Chris here. The dry desert of the arid Best Actor race is about to get a bit of a transplant into the actual desert. Scott Cooper's Hostiles had one of the quieter debuts on the festival season, landing quiet praise and a tribute for Christian Bale when it went to Telluride. It got even quieter as it waited for a distributor while majors were already fully booked - but now it will be a last-minute arrival from a new mini-distrib with hopes for recognition for Bale. The film will open in limited release on December 22.
The director hasn't had Oscar success since winning Jeff Bridges a long-awaiting prize for Crazy Heart, but the film might just benefit from starring a beloved player in a less competitive year. Does it also help that the film will stand out from the pack by genre alone? Hold onto your spurs, we've got a western in the Oscar race! Take a look at the trailer before we break down the Yes No Maybe So...
YES
- Rosamund Pike finally gets some post-Gone Girl complexity to work with! Her breathy, death-obsessed monologuing is one of the trailer's more intriguing elements. Like a suicidal Oregon Trail Amazing Amy, she'll be so much happier once she's dead.
- I am far more positive on Scott Cooper's abilities than the majority of the internet. He's a morose and brooding voice, but I'd say a keen visual storyteller as well. My certainty that he'll one day give us something great keeps me curious.
- Those set pieces look massive and intimate all at once. Hurray for no CGI battle on this frontier.
NO
- We already had Wind River this year to give us a thoroughly white lens on the suffering of Native Americans, and once was gross enough. No Native American even speaks in this trailer. Give Wes Studi his moment!
- Stop hiding Ben Foster behind giant mustaches. STOP IT!
- No insult meant to the upstart distributor, but the vagueness of "Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures" makes me chuckle every time. (And their summer shark movie 47 Meters Below remains my worst of the year. Sorry, girl.)
- "We are all hostiles"? "We're all prisoners"? Yeesh.
MAYBE SO
- My least favorite invented subgenre is "But It's Really a Western!". See Hell or High Water or Logan for recent examples. At least this is an actual western.
- Out of the Furnace is one of Bale's most underrated performances, so maybe the collaboration with Cooper will continue to give the goods.
- However, this looks way more morally complex and intense than the standard western. And visually formidable - cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi has done gorgeous work for Cooper for Furnace and Black Mass.
Much as I want to give the film a fair shot, my maybe so is leaning no. Your thoughts?