'Bone Tomahawk'

Grisly, Gruesome And Gross

Westerns are hard to do in this day and age. The American frontier is further behind us than a time when some of the people who saw it were still alive. Today, it may as well be any other time in history that gets a look, but the combination of dust, horse, guns and saloons always gets a look at some point. There was a spate of revival westerns in the 1990s that genuinely were great, and even more recently, the remake of 'True Grit' has put the Western back into the middle of American cinema, but the bottom line is that these are much harder to do than before.

So it's a brave director who decides to take one on. Gore Verbinski's 'The Lone Ranger' should have scared off anybody, but clearly there are brave souls. Of course this film is more of a hybrid with horror mixed into the Western context, but in most part, it is a Western. It is almost like 'The Searchers' meets 'The Thirteenth Warrior'.

Anyway... spoiler alert.


What's Good About It

The dialogue is very well written in this piece.  The way the characters go about phrasing their concerns with elaborate rhetoric makes for some fun viewing. The stars of the film make tremendous mileage out of the language. It's quite the feast if you like dialogue. Structurally, it's put together well so you never feel like the film is meandering into weird detours. The polemic is simple but effective in telling the story.

Yet overall, it's the performances that hold this film together nicely. Kurt Russell as the sheriff is solid; Patrick Wilson as the cowboy with the broken leg, strangely echoes his turn in Fargo season 2; Richard Jenkins as the second deputy Chicory is the standout, playing a doddering foolish old man; while Matthew Fox rounds out the quartet as the vain dandy.

The story is in its own way strange and haunting. There is an understated quality to the lighting and camera work. The darkness is simply dark and unknowable, while the day is bright and the intense sunlight blows away colour. The story feels coherent and things are carefully set up so each and every detail is shown to have its place and a consequence.

What's Bad About It

The bad guys in this film are cave dwelling troglodyte cannibals that even the ordinary Native American fears, dreads, despises and detests. It's hard to fathom such a tribe could exist except in fiction like this. The decidedly un-anthropological horror element is the surprise ingredient in this horror Western hybrid, but it robs the rest of the film of its power.

Part of the problem is casting the native Americans as out-and-out bad guys is just not going to wash anymore. So to replace the threat, the film provides us with a villainous bunch that we can all agree are bad guys and so deserving of the death that is dealt to them. Indeed, they are terrifying and do terrible things, but the extremeness of their transgression signals the film is not quite wedded to the realism it works so hard to establish.

There are also moments of anachronistic insight that are, while funny, totally disruptive to the sense of milieu.

What's Interesting About It

In trying to do 'the Searchers' type scenario of kidnap recovery, the film has had to invent a wildly monstrous group to replay a colonialist routine. They even set it up with a Native American character disavowing any relationship to this group so that the post-modern revision is intact, but they barrel along into the same Heart of Darkness problem. This suggests that we're never going to be done with this colonialist construction of there being a darkness into which civilised white men must venture. When you cast your mind to it, you could endlessly think up scenarios that play into this construct.

This cultural heritage must have some pretty deep roots, I would imagine. Recently there was a report where fairytales went longer into our past than previously thought. So it's entirely possible this construction of going into the heart of darkness to recover something goes back deep into our prehistory.

I was thinking about how this one might have been more interesting had it happened longer ago in prehistory, and it was Neanderthals in the cave and not some made-up indigenous tribal group. 'The Thirteenth Warrior' actually worked through a scenario where a bunch of Vikings and an itinerant Arab played by Antonio Banderas travel deep into the land of the cannibals, which is much the same story. In some ways it is interesting this film is getting critical kudos considering its lurid premise, because other films were panned for it.

Inglorious And Unattractive

All the above being said, it's hard to fathom if anybody found this to be affirming the white male dominance in the colonialist picture. Because the characters are hidebound by the historic context in which it is set, they cannot have the awareness we possess. Kurt Russell's sheriff Hunt is played as if he is over-compensating for some inadequacy, while Richard Jenkins' Chicory is played like a obsequious buffoon. Patrick Wilson's O'Dwyer is severely hampered by a  broken leg, and so doesn't get to be alpha male, while the hopeless self regard and vanity of Matthew Fox's Brooder makes him more of an annoying accomplice than a working partner. The irony is steep because the characters talk knowingly but the audience always knows better.

In short, they're not heroic, they're not even anti-heroes except perhaps Brooder, and as four horsemen go, they lose their horses halfway into their journey. The funniest line in the film is when Lili Simmons' Sam exclaims that the Frontier is not dangerous for its indigenous people or extreme wilderness, but because of idiots - idiots like these four horsemen. It might be the most post-modern moment in the film, where the barking irony eats itself. Somehow the film stays together because Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins are so good in the scene when receiving the admonishment.

The Malfunctioning Gun

It seems to have gone into the vernacular of American cinema where there is at least one moment where a gun fails. It makes it more interesting when a gun fails because it immediately dislodges the overwhelming advantage having a gun possesses. Yet, having seen that moment in a number of films lately, I think the device is getting old.

Freudians would probably argue that this would reflect a growing sense of impotence in the American psyche, but I strongly doubt that's the case. I think it's more of a case that it is the least offensive or noticeable of the Deus Ex Machinas a writer can put in. As such it provides a moment of relief or story turn, but when I reflect on it, it seems a little pat. Cheap thrills are hardly ever great art.