There’s an enormous amount to describe, but very little to actually say about Kevin Costner’s bedraggled “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2,” the second of a planned four installments in his sprawling, multistranded western, that plays, after “Chapter 1″‘s muted reception in Cannes, out of competition on the final day of Venice. Doubling down on the first chapter’s intermittent triumphs but also on its grievous structural issues, it is an exercise in contradictions: incident-packed yet oddly sedate; replete with characters new and returning, yet largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, running to over three hours, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.
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It’s hardly a surprise that it picks up where the last left off, given the last left off with, essentially, a preview-reel of part two. Viewers bewildered by that montage’s final image — a lingering close-up of a mustachioed Giovanni Ribisi, who did not otherwise appear — will at least have that mystery partially solved when “Chapter 2” opens in Chicago, with Ribisi’s shady Mr Pickering persuading a couple of local rubes to invest in the land-grab scheme that is advertised on all those flyers encouraging settlers to move to the bucolic frontier idyll dubbed Horizon. This all is narrated by Georgie (Aidan McCann) the young son of one of the investors, in a sing-song Scots-inflected accent reminiscent of Anna Paquin’s in “The Piano,” and with a nice line in dry irony that makes it a bit of a shame that we’re never going to hear from him again. Instead, like apparently everyone else, we head west.
As last time, the two best-developed strands are the wagon-train storyline during which the grim travails of Ella Hunt’s Mrs Proctor become the main focus, and the continuing adventures of Sienna Miller’s Frances, whose tentative romance with Union Army officer Trent (Sam Worthington) ends when he goes off to fight. Both these narratives bring some insights to bear on the plight of women in the pioneer west, with Mrs Proctor enduring sexual enslavement following the murder of her husband, to the shamefully complicit silence of the rest of the wagoneers. Meanwhile Frances, disappointed by Trent’s departure (“War is a good refuge for you men who don’t know your own cause yet” she observes tartly) insists on moving back to her burnt-out homestead with her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia McPhail), to await the arrival of her dead husband’s widower brother, whom it is assumed she will marry. When these strands finally converge, in the persons of Will Patton’s gruff good-guy patriarch, and his wayward, willful tomboy daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman), it’s possible to glimpse for a second an overarching plan to the “Horizon” project that is mostly indiscernible otherwise.
Almost everything else is far less well-developed. Costner’s own storyline, involving the building grudge-match between his taciturn gunslinger Hayes Ellison and the vengeful bad-guy brothers on his trail is thin gruel by comparison, especially while he’s separated from his prostitute love interest (Abby Lee) who spends most of this movie hiding in the dirt under the wooden floorboards of a bar/brothel. And as though Costner and Jon Baird’s screenplay can support only one non-white ethnic angle at a time, on this occasion the Native American characters barely get a look in, and their screentime is donated instead to a group of Chinese settlers, led by the (sigh) inscrutable Mr Hong (Jim Lau), who move in next door to Frances, renovate a sawmill, and put up a teahouse.
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Any summary of “Horizon” will comes across as far more coherent on the page than it is on the screen. In reality, it has its stirring, majestic set pieces such as a wagon burning or a barn-dance gunfight, and, courtesy especially of J. Michael Muro’s grand cinematography, lots of gorgeously epic shots of the wagon train wending across bright, arid plains or the settlement that will, we imagine, become Horizon, gradually springing up from the dirt. But too often its best-imagined sequences take place on either side of inexplicable gaps, during which the emotional tempo has changed so completely, it leaves viewers forced to wonder if we somehow missed something. This herky-jerk rhythm only increases as we hurtle towards an ending which, once again without warning suddenly segues into a dialogue-free montage of clips from the forthcoming installment. Actually it would have been so much more useful to have kicked it all off with a quick recap of what happened in Chapter 1; Chapter 2 sees Costner at his most confoundingly presumptuous about our level of detailed recall of the previous film. Even the most assiduous viewer, who has perhaps watched the first film only recently, will still struggle on occasion to identify which particular massacre is being glancingly referred to, or why characters whom we vaguely remember being closely bonded are now on the outs, or vice versa.
The frustration is mainly that Costner’s prowess in staging rousing, old-fashioned genre-western hi-jinks is undimmed on a scene-by-scene basis. When you’re not being yanked into another storyline, you can immerse yourself in this finely detailed world where right down to the fastenings on jackets and breeches, class status and character information is coded into the costuming, and the hopeful desperation of the frontier mentality is embedded into the exceptional production design. (Though perhaps one should pity overworked composer John Debney whose classical saddle-opera score has to soar to a different type of crescendo every five minutes, so its occasional lapse into dubious shorthand, as when the Chinese settlers’ arrival is accompanied by an overlay of Oriental strings, is perhaps forgivable.) But like a modular suite of furniture in which each section is perfectly designed but it’s assembled so haphazardly it barely resembles a sofa, “Horizon: An American Saga – Part 2” is, as a film, fatally hobbled by its ungainly construction. And by the itching sense that the very same footage, quickly reedited for clarity, could have made for three perfectly compelling hourlong episodes of the prestige TV show that “Horizon” should always have been.
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