Movie review: ‘Horizon' is love letter to Western

Arguably once the most popular form in American cinema, Westerns have been on a slow, steady decline since at least the 1960s or ’70s, with only occasional flagging efforts at relevance.

That makes Kevin Costner’s latest film, “Horizon: An American Saga,” a kind of gift for aficionados. It plays as though Costner is trying to personally, individually fill in the void of missing Westerns by making one movie that counts for six.

“Horizon,” which Costner began developing back in 1988, is intended to be a multi-film opus, with the director and star teasing that he wants to follow up with as many as four parts should they prove financially feasible.

That isn’t likely to happen, however. “Chapter 2,” which is already in the can, was planned for release in theaters Aug. 16, but was scrapped after a disappointing audience response to this first film.

“Chapter 1” certainly includes enough plot strands — a gunfighter who gets pulled into a blood vendetta; survivors of an Apache assault living at an Army fort; a wagon train headed West — to fill out several installments.

“Horizon” isn’t a revisionist Western, but Costner lets certain ambiguities come to the forefront. The Apache as depicted in this film are not simply a faceless menace. They have their own factions, and an early argument among them is among the most interesting scenes in the film.

There are more white characters by sheer volume in “Horizon,” but this is still a Western that openly acknowledges that indigenous peoples had good reason to not be enthusiastic about white settlers.

There’s a telling moment when, after a bloody Apache assault, we get a shot of an Apache woman looking for her husband among the returning war party and finding only an empty horse. That opening raid is chillingly echoed in the film’s last major action sequence, as a group of white trackers perpetuate equivalent, genocidal violence on an Apache village.

“Horizon” is structured less like a traditional screenplay than like a phone-book-sized novel. To say this movie takes its time would be an understatement. The film ambles around, growing more expansive as it goes, and even at its extended length there are narrative elisions, jumps where it feels like our genre expectations are supposed to fill in the gaps.

For instance, Sienna Miller and Sam Worthington’s characters suddenly develop a romance in the final hour of the movie that seems to be motivated simply by the fact that they’re the two prettiest people on screen.

It’s hard to tell if these are debilitating problems, because “Horizon” is only half a movie at the moment. The film literally ends with a montage of scenes to come in “Chapter 2,” and a feeling that the narrative is really only getting started.

Taken as part of a larger whole, “Horizon” may very well be a sweeping masterpiece. Taken as an individual movie, it’s sprawling and undisciplined.

But within that sprawl, there are so many wonderful things. Costner has always been essentially a meat-and-potatoes director, but one who knows how to pull out a big flourish when it’s really needed.

At the end of a particular shootout sequence — probably the best scene in the movie, an almost Tarantino-esque dialogue exchange that the audience realizes will end in bloodshed before the characters do — Costner cuts to a shot of a character reflected upside down in a water trough, and it’s the kind of bravura stroke that movies were made for.

“Horizon” has more than a few of those master strokes, all delivered with aching sincerity. There are moments here that recall John Ford in their naked, open sentimentality, like a sequence where a little girl cuts flowers out of a quilt to gift soldiers being sent off to war.

Shamelessly corny? You bet. But I teared up, as I did at many moments in the movie, which attempts to resurrect the aching, often bittersweet sincerity of classic Hollywood westerns, and their dream vision of a mythic American landscape that probably never really existed.

This is unashamedly a passion project for Costner. He poured his heart and soul and a lot of his money into it, and has constructed it as a love letter to the genre.

Costner constructs his set pieces with real finesse. He gives juicy roles and clipped, effective dialogue to a virtual galaxy of guest stars.

The film basically plays like Costner laying out a long buffet of Western stuff, all of it carefully crafted, some of it corny, much of it beautiful.

It’s all a bit much — a buffet that stretches on and on and on. I got my fill and then some. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t eager to come back for more.

C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.

At a glance

What: “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1,” rated R

Director: Kevin Costner

Starring: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi

Running time: 181 minutes

Rating: ★★★½