Nathaniel Bell
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 ends with a trailer. Or, more precisely, it concludes with a series of vignettes that gives the audience a “preview of coming attractions” for the next installment of the planned four-part Western chronicle, due in August. The sequence presents wordless clips from scenes we haven’t watched yet, featuring a few characters we haven’t met yet, venting emotions we haven’t felt yet. It’s one of the most awkward closers in recent memory, right up there with Babylon’s “magic of the movies” montage. And it handily pinpoints the biggest problem with Kevin Costner’s costly epic: Even at three hours, it’s only one-fourth of a movie.
Produced at great personal expense to Costner, who also co-wrote, directed, and stars, Horizon is a return to the kind of myth making that marked the 1990s, when movies like Titanic, Braveheart, and Costner’s own Dances with Wolves routinely won Best Picture while scoring huge financial returns. (Going back further, one could find inspirational roots in silent, building-an-empire epics like The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse.) There is something brave in the attempt to renew faith in the Western at a time when the genre has proven to be box-office poison. But bravery alone does not a good movie make, and Horizon is an odd, unsettling mixture of the solemn and the risible, the corny and the sublime.
The saga begins with an unnamed builder surveying a plot of land in an unnamed valley. (The majority of the film was shot in Utah.) He is laying the first foundations for the town of Horizon, where all the characters will presumably converge. Set during the first year of the Civil War, when settlers who weren’t in uniform were migrating to the West, the film is about the selling of the American dream, and the people who were drawn out West in pursuit of that dream. Among the dense quilt of characters are a tough frontier woman (Sienna Miller), a sensitive Union soldier (Sam Worthington), a determined wagon master (Luke Wilson), and a psychotic son of an outlaw family (Jamie Campbell Bower) who is in pursuit of a woman (Jena Malone) whose infant son was stolen at the outset of the saga. And then there’s Hayes Ellison, played by Costner, a weathered horse trader who speaks softly and carries a big six-shooter, which makes him particularly attractive to the local prostitute with a heart of gold (Abbey Lee). Meanwhile, a waning tribe of Apache warriors watches as their land is overtaken by the “white-eyes” from the East.
The unwieldy narrative is flecked with exciting scenes of a familiar variety: a harrowing Apache attack on the fledgling township of Horizon at night, a horsebound pursuit over hill and dale, a tense standoff that ends on a satisfyingly violent note. But these are interruptions in an otherwise lugubrious drama, bedecked with too many characters and storylines. It’s telling that Costner and his co-writer, Jon Baird, intend to release the entire saga — provided all four of them get made — as a miniseries. The scope screams cinema but the rhythms are strictly TV. This is the passion project that Costner left Yellowstone for, and it is he himself — the star, if not the director — who remains the biggest draw. It remains to be seen whether the loose ends will be tied up neatly in subsequent chapters, but the truth is that the picture, like a tired-out horse, cannot stand on its own feet. It limps when it should gallop.
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