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As they continue to encounter more difficulties the nature and scale of directorial problems become clear. The landscape in westerns is always amazing. That’s why Indian and cowboy alike were willing to put up with so much physical hardship. It changes, slowly, over immense distances and, in Hostiles, always from ground level. Director Paul Greengrass fails to see this in that he wants us to see too much. As if an integrated aesthetic understanding has been corroded by the special-after-effects of action films, he treats us to soaring drone or ’copter shots racing over the epic land. It’s not just nudity or violence that’s gratuitous. These are views no one in the film — or at the time — ever had. Spectacular and expensive, they take us out of where we’re supposed to be and into the Bourne age. The camera has to be earthbound.
Kidd’s next reading is an unscheduled performance at a township where the semi-industrialised business of buffalo genocide is in full swing. The robber-bosses want diverting Fox-style infotainment but, turning into activist and preacher, Hanks goes all Howard Zinn with a rousing story about a miners’ uprising. Are we seeing a genealogical prequel to his recent role as Ben Bradlee in The Post? Certainly a point is being made about fake news, the point being that Hanks and Zengel have to make another getaway. The wheels are starting to come off the wagon, literally, but not exclusively. Hurtling downhill Hanks loses control of his wobbly vehicle and Greengrass loses all control of his Hanks vehicle.
After streaming News of the World I switched, not inappropriately, to CNN, more precisely to a commercial featuring an SUV in the testing terrain of the automotive west. Filmically it was cut from exactly the same cloth as that used for the wagon crash, with airbags and computerised safety features built in. Now, Greengrass might claim that he is offering a cinematic experience and he’s right — if the medium achieves its manifest destiny in the form of car ads. In which case it doesn’t matter much if cinemas never reopen. Except it does matter because then we’d be denied a western like Kelly Reichardt’s slow, steady, simple and utterly riveting First Cow. The different approaches to music are instructive. Reichardt’s soundtrack is rooted in the guitar of William Tyler. News of the World features some default Cooderism but for moments of heightened emotional drama — of which, in truth, there are none — reinforcements are needed in the form of orchestral uplift: further proof, to use a 19th-century phrase, of an inconsistency of conception.
As memorably expressed by a much-loved song from my childhood, Hanks, with no wheels on his wagon — no wagon even — is no longer rolling along. On foot, he and the girl are more vulnerable than ever to all manner of threat and hindrance. The Indians are out there, implicitly, because the pedestrian pair are viewed with unspecified The-Hills-Have-Eyes menace, though from Zengel’s p.o.v. that menace retains qualities of salvation. In the walkabout emptiness, though, we stumble towards a potential justification for the overreaching aerials. Could it be that those shots expressed the pre-civilised, cosmic consciousness of the indigenous people? Not when an apocalyptic dust storm swirls in, leaving in its wake only a dim vision of a band of ghostly Kiowan refugees. They may be on a defeated trudge to life on the rez but I see them, without reservation, as our forlorn representatives on the trail of cinematic tears.
Geoff Dyer’s new book, See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, will be published by Canongate in April.
Because you read about american indians
Also by Geoff Dyer
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