Movie Review: Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1’

Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1 has attracted all kinds of attention, but not for the reasons that actor-hyphenate Kevin Costner would prefer. 

Even before the premiere of the first “chapter” (when was this phrase ever associated with a movie?), the film was being reviewed not for its plot, acting, or direction, but for its budget—or, more specifically, Costner’s budget.

A director friend of mine insists that its rumored expenditure has been distorted—it’s amortized over the four films projected rather than this first one. But whatever the correct amount (I’ve seen ranges from $38 million to $100 million), it was evidently enough that Costner felt compelled to sell one of his properties to help finance the series.

Speaking of “series,” Costner’s involvement in Horizon ended up being so intense and protracted that he decided to forego appearing on the last season of his long-running TV show, Yellowstone.

All of this is beside the point. Costner’s money is his to spend and no concern of yours or mine. To the extent it matters at all, it is whether the box office for the first installment in this “American Saga” allows the remaining ones to be seen first in theaters (Costner’s preference) or to be streamed at home.

Ah—that’s the rub.

Though Costner might have looked to John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann for guidance on how to fill a magnificent Western landscape, he seems to have gravitated more towards the multi-character, multi-plot P.T. Anderson 1999 movie Magnolia—only not in that film’s three-hour running time, but over the three remaining in his series, too.

The ideal audience for this kind of project—patient, willing to follow characters over time—is not sitting in a theater, but in front of a suitably large home theater projection screen. Maybe that’s why “Chapter 1” did not perform up to expectations, leading the second part to be delayed past its August 16 premiere date.

Evidently, Costner’s production company, Territory Pictures and Horizon's distribution partner New Line Cinema, hope to grow the audience for the second installment through widespread exposure in the next few weeks, including on PVOD and Max.

Perhaps more than any star today, Costner has found the western a congenial genre. Silverado provided him with the first signature onscreen time, and Dances With Wolves briefly made him the king of Hollywood, with Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

Wyatt Earp and Open Range continued his fascination with this form as old as Hollywood itself. And, when his career hit a trough a decade ago, it was a small-screen modern western, Yellowstone, that thrust him back squarely into the forefront of Hollywood again.

It took the actor 35 years—even before he started work on Dances With Wolves—to begin bringing this new sprawling work to the screen. With Horizon, Costner and co-screenwriter Jon Baird want to tell a story unlike any the actor has tried before.

Promotional men, farmers, gunslingers, soldiers, gamblers, prostitutes, and Native Americans all contest a narrow space along Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley, starting in 1859, a couple of years before the Civil War. In a sense, this convergence of different groups on the frontier represented the first American “clash of civilizations.”

The plot contains so many threads that Costner himself doesn’t appear onscreen, as grizzled horse trader Hayes Ellison, until nearly an hour goes by. Worse, so many characters are introduced before being quickly shuffled off to the next segment that keeping them all straight becomes confusing at times. Viewers may find themselves wishing for longer glimpses of the more recognizable other actors (e.g., Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Michael Rooker) in the large cast.

However much money Costner poured into the movie, viewers get their money’s worth.

Shot mostly in Utah, the vistas—low-angle shots of the sky, open plains and mountain ranges—are as sweeping as anything in John Ford’s Monument Valley oaters. Some sequences—including 45 minutes of a family withstanding an Apache attack—are breathlessly tense.

Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of continental expansion, titled his history of the western movement The Winning of the West. But in this first installment of Costner’s saga, few viewers will regard anybody in this struggle “winning.”

Far from being “wide open spaces,” this land was already occupied, and entailed the displacement of those already there and the shock and alienation of those who, in oncoming, unstoppable waves, moved in.

Native Americans, of course, lost their lands. But settlers lost family members in every conceivable situation (natural disasters, Indian attacks, homesteader-cattle baron conflicts); soldiers saw too much corruption and violence to hold onto their innocence about government’s good intentions; and even opportunists and bullies learned not to trust their good fortune for very long.

As the Baird-Costner screenplay makes plain, debate and division even within each side often further complicated this struggle for the American interior.

In extended dialogue rendered in subtitles, young Native American warriors angry at white seizure of their lands burn with indignation as tribal elders warn of the dangers of massive retaliation. On the other hand, soldiers trying desperately to keep a tentative peace bemoan the continuing wagon trains that make this well-nigh impossible.

Chapters 1 and 2 of Horizon will premiere in early September at the Venice International Film Festival. I hope industry observers who have written off this ambitious saga will use the opportunity to see it on the big screen to rethink any urge to call it “Kevin’s Gate.”

Whatever its flaws in marketing and execution, Horizon is an honorable attempt to tell the true story of the American West in all its complexity, with skill and love. If it doesn’t find its audience in 2024, it surely will in years to come, if given the chance.

Quote of the Day (Kevin Costner, on ‘Broken People’)

"Broken people say awful things and do incredibly absurd things." —Kevin Costner, quoted in David A. Keeps, “57 Minutes With Kevin Costner: Two New Moves for the Quintessential Decent Guy Movie Star: A Step Into Racial Politics, and Playing a Grandfather,” New York Magazine, January 26-February 8, 2015

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Tin Cup,’ As Russo Sizes Up Costner’s Handicap)

Roy “Tin Cup'”McAvoy (played by Kevin Costner): “Okay, so how do I do it? Therapy, I mean, I mean, wh—how do I start doing it?”

Dr. Molly Griswold (played by Rene Russo): “Ooo-kay, Roy. Well, in parlance you might understand, just kick back and let the big dog eat.”

Roy: “Suppose there's this guy, and he's standing on the shore of a big wide river, and the... river's full of all manner of disaster, you know, piranhas, alligators, eddies, currents, shit like that... nobody'll even go down there to dip a toe. And on the other side of the river's a million bucks, and on this side of the river... is a rowboat.”

Molly: “Mm-hmm?”

Roy: “I guess my question's this: What would possess the guy standing on the shore to swim for it?”

Molly: “He is an idiot.”

Roy: “No, see, he's a helluva swimmer. His problem's more like why does he always have to... rise to the challenge?”

Molly: “He is a juvenile idiot.”

Roy: “You don't understand what I mean by the river.”

Molly: “Roy, we're talking about you, and what you like to call your inner demons—that human frailty you like to blather about—not some mythopoetic metaphor you come up with in a... feeble and transparent effort to do yourself credit.”

Roy: “You mean you're going to make me feel lousy?”

Molly: “No.”

Roy: “I came here to feel better. I mean, what kind of therapy is...”

Molly: “Roy, Roy, Roy, you don't have any inner demons. What you have is inner crapola, inner debris... garbage... loose wires, a few...[laughs] horseshit in staggering amounts!”— Tin Cup (1996), screenplay by John Norville and Ron Shelton, directed by Ron Shelton

Boys gave her the cold shoulder in school. Too tall, it seems, and, for a long time, burdened by a full-torso brace to deal with scoliosis, with the whole experience adding up to such misery that she dropped out of high school. That didn’t stop a modeling agency from signing her when she was seen at a Rolling Stones concert. When modeling petered out, she took up theater—not to mention intensely studying literature and even Christian theology—before becoming a more striking presence in her new profession: actress.

Rene Russo celebrates her 60^th birthday today. Her work at the height of her career, from roughly Major League to the millennium, has been a cause of celebration for cinephiles, and her subsequent dimming status something to lament.

Maybe Russo’s height (5 ft. 8 inches), while a handicap with insecure boys, worked to her advantage on the big screen. It took someone of her stature to stand up to—to turn around, really—the strong-willed but often wayward men played by her male co-stars: not just Costner, but also Tom Berenger, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, John Travolta, and Pierce Brosnan.

“Pretty girl…ugly swing,” marvels one of Roy’s baffled friends as Russo’s Molly, much against her better judgment, takes her first lessons from the golfer with “horseshit in staggering amounts.” No matter: if Roy can put up with her awkwardness on the links, she can see past his self-defeating instinct to go for broke, in golf and in love.

In the studio system of the Thirties and Forties, Russo, with writer-director Ron Shelton as her Preston Sturges, could have taken her place beside Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, and other bent goddesses of the screwball comedy. In her two most recent efforts, the Thor movies, her luminous presence was incidental to the struggles of its muscled mythic Nimrod. So much the worse for Hollywood in the 21^st century. Pleasure is all the more golden for being so fleeting—even the joy in watching Russo work.

This Day in Film History (Baseball Classic “Bull Durham” Scores)

June 15, 1988—Make up any list of the greatest baseball films and the greatest romantic comedies, and one movie will likely appear on both: Bull Durham, which premiered on this date 20 years ago and promptly became a popular and critical hit.

The movie marked the passage of several talents coming into their own: stars Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins—and, most significant for its eventual success, I would argue, writer-director Ron Shelton, who captured the anxieties and idiosyncrasies of minor-league players so well because it reflected his own experience in the game he had quit 15 years before.

Bull Durham strikes me now like one of those “Folly Floaters” that Yankee reliever Steve Hamilton used on nonplussed hitters in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: A lazy pitch that sneaked up on you and was a hilarious wonder to behold (so long, of course, as you weren’t at the receiving end of it).

To their immense credit, critics got it about Shelton’s offbeat take on love and the Great American Pastime, as his screenplay netted both the New York Film Critics Circle and L.A. Film Critics Association Awards. 

To its shame, Hollywood didn’t, giving the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay instead to Rain Man—hardly a bad film, by any means, but one that, when you get right down to it, never deviated far from its road-film and buddy-film genres. 

(Even odder, Sarandon was never nominated for her career-defining role as Annie Savoy, the community college English instructor who makes it a point to take a new player under her wing, so to speak, each year.)

In contrast, I think it’s safe to say there was no baseball film quite like Bull Durham beforehand, and there’s been none since then. 

(In fact, the odds are high against it: no less an authority than Shelton himself believes that nowadays his seminal work would only see the light of day as an indie, and even in that instance getting it launched would be dicey, because of that market’s heavy reliance on foreign sales.)

Consider the other major baseball films that appeared in a five-year span from 1984 to 1989:

The picture whose success probably helped get Shelton’s project greenlighted was the Robert Redford film The Natural in 1984. Like Kevin Costner’s other significant baseball film made only year later after Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Redford movie appeals heavily not only to the mythic and nostalgic elements of the game, but also to the longed-for connection between fathers and sons.

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, based on the Eliot Asinof account of the “Black Sox” betting scandal in the 1919 World Series, for all its finely wrought and historically accurate detail, follows a straight-through narrative—owner Charles Comiskey’s greed, the players’ fateful decision to bet (or, in the case of third baseman Buck Weaver, not to bet but not to inform), and the legal fallout.

David Ward’s Major League had the dubious distinction of following the far superior Bull Durham. Its fine cast could not surmount a painfully pedestrian plot whose twists could be guessed at within 10 minutes of the opening credits.

Shelton’s script, in contrast, threw out the conventions of the baseball film. There’s no real-life hero, such as in Pride of the Yankees; no American Pastoral (the Durham Bulls’ home games are in a small city ballpark that everyone walks to); and, most of all, no Opening Day and World Series. Quick – summarize the plot in a sentence. (Didn’t think you could!)

Instead, it’s built on a series of terrific scenes that highlight the players’ flakiness: the wild fastball of Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh; the pitcher’s mound conference involving Nuke’s jammed eyelids, a live rooster to take a curse off a glove, and “what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present”; and Nuke’s misinterpreted lyrics of “Try a Little Tenderness.”

And there are also some of the most famous monologues in film history, notably Annie’s opening “Church of Baseball” speech and Crash’s summary of his 21 magical days in the major leagues, or “The Show” (“You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains”).

Pitchers as a class are so flaky that Nuke is hardly an exaggeration. Any list of baseball characters is bound to include ball-addressing, mound-landscaping Mark “The Bird” Fidrych; reliever Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky; and perhaps the wildest eccentric of them all, Rube Waddell, who, when he wasn’t delayed for games because of drunkenness or playing marbles with street urchins, would run out of the stadium, mid-windup, the second he heard a fire engine.

In his madcap reverence for the strikeout (pronounced “fascist” by Crash), Nuke most resembles Roger Clemens, who has named all of his children with the letter “k”; in his taste in exotic underwear fashions (“The rose goes in front, big guy,” deadpans Crash), he appears to have inspired Jason Giambi.

I don’t believe the three principals have ever been better, despite Oscars they earned in other films. 

Costner is best at his loosest, as Shelton sensed not only in casting him for this but also in his fine golf film, Tin Cup. 

Sarandon’s role as Annie may have been the most significant sexy older woman role since Mrs. Robinson, and it was criminal that she was not even nominated for a role that called on her to be by turns funny, alluring, rueful, maternal and smart. 

Robbins’ dim bulb of a rookie was so convincing that I had trouble for a long time imagining him as anything else.

There is an undercurrent of sadness in the film, typified by the sequence when Annie bids goodbye to Nuke and Crash is released. The two realize the full truth now of Annie’s remark that “The world is not made for people cursed with self-awareness,” and the kindred spirits’ recognition of this draws them close together at last—and brings this classic to its inevitable conclusion.

(As luckless as Crash and Annie are, it’s nothing compared with the real-life manager of the Durham Bulls at the time of the film’s release, Grady Little – yes, the same poor guy who, as manager of the Boston Red Sox, lost to Joe Torre’s Yankees in 2003, then lost his job with the Los Angeles Dodgers to the same Torre this past off-season. “There’s no crying in baseball,” Tom Hanks famously proclaimed in A League of Their Own. Also, I might add, no fairness or justice.)