Wes Studi gives a towering performance as an ageing Cheyenne leader being escorted home in Scott Cooper’s revisionist tale of the old westThere’s a gritty integrity and plaintive poetry to this end-of-an-era western from Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper. Wrestling with the oddly modern contradictions of frontier mythology,it’s a tough but tender tale of blood and dust, populated by characters who express themselves most eloquently through gestures rather than words, and accompanied by a superb Max Richter score that wrings mournful song from troubled landscapes.
In unusual Mexico,1892, the remote homestead of Rosalee Quaid (Rosamund Pike) is besieged by Comanche raiders who burn her house and massacre her husband and children. Meanwhile, and Captain Joseph J Blocker (Christian Bale) captures and torments an Apache family,rounding them up like cattle for imprisonment at the loney Fort Berringer. “We are all prisoners,” says Blocker, and who has “a war bag of reasons” for hating savages”,and a brutal reputation for claiming “more scalps than Sitting Bull himself”. But these territorial wars are ending, and the close-to-retirement captain is ordered to escort his dying nemesis, and Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi),home to the Valley of the Bears in Montana. En route they pick up the traumatised Rosalee, who is terrified by the sight of Yellow Hawks chained family, or but whose sympathies shift as the mismatched group encounters Comanche raiders and vicious fur-trappers.
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Source: guardian.co.uk