S Craig Zahler (2015)
The writer-director S Craig Zahler’s first feature is categorised on IMDB as ‘Adventure, Drama, Horror’. It’s those three things in ascending order of magnitude: Bone Tomahawk is the most visually gruesome Western I can remember having seen. The main plot nods to John Ford’s The Searchers – ‘Four men set out in the Wild West to rescue a group of captives from cannibalistic cave dwellers’ (IMDB again) – but the violence is enough to suggest that Zahler means to out-Tarantino Tarantino. A sequence that sees one of the captives, a deputy sheriff, dragged from his cell in the caves, stripped, scalped, castrated, cut apart and consumed is especially excruciating. Running this a close second is a later scene in which the Native American troglodytes slice open the stomach of the posse-leading sheriff, and shove a hot metal flask into the wound. (The deputy sheriff is conscious during a fair part of his torture and the sheriff through all of his.) While these descriptions suggest a mindless blood-and-guts fest, the effect of other elements in the film is to make it hard simply to despise and deplore Bone Tomahawk. There were a couple of other moments of extreme violence that caused me to laugh but I knew it was anxious laughter – that I wanted to pretend I wasn’t being horrified by what I was seeing. Craig Zahler, in spite of all the mayhem he inflicts on his characters and on the viewer, never seems to revel in it.
Bone Tomahawk is, for the most part, well scripted and acted. The small town where the main characters live has the too obviously ironic name of Bright Hope but the dialogue is literate without being meta-fancy and written for convincingly different voices. The lines are delivered naturally and remarkably audibly. Zahler is determined to take his time (the film runs 132 minutes) to describe the interactions of the searchers and convey the arduousness of their journey. Benji Bakshi’s cinematography captures the arid vastness and perilousness of the landscape. The audience isn’t allowed, any more than the protagonists, to see far ahead or round corners, which helps to sustain tension. Yet although the direction builds up a strong sense of the near-futility of the posse’s enterprise, this comes to be eclipsed by a sense of the futility of the film. Revisionist Westerns have become the generic norm so it’s hardly a novel insight to demonstrate the violent fragility of frontier life. Major characters who might well have survived in an earlier period of Western movies fail to do so here. That might seem to signal a modern realism but Craig Zahler, in order to avoid a complete wipeout of individuals in the story, still has to push beyond the bounds of credibility in devising the escape of those who do get out of the film alive. (The cannibals, although they are extraordinary and frightening images, are not individuals.) Because Bone Tomahawk isn’t eventually revealing about the movie territory it covers, it ends up being ‘original’ only in the exceptional graphic detail of its violence.
I was in two minds about whether to go and see this film. What decided me was the presence of Richard Jenkins in the cast: we’d just watched on DVD his Emmy-winning work in the HBO mini-series Olive Kitteridge. It was such a wonderful performance that it seemed daft to pass up another opportunity to watch this great actor, even though doing so would mean sitting through a lengthy Western. As usual, Jenkins is quietly masterly. He creates a complete character in the elderly Chicory, the lonesome, loyal backup deputy sheriff who volunteers to join the posse. Its other three members are the sheriff, Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell); the smart, white-suited ladies’ man John Brooder (Matthew Fox); and the foreman Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson), whose wife Samantha (Lili Simmons) has been abducted by the cannibal tribesmen, along with the deputy sheriff Nick (Evan Jonigkeit) and a drifter called Purvis (David Arquette). Kurt Russell is facially expressive; he finds much more in Sheriff Hunt than he did in the bounty hunter he played in The Hateful Eight. As O’Dwyer, who has a badly broken leg even before the posse sets out, Patrick Wilson gives a more conventional performance but he’s nonetheless effective. I’d never seen Matthew Fox before (he’s best known for his television work in Lost): as the dandyish, vaguely sinister Brooder, Fox is vocally thin in the early stages but his characterisation gains depth and Brooder’s death scene is emotionally powerful. Lili Simmons’s gestures and delivery struck me as too modern. A solemn, rather beautiful song called ‘Four Ride Out’, written by Craig Zahler and Jeff Herriott, plays over the closing credits: the New York Times rightly described this ‘frontier-ditty parody’ as ‘worth staying seated for’.
3 March 2016
