Just a few months after the first three-hour installment of Kevin Costner’s legacy project had its lackluster premiere at Cannes, his second slab of Western fudge has launched in Venice. There are more snow-topped mountains in Montana, more bars bathed in golden gaslight, more shoot-outs, more lines of wagons moving ever westward ho. Costner obviously loves classic Westerns, including his own — he allows himself a callback to Wyatt Earp — and these are all treasurable, time-honored motifs of the genre. Piling them high over hours and hours does not, however, mean that the result will be all the more classically magnificent. It just means there will be a lot of it, whatever it is.
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What it is, unfortunately, is a collection of anecdotes lying side by side, never cohering — so far, anyway — into the comprehensive panorama of the turbulent making of America that Costner and his co-writer, John Baird, must have envisaged. Like the mesas of Monument Valley, these narrative strands are also immediately recognizable. Sienna Miller’s Frances Kettredge, who lost her husband, son and home during an Apache raid in Horizon: Chapter 1 , is now a plucky homesteader rebuilding her life with her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) in Horizon, an outpost town advertised on flyers as a promised land. The town is actually no more than a collection of tents talked up by property speculators, but with the war between the states laying waste to the Southeast, those wagons keep on coming.
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Luke Wilson is remarkably good as the featured wagon train’s guide, trying to deal with a crime among the aspiring pioneers that is beyond his pay grade or competence. The director himself continues to play Hayes Ellison, a taciturn horse-wrangler who has, as you might say, certain other skills; as an actor, at least, Costner seems to have ingested the essence of what Westerns are supposed to be like. Ellison killed the most egregious psychopath among a clan of murderous brothers, who are now galloping across entire prairies to get revenge; there could be a fun parlor game counting up the Westerns based on this configuration. Meanwhile, Ellison’s erstwhile flirtation, a sassy prostitute called Marigold (Abbey Lee), is hiding out from the same bad dudes, lying in the dirt underneath the bar where she works. What it is to live on your wits.
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There is nothing wrong with revitalizing these familiar plotlines, any more than there is with using stock imagery; the essence of the Western is myth, after all. And, to give them their due, Costner and his co-creators have given each of these old chestnuts a modern twist. Their story of the frontier, for example, focuses on dangers facing women in a lawless men’s world that certainly would not have troubled John Ford. One of the wagon-train women, Mrs. Proctor (Ella Hunt), is effectively imprisoned and repeatedly raped, while her traveling companions turn a blind eye; their collective cruelty defies belief, but who is to say it didn’t happen?
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Costner also, conscientiously and with kid gloves, continues the valiant attempt begun in his directorial debut Dances With Wolves (1990) to redress the genre’s baked-in racism. In the first chapter of Horizon , the White Mountain community of Apache were shown disputing how to deal with the invading “white-eyes”: whether to annihilate or just avoid them, essentially. This time around, the braves seem to have receded to the top of the mountain ridge; instead, we have a different brand of diversity in the Chinese community in Horizon, silently accruing sufficient timber to construct their own teahouse. There is a numbing banality as a representation of one of America’s most significant immigrant groups, but you can hear the loud creak of an effort being made.
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The real problem here, however, is that nothing adds up; there is no structural integrity, no over-arching trajectory, no sense that the various stories weave together to create the saga of the subtitle. There are arbitrary cuts as the stories alternate at random, often with the sense that we have missed some vital information during the in-between bits; it’s that sense of crash-landing in the middle of a scene that you used to have when television stations kept movies running over commercial breaks. Even when single scenes work, they don’t fit together.
Never having been drawn into the stories or invited to warm to anyone in particular, we feel no real urgency even when a knife is being held to the neck of one or other of this plethora of characters; the hours roll by not unpleasantly, but with the dull evenness of cruise control. Only John Debney’s brazenly old-school orchestral accompaniment roils and toils with barely a breather, its innumerable crescendos of a million massed strings failing to compensate for the absence of other kinds of dramatic highs. No expense was spared, obviously: every scene is lit to last forever, every costume beautifully conceived, all the prettiest horses cast and all to so little avail.
Title: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Director: Kevin Costner
Screenwriters: Jon Baird, Kevin Costner
Cast: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Abby Lee, Will Patton, Ella Hunt
Running time: 3 hr 10 mins
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