rhapsodizing to one another about how hard life is.) "Better" still, Wes Studi and his family, who included Adam Beach and Q'orianka Kilcher, got little to no character development and only a few lines; then all of them died except one.
Oh, we are meant to say, how ironic, look how Christian Bale over the course of this narrative has done a 180 from killing Indians to killing white guys for killing Indians. Now he is sad the Indians died whom we never got to know. "You're a good man," asserts Rosamund Pike, who herself has been traumatized by Comanche attacks. The Indians must be quiet and then dead to enable Christian Bale's journey.
**end spoilers**
It seemed we were even supposed to side against an officer's wife who preached sympathy for Indian tribes since their land was stolen and their health ruined; she was presented as naïve and insensitive for saying such things to the grieving Pike and battle-scarred Bale. At best, the point of the film appeared to be that no one really won in that conflict and no one was right: a troublesome take when governments try to wipe out a continent's worth of people.
Timothée Chalamet was also there. So was "the Butcher of Luverne" from Fargo season two. There was a black soldier (played by newcomer Jonathan Majors), but he died too.
I mean. It was nice to see Wes Studi et al, even with the occasional Noble Silhouette, and the hair extensions the makeup department gave him and Adam Beach looked pretty good. And the movie was beautifully shot. I'm just tired of this lipstick-on-a-pig stuff where films and prestige television shows revel in high production values while dishing out stories that should have been about something else.
ETA: LOL, I just found a note from the night I watched the movie that says, "literally yawned during the big reconciliation."
Mohawk (2017)
An effective "pick 'em off one by one"-type horror film in which early-19th century U.S. soldiers chase down, and then get chased by, two young Mohawk tribespeople and their English soldier companion after one of the tribespeople attacks their fort.
I… don't know what to do with this movie. It's, again, beautiful, with a forest setting so vibrant it practically becomes its own character, as well as striking makeup and costumes. The story sympathizes with the Native protagonists and indeed takes their POV for the beginning, end, and portions of the middle. There's more character development than in Hostiles, althoughit would've been hard to have less it should have been deeper still. Surprise bonus, there's a canonical polyamorous relationship: the lead, Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn), has two lovers, fellow Mohawk Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and English soldier Joshua (Eamon Farren). Oak's mom (hi, Sheri Foster) knows about it and everything. Together they form a loyal trio who have their political disagreements but don't appear to compete romantically. At one point I honest to goodness thought the two men were about to kiss too.
And yet. And yet. After we meet the cadre of U.S. soldiers, we stay in their POV more than Oak's. The camera lingers on them: their odd faces, their copious hair, their sweat and blood and too-warm uniforms, their pipes and their tracking doodads. They're not good men, they're not presented as physically or morally attractive, when they try to justify being horrible people I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to agree with them, and yet we stay with them, we must keep looking at and listening to them, we are suddenly in a movie about white men, and in the end I think they get more screen time than Oak.
(Hm. As I write that out, I wonder if the discomfort was the point? Much as living in this country means constantly having to look at and listen to morally suspect white men? Dunno, it still jarred when the POV switched.)
**major spoilers**
In addition to which: Oak and Calvin and Joshua get killed. It's only of middling consolation that the white guys all eventually die too. Oak's death came as a shock to me. But then her resurrection didn't. And so for the final act we're in a supernatural revenge fantasy, with all the mixed feelings that entails. Is it empowering and gratifying, or does it play into myths about Native people being more or less than human and white fears that Native people want nothing more than to reenact the crimes they suffered on their oppressors? If the film hadn't been written and produced by white people, these questions would sit better.
I also wish it had been left more ambiguous whether the soldiers' confusion and deterioration toward the end of the story resulted from a curse and/or reanimated vengeance spirit vs. from plain fear and Nature: heat exhaustion, dehydration. But that difference in narrative preference could well be driven by culture.
**end spoilers**
The violence I won't label as a pro or a con, but it's good to be aware that there's a lot of it, including an extremely difficult torture scene and a gruesome exacerbation of a preexisting physical disability. This isn't sexy blood; it's blood with hair and bits of flesh stuck in it.
So. I don't know. I'm glad I saw it, and it will stay with me for a while, but I wish we'd kept to the Mohawk characters' perspective the whole time.
Some movies I thought about while watching this one: Apocalypto, for the chase through the woods/jungle, the protagonist's exploitation of familiarity with the local area, the ultraviolence. The Last of the Mohicans, for a vaguely similar time period in which Native communities in the New York area had to decide whether to choose sides in someone else's war (the French and Indian War there vs. the War of 1812 here) and for the broken elbow. The Witch, for the spooky is-it-evil-or-is-it-just-dread atmosphere when they visit the empty longhouse.
A recent review fromsovay, who liked it more.
Wind River (2017)
A young woman is found dead in the snow on the Wind River reservation (Eastern Shoshone/Northern Arapahoe) in Wyoming. Tribal police, an FBI agent and a U.S. Fish & Wildlife hunter work together to solve the case.
Since we are grading on a curve: This was by far the best of the bunch, for a movie set on an Indian reservation and featuring a majority-Native cast—including but not limited to Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Gil Birmingham, Julia Jones, Martin Sensmeier and a man named Apesanahkwat, whose resume, I learned, includes not only acting but also being an eight-time elected chairman of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, a former Marine who served in Vietnam and an architect of Indian gaming legislation in the U.S.—that was once again made by white people and focuses on two white characters, in this case played by Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.
I liked it a lot, actually. It took its time, it had morbid humor, the grief hit home. Emotionally resonant. Sentimental sometimes, maybe, but it worked on me. There were a couple of lines of untranslated dialogue between Native characters. It stuck a pin in some stereotypes. Olsen's character got ribbed for her naïveté, while someone called out Renner's character: "The only thing Indian about you is your ex-wife." It touched on multiple ways in which residents struggle to cope with bleak futures on a bleak landscape (though we know those aren't the only stories); highlighted a gap in legislation/jurisdiction that frustrates those seeking justice, including government employees; and at the end explicitly tied into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women awareness campaign.
Flaws, for sure, including a dropped side plot and some inconsistent medical-related stuff toward the end, but overall would rec. Like Arrival, it even made me tolerate Renner's face. And it avoided most of the plastering-on-of-romance that could have been done re: Renner and Olsen.
Warning for a scene involving sexual assault that conveys the horror of when a seemingly ordinary evening tips over into tragedy in a matter of minutes. The banality of evil, the awful power of toxic men.
**major spoiler for both Wind River and Longmire season 4**
It's always the oil rig workers. At least Julia Jones was a couple of levels removed this time.
**end spoiler**
Thanks to![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
GlassesOJustice and gwyn for mentioning this movie.
Thank you to Métis in Space for teaching me to more effectively identify and think through several tropes discussed above. Still so much more to learn.
Hostiles (2017)
1890s U.S. soldier Christian Bale is sad because he likes killing Indians but now he's been ordered to escort aging Cheyenne war chief Wes Studi and his family home to Montana. Oh no, I thought, this had better not be a movie about how Christian Bale gradually, grudgingly realizes that Indians are people too, while we are forced to stare at his face. Alas, that is exactly what transpired, Dances with Wolves moustache and all.
(How sad is Christian Bale? So sad that he goes into the desert to cry to heaven about it while the score swells and thunder booms.)
**spoilers**
There was not even a coherent or convincing arc demonstrating why he changed. (That could have to do with a handful of scenes I gave up on and fast-forwarded through during this two hour and fifteen minute movie because I didn't care about soldiers rhapsodizing to one another about how hard life is.) "Better" still, Wes Studi and his family, who included Adam Beach and Q'orianka Kilcher, got little to no character development and only a few lines; then all of them died except one.
Oh, we are meant to say, how ironic, look how Christian Bale over the course of this narrative has done a 180 from killing Indians to killing white guys for killing Indians. Now he is sad the Indians died whom we never got to know. "You're a good man," asserts Rosamund Pike, who herself has been traumatized by Comanche attacks. The Indians must be quiet and then dead to enable Christian Bale's journey.
**end spoilers**
It seemed we were even supposed to side against an officer's wife who preached sympathy for Indian tribes since their land was stolen and their health ruined; she was presented as naïve and insensitive for saying such things to the grieving Pike and battle-scarred Bale. At best, the point of the film appeared to be that no one really won in that conflict and no one was right: a troublesome take when governments try to wipe out a continent's worth of people.
Timothée Chalamet was also there. So was "the Butcher of Luverne" from Fargo season two. There was a black soldier (played by newcomer Jonathan Majors), but he died too.
I mean. It was nice to see Wes Studi et al, even with the occasional Noble Silhouette, and the hair extensions the makeup department gave him and Adam Beach looked pretty good. And the movie was beautifully shot. I'm just tired of this lipstick-on-a-pig stuff where films and prestige television shows revel in high production values while dishing out stories that should have been about something else.
ETA: LOL, I just found a note from the night I watched the movie that says, "literally yawned during the big reconciliation."
Mohawk (2017)
An effective "pick 'em off one by one"-type horror film in which early-19th century U.S. soldiers chase down, and then get chased by, two young Mohawk tribespeople and their English soldier companion after one of the tribespeople attacks their fort.
I… don't know what to do with this movie. It's, again, beautiful, with a forest setting so vibrant it practically becomes its own character, as well as striking makeup and costumes. The story sympathizes with the Native protagonists and indeed takes their POV for the beginning, end, and portions of the middle. There's more character development than in Hostiles, although
And yet. And yet. After we meet the cadre of U.S. soldiers, we stay in their POV more than Oak's. The camera lingers on them: their odd faces, their copious hair, their sweat and blood and too-warm uniforms, their pipes and their tracking doodads. They're not good men, they're not presented as physically or morally attractive, when they try to justify being horrible people I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to agree with them, and yet we stay with them, we must keep looking at and listening to them, we are suddenly in a movie about white men, and in the end I think they get more screen time than Oak.
(Hm. As I write that out, I wonder if the discomfort was the point? Much as living in this country means constantly having to look at and listen to morally suspect white men? Dunno, it still jarred when the POV switched.)
**major spoilers**
In addition to which: Oak and Calvin and Joshua get killed. It's only of middling consolation that the white guys all eventually die too. Oak's death came as a shock to me. But then her resurrection didn't. And so for the final act we're in a supernatural revenge fantasy, with all the mixed feelings that entails. Is it empowering and gratifying, or does it play into myths about Native people being more or less than human and white fears that Native people want nothing more than to reenact the crimes they suffered on their oppressors? If the film hadn't been written and produced by white people, these questions would sit better.
I also wish it had been left more ambiguous whether the soldiers' confusion and deterioration toward the end of the story resulted from a curse and/or reanimated vengeance spirit vs. from plain fear and Nature: heat exhaustion, dehydration. But that difference in narrative preference could well be driven by culture.
**end spoilers**
The violence I won't label as a pro or a con, but it's good to be aware that there's a lot of it, including an extremely difficult torture scene and a gruesome exacerbation of a preexisting physical disability. This isn't sexy blood; it's blood with hair and bits of flesh stuck in it.
So. I don't know. I'm glad I saw it, and it will stay with me for a while, but I wish we'd kept to the Mohawk characters' perspective the whole time.
Some movies I thought about while watching this one: Apocalypto, for the chase through the woods/jungle, the protagonist's exploitation of familiarity with the local area, the ultraviolence. The Last of the Mohicans, for a vaguely similar time period in which Native communities in the New York area had to decide whether to choose sides in someone else's war (the French and Indian War there vs. the War of 1812 here) and for the broken elbow. The Witch, for the spooky is-it-evil-or-is-it-just-dread atmosphere when they visit the empty longhouse.
A recent review from
sovay, who liked it more.Wind River (2017)
A young woman is found dead in the snow on the Wind River reservation (Eastern Shoshone/Northern Arapahoe) in Wyoming. Tribal police, an FBI agent and a U.S. Fish & Wildlife hunter work together to solve the case.
Since we are grading on a curve: This was by far the best of the bunch, for a movie set on an Indian reservation and featuring a majority-Native cast—including but not limited to Graham Greene, Tantoo Cardinal, Gil Birmingham, Julia Jones, Martin Sensmeier and a man named Apesanahkwat, whose resume, I learned, includes not only acting but also being an eight-time elected chairman of the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, a former Marine who served in Vietnam and an architect of Indian gaming legislation in the U.S.—that was once again made by white people and focuses on two white characters, in this case played by Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.
I liked it a lot, actually. It took its time, it had morbid humor, the grief hit home. Emotionally resonant. Sentimental sometimes, maybe, but it worked on me. There were a couple of lines of untranslated dialogue between Native characters. It stuck a pin in some stereotypes. Olsen's character got ribbed for her naïveté, while someone called out Renner's character: "The only thing Indian about you is your ex-wife." It touched on multiple ways in which residents struggle to cope with bleak futures on a bleak landscape (though we know those aren't the only stories); highlighted a gap in legislation/jurisdiction that frustrates those seeking justice, including government employees; and at the end explicitly tied into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women awareness campaign.
Flaws, for sure, including a dropped side plot and some inconsistent medical-related stuff toward the end, but overall would rec. Like Arrival, it even made me tolerate Renner's face. And it avoided most of the plastering-on-of-romance that could have been done re: Renner and Olsen.
Warning for a scene involving sexual assault that conveys the horror of when a seemingly ordinary evening tips over into tragedy in a matter of minutes. The banality of evil, the awful power of toxic men.
**major spoiler for both Wind River and Longmire season 4**
It's always the oil rig workers. At least Julia Jones was a couple of levels removed this time.
**end spoiler**
Thanks to
gwyn for mentioning this movie.Thank you to Métis in Space for teaching me to more effectively identify and think through several tropes discussed above. Still so much more to learn.
