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USA 2000
Directed by
Billy Bob Thornton
117 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

All The Pretty Horses

No doubt as a result of his Oscar-winning debut, Sling Blade (1996), Billy Bob Thornton was able to raise a considerable bankroll for this his second film, a retro-modern Western set in the late 1940s. Thornton, an Arkansas boy, clearly loves Western mythology but despite being a quality production his film is curiously shapeless and, at times, narratively opaque.

Adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy now best-known as the source of No Country for Old Men (2002) the story tells of John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) a young Texan who finds himself without a home after his mother sells the ranch where he has spent his entire life. Heading to Mexico with his best-friend, Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas), to make a new start, the two young men find that South of The Border they do things a lot differently than in Texas.

Whilst being considerable shorter than Thornton’s first cut which was four hours long All the Pretty Horses suffers from a remarkable lack of shape. Relatively early in the piece a third main character appears, Blevins (Lucas Black who had starred in Sling Blade) a cocky teenage with a hot temper and a horse of such high calibre that Cole immediately realizes that it is stolen.  Evidently Blevins and his horse are going to play an important role in the plot and indeed, they do, but exactly how I was never clear.  Suffice it to say that after some typical Western hi-jinx in which Blevins loses his horse and then disappears from the narrative for a while, they all end up in some horrible Mexican prison, an outcome which overlaps with the other main narrative strand of the film: Cole’s illicit romance with the daughter (Penélope Cruz) of a wealthy Mexican rancher (Rubén Blades). 

Thornton’s primary aim seems to be to portray, as apparently did McCarthy's novel (it was the first volume in a trilogy that also includes ‘The Crossing’ and  ‘Cities of the Plain'), some larger insights into the mythic male hero of the American West but the segue from Western to prison movie, High Plains Drifter (1972) to Midnight Express (1978), is disorienting and there is not enough in Cole’s (or Damon’s) amiable character to substantiate such a reading . And then, to make matters worse, after tying off Cole’s odyssey the film keeps going as he basically retraces his steps back to Texas to no particular dramaturgical gain.

Even the film’s look is confusing as it hybridizes classic Western landscapes with touches of the modern world of the late 1940s. In short, with Thornton’s film we never really know where we are or why, an outcome which clearly Thornton who won an Oscar as the writer of Sling Blade but who passed the writing job here to Ted Tally, would not have intended.

 

 

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