I loved this 2017 western but noticed how I was emotionally manipulated to increasingly side with the Indians against the whites.
A friend says: “The trend of having the audience root against the white man began with Little Big Man, then reached its high point in Dances with Wolves and most bizarrely was applied to the human race as a whole as opposed to the aliens in Avatar.”
The white protagonist played by Christian Biale starts off hostile against the Indian Chief he has to transport but as the movie goes along, the white guy gets close to the Indians he’s guarding until the penultimate confrontation in Montana when with the Indians, he kills four white guys protecting their own land. When the white protagonist scalps the white land owner, you are manipulated to cheer. You just feel it is awesome that he identifies more with the noble Indians than with the pedantic white guys (including white guys who saved the protagonist’s life in past battles with these very Indians).
I don’t think you’d find a Jewish movie glorifying Jews siding with Nazis to kill their own kind.
I don’t think there’s anything that whites are encouraged to find more moving and exciting than siding against your own people in a fight.
The three are forced to band together to overcome the punishing landscape and the Comanche bandits on their tail during a 1,500-mile trek across the perilous American frontier.
“For me really it was about two disparate men with very different world views who come together over the course of the narrative to offer one another a bit of reconciliation and hope. God knows, we need that in America now,” Cooper told AFP.
“I hope, if anything, it sparks a conversation about how we all need to come together and understand each other a bit better and the story is truly a journey of the soul for the characters.”…Not all critics, however, have been convinced about the movie’s progressive bona fides, with several pointing out that the white actors get all the best lines and complex characterization.
The point is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, in a story about fractious white-native relations in the American West, it is English actors Bale and Pike who are attracting all the early Oscar buzz.
Variety reviewer Peter Debruge accused “Hostiles” of treating its native characters as little more than one-dimensional “abstract plot devices” depicted as “ruthless savages or as stoic sages.”
Critics have also called out the movie for drawing a false equivalence between individual native attacks such as the Comanche ambush in the prologue and government-sanctioned genocide.
Cooper, however, insists he went to great lengths to understand the “language, customs and mores” of his native characters, employing Cheyenne cultural advisors to ensure he got it right.
“It was very important for me to represent Native American life in an extremely authentic but dignified manner,” he told AFP.
