Horizon: not as good when you get there
Kevin Costner's soap opera moseys into town.
Question: Why is it only cowboys “mosey”?
I love a western. Always have. Nowadays I budget for the unpalatable politics of some of the older ones (although that is sometimes often misunderstood by critics, anyway) and take them as fables, origin stories of a country trying to understand itself. And, unlike many, I have quite a bit of time for Kevin Costner in this respect. Even Dances with Wolves, seen now as a towering example of the white saviour complex, is still a film by a man trying to understand his country. Costner has, to some extent, anointed himself long ago as a sort of Grand Scholar of the American Soul. His films can be categorised into two — baseball and cowboys. Even The Bodyguard is just a simple tale of the All American Hero. Waterworld is a western where the Man with No Name has gills.
Costner is one of America’s most obsessive filmmakers. If he was a novelist, his name would dominate the departure lounges of American airports.
But he’s not a novelist. He’s a filmmaker. And Hollywood has its own way of scratching creative itches.
I must admit, I have always been slightly in awe of the sheer hubristic ambition of Costner’s film-making. His stuff is often so hubristic it's difficult to see what the audience might be. Who, I ask myself, worships at the temple of Costner. I have never in all my travels met a member of his church. But then you watch them and you see. His output now is for the tired and beleaguered. He is now the maker of the 3rd great American myth cycle — the soap opera.
So, baseball, cowboys, and soap. That's Costner.
I was sort of looking forward to his Horizon: An American Saga: Part One. I love the idea of any movie having more than one rightful place for the colon. But also I was looking forward to it because you just never know when he's going to do something really good. I still regard Open Range as a western as fine at The Unforgiven (although Clint’s paean to the 70s grit is pure cinema, whereas Open Range does have an odd sort of TV movie feel to it in parts, and is more an homage to the Renown age of Westerns with Randolph Scott). Regardless, Open Range is a modern great of the genre.
Horizon, though, is a bad movie.
It has pretensions of Lonesome Dove, an epic of the story of nation building that had as its backbone a pulitzer prize-winning novel that helped it overcome some of the flaws of its screenplay adaptation. But it has none of the momentum and tightness of Open Range.
Reviews have pulled Horizon up for being a bit too ambitious - boring, even. One review said it was 3 hours of just introducing characters ready for Parts 2 & 3. In that regard, you can see the first fatal flaw of Horizon — it is a TV mini series that has stumbled into your cinema. Not a very good TV mini series, but one as good as the unbelievably popular and equally bad Yellowstone (which I soldiered on through two thirds of a turgid first season before allowing myself to slip soporifically into a place worse than death).
So, Horizon is long (isn’t everything, nowadays), it is boring, but worst of all it has no energy, no grit, no momentum, and it pitches itself not far north of an episode of Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman (only one colon).
The unforgivable stretch of Horizon is the setpiece of the Apache annihilation of a settler's township (the spot that will eventually become the town of Horizon of the title). A town is raised, men, women, and children are butchered, and all with the weight of an Olympic opening ceremony diorama. It is soap opera.
It doesn't help that everything is embalmed in a score that evokes the classic western tropes while at the same time directing every moment of audience emotional attention. This bit is noble. This bit is sad. This bit is some light relief. This bit is sad again. This is noble. This is when the Indians are coming. Nothing is left to chance. Within twenty minutes I was pining to be free of it.
Had it been a TV show, I'm sure the millions of Yellowstone fans would have given it a chance, but without clear indication of when to pause the movie, they may not feel comfortable coming to something not handed to them as a mini series, when it is a mini series to its cold cold bones. But rest assured, if you're looking for something as stupid, boring, condescending, badly written, badly acted, and epic, as Yellowstone, then give it a go.