Western

Horizon, an American Saga: To Each His Yellowstone

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kevin Costner in Horizon, an American Saga: Chapter 1

Can Kevin Costner save the movies? He’s certainly willing to try, even if nobody asked him. Horizon: An American Saga is many things—an epic western, a romantic melodrama, a historical reckoning, an ode to classical masculinity—but above all, it is a wager on the sanctity of the theatrical experience. In the 34 years since Costner captured the hearts of viewers (and Oscar voters) with Dances with Wolves, the landscape of American cinema has changed, with much adult-oriented prestige fare migrating from the expansive frontier of the multiplex to the cozier confines of your living room. Costner himself has played a small part in this, having spent five seasons starring on the wildly popular TV series Yellowstone. With Horizon—which Costner not only wrote (with Jon Baird) and directed, but also financed with $38 million of his own money—he aims to unfurl a long-gestating passion project that restores the big screen to its former glory.

So the bitter and abiding irony of Chapter 1, the first of at least four planned installments in the saga (with the second slated for release on August 16 er, we’ll get back to you on that), is that it feels very much like an episode of television. It introduces a large number of characters and sketches out their preliminary circumstances, rarely affording them anything resembling closure. It also cuts across numerous locations, hinting at a potential intersection of disparate subplots but reserving any such linkage for a subsequent entry. And it concludes not with an exclamation point but with an ellipsis—a frenetic, fairly absorbing montage that comprises footage from the already-shot Chapter 2, a technique akin to the “This season on [X]” stingers that wrap up the premiere of your favorite Netflix or Amazon series. This isn’t a movie; this is a pilot. Read More

Read more

Killers of the Flower Moon: Fail the Conquering Hero

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

Among the most insufferable criticisms lobbed toward Martin Scorsese—not the most insufferable; here will be the first and last time this review mentions the words “Marvel Cinematic Universe”—is that his only good movies are the ones about gangsters. Taste may be subjective, but aside from ignoring the vast majority of the director’s fertile filmography, this grievance neglects the organizational rot that runs through so many of his pictures. Sure, it’s obvious that the suits in The Wolf of Wall Street are just thugs with brokerage licenses, but even when Scorsese isn’t explicitly dealing with lawbreakers, he is routinely wandering halls of power and exploring systems of iniquity. The snobbish aristocrats of The Age of Innocence, the monopolistic bureaucrats of The Aviator, the dogmatic zealots of The Last Temptation of Christ—they are all veritable hoodlums, seeking to impose their chosen brand of moral order upon the world, intolerant of individual resistance.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s latest movie and one of his best, is even less tangential to the gangster genre than his films about musicians or comedians or pool sharks. It doesn’t nominally feature mobsters who say “fuggedaboutit,” but its tale of criminality and corruption occupies the same thematic territory as that of Mean Streets or Goodfellas. Yet where those classics exhibited joy in depicting the mechanics of their antiheroes’ frenzied avarice, Flower Moon finds Scorsese operating in a more mournful register. It isn’t that age has mellowed him—in some ways, this is among the angriest pictures he’s ever made—so much as it’s nudged his focal point. The methods of vice are no longer the primary attraction; what matters now are the consequences. Read More

Read more

The Power of the Dog: West for Success

Jeremy BeckReviews
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog

A man in a black hat riding a horse. A woman with a flower in her hair serving a meal. A sprawling ranch, a glinting sunset, a bottle of booze. These are the artifacts of the Western, one of cinema’s oldest and most durable genres. They are also, in the hands of Jane Campion, raw clay to be modeled and molded, reshaped into new forms both beautiful and angular. The Power of the Dog, Campion’s first feature in a dozen years and arguably the best work of her long, too-infrequent career, treats the Western much like the carcass that one of its characters encounters on his dusty travels; it picks its bones clean and then assembles the harvest into a rich, tantalizing story of cruelty, desire, and retribution. It doesn’t so much upend the form’s conventions as weaponize them to reimagine a new kind of movie altogether.

Campion is hardly the first filmmaker to interrogate the complicated history and inherent stereotypes lurking beneath the familiar tales of cowboys and Indians; it’s been nearly three decades since Clint Eastwood deconstructed his own mythos in Unforgiven, and ever since (not to mention before), countless artists have breathed new, investigative life into that same classic carcass. But The Power of the Dog is especially notable for how it wields the twin powers of absence and suggestion. There are no bloody shootouts (nary a gun is even fired), but the threat of incipient violence still looms over its Montana setting like a storm cloud. There is no sex—an offscreen marriage generates no more visible ardor than a few chaste kisses on the cheek—but the screen nevertheless seethes with unconsummated longing. And there is no tin-starred sheriff maintaining law and order, but crime is still very much afoot. Read More

Read more

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Their Lives Are in Pieces, and So Is the Movie

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tim Blake Nelson in the Coen Brothers' "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

In one of the six vignettes that make up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new Western from Joel and Ethan Coen, a solitary prospector played by Tom Waits spends a good deal of time digging a series of holes near a river. As you watch his methodical work, it doesn’t take you all that long to discern his purpose; even if you struggle to fathom the particular mechanics of his strategy, it’s plain that this silent, grizzled man is searching for gold. But because these laborious digging scenes find the film at its least busy—note that this is another way of saying “most boring”—your mind is likely to wander, and to contemplate the potential thematic connections that must surely link the film’s narratively disparate episodes.

But how? In structuring The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as an anthology, the Coens have invited their audience to engage in a robust, somewhat maddening intellectual guessing game. Maybe the movie is about the tragic inevitability of death; this seems plausible, given that four of our six main characters die, while the other two do the killing. Maybe it’s about the inherent tension between the tantalizing promise of the Old West (manifest destiny!) and the cold reality of a lawless, nascent civilization. Maybe it’s about the perpetual collision between man’s insatiable greed—most everyone we meet craves more of something, be it money, glory, or respect—and his desire for stability and peace. Or maybe, just maybe, the vignettes don’t share any deeper meaning at all. Maybe those holes are just holes. Read More

Read more

The Old Man & the Gun: Hands Up, Please, This Is a Respectful Robbery

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford in "The Old Man & the Gun"

Describing Robert De Niro’s vicious mobster in Goodfellas, Ray Liotta says, “What he really loved to do was steal; I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun also follows a real-life criminal with a genuine passion for robbery, but that’s pretty much where the similarities between the two films end. Never one to tackle genre material head-on—Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was ostensibly about lovers on a shooting spree, but it was really just a collage of pretty Texas pictures overlaid by Malickian voiceover—Lowery paints this story’s true-crime elements with a warm, humanist gloss. What would typically play as a gritty thriller—there’s even a cops-and-robbers angle, with an obsessed detective who makes it his mission to capture this audacious thief—instead unfolds as a leisurely character study of aging and contentment.

Mostly, The Old Man & the Gun is a showcase for Robert Redford, appearing in what is supposedly his final role. He plays Forrest Tucker, the felon who, as relayed in the David Grann article that formed the basis for Lowery’s screenplay, robbed nearly 100 banks over a 60-year span, escaping from prison more than a dozen times in the process. That’s quite the rap sheet, but Redford doesn’t exaggerate Tucker’s legend or puff up his stature. Instead, he delivers a sly and twinkly performance, investing this sundance elder with a strange integrity that’s part-pride, part-grace. Read More

Read more