Author's judgement: 
+
Entire generations of movie buffs grew up on bread and westerns. We've seen movies of all kinds: first with the good whites against the bad Indians, then half and half, finally the good Indians against the very bad whites. Then again the western declined in every way: the man with the star against the attackers of the stagecoach, the democratic northerners against the southern slavers, the railway builders in the wild plains and the gold seekers, the "Italian western" as well as parodies in all guises. We got to know all the Native American tribes, from the Cheyenne to the Sioux, from the Seminoles to the Navajo, as well as memorizing the topical places: Juma, Laredo, Dallas and other more or less known locations. The greatest directors have grappled with this type of film: from John Ford to our Sergio Leone with Akira Kurosawa in the middle. To conclude the picture, it is necessary to insert the "moral" western to begin to think that, perhaps, we are at the last pages of a story that is now close to ending.
This, in fact, is the theme of the film that we propose for this week: Hostiles, directed by Scott Cooper. The story takes us to 1892, when the United States was nearly pacified as the frontier era was ending and the new century was approaching. The first images of the projection show a quote from the writer DH Lawrence which provides a correct interpretation not only and not so much of the story narrated but of all the recent epic of the United States: “The American soul is essentially isolated, stoic and murderous”. In this film you no longer see the dusty and wild towns but orderly and clean military outposts. A reluctant army captain - with a not entirely innocent past - is ordered to escort a seriously ill old Indian chief to the land of his birth, as a sign of appeasement that the President intended to give to the rest of the nation.
The knots, the dramas and the tragedies that however marked the whole period of the colonization of the whites on the territories of the natives are not completely healed and the journey that the protagonists of the story are preparing to make would like to be, metaphorically, a crossing towards the search of a coexistence and a peace that is difficult to achieve. The protagonist, the captain, immediately emerges for a singularity of him: he reads Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which then, at the end of the film, he will give to the grandson of the old Indian chief. Few other works of literature are as strongly appealing to morality and justice as this masterpiece by the English writer. The journey will take place between difficulties and moments of strong violence and ferocity. At a certain point the Wounded Knee massacre will also be remembered, which actually took place in 1890 by the famous seventh cavalry regiment, as a turning point in the atrocities committed on the skin of the Indians. The story ends with a dramatic and close-up double ending on the tracks of a train (once again the topical image of the now modernized West) which suggests and imagines that history is turning the page.
The film would like to be “politically correct” even if the construction of the characters, especially that of the natives, still suffers from a consolidated stereotype: wise and wild while the whites are cultured, some are bad but still the majority devoted to good. The work is well done even if the narrative rhythms and times are sometimes excessively long. The cast is sufficient (note a brief appearance by Timothée Chalamet, already seen recently in Call me by your name) and dominates the scene, as required by the type of film, the vision of the great prairies and wild canyons. For fans of the genre, Hostiles is worth watching, if only for the scarcity of offer of this type of story. It should be noted that over two years have passed, 2015, since the last film worth remembering: Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Another rhythm, another hand, another experience.
