Thoughts on Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

In 1990 a young movie star directed his first movie. It was a big swing — a historical epic, three hours long, with the star in practically every scene, and much of the dialogue delivered in an obscure language and subtitled. And it hit big, with almost $200 million in domestic box office, twelve Oscar nominations, and seven wins, including Best Picture and Best Director.

You would think a success like that would set its maker up for a lifetime of directorial opportunities. But Dances with Wolves was Kevin Costner’s peak, and the fall was hard thereafter. His earnest acting style fell out of favor amid the ironized movies that defined the 1990s. He starred in unsuccessful epics that became synonymous with bloat and excess, from Waterworld to Wyatt Earp. He directed one of them, The Postman, which was universally derided as messianic hooey. And even his great triumph came to be regarded retrospectively with some embarrassment — it had beaten out Goodfellas, a manifestly superior movie; it was liberal-minded but filled with a mixture of white-savior and noble-savage tropes that progressives felt themselves to have outgrown.

With time, Costner regained goodwill and opportunities. He made one minor but well-regarded western, Open Range. He aged gracefully and took supporting roles. He found a perfect television vehicle as the charismatic patriarch of the Dutton clan on the immensely successful Yellowstone.

But it seems that deep in his heart he wanted to go back, a boat beating against the current, to the version of himself that made that once overpraised but now underrated epic. And that desire to change his legacy has given us one of the most remarkable stories in the movie business right now: The 69-year-old Costner ditched his hit show, spent most of his personal fortune, and even allegedly ruined his marriage in a quest to make just one more big-budget epic set in the American West.

Except that it’s not just another Dances with Wolves; it’s something bigger and wilder. The three-hour running time of his 1990 epic is just enough to cover Chapter 1 of Costner’s new Horizon: An American Saga, which debuted in theaters in June with the promise that Chapter 2 would come later in the summer (though its release has been delayed), while Chapters 3 and 4 are being filmed. This is not some attempt to merely imitate John Ford or David Lean, in other words; it’s an attempt to cram an entire lost career as an auteur of the American West into a single endless epic.

I wish I could report that it’s a glorious triumph, but instead it’s something that almost defies critical analysis. Imagine the first two episodes of an old-school 1980s miniseries, based on a James Michener– or John Jakes–style historical-novel doorstop, except filmed with a cinematic eye, blown up for the big screen, and given more of a movie-star-grade cast. That’s what you have in the first part of Costner’s series: three hours of story that give you a couple of gripping set pieces, including a brutal Apache raid on an Arizona settlement, but mostly is content to introduce its cast and story lines and set up presumed convergences that don’t actually arrive.

So we have Costner himself playing some kind of Western archetype of the good-hearted gunman who falls in with a prostitute (Abbey Lee) and the baby that a former prostitute (Jena Malone) bore to the son of a wicked Montana dynasty before she shot him and escaped. We have Sienna Miller as the survivor of the Apache massacre, Sam Worthington as the Army officer who takes a shine to her, and Danny Huston as his philosophically minded superior who delivers speeches about the tragic inevitabilities of westward expansion. We have Luke Wilson as the leader of a wagon train; Michael Rooker and Will Patton looking familiar in minor roles; various Apache characters arguing about how to fight or make peace with the white man; and various representatives of the Montana clan on the trail of the prostitute and baby.

This is a list and not a plot summary because there isn’t a plot to summarize, just various episodes and incidents, stitched together with archaic-sounding dialogue that sometimes lands and sometimes really clunks. It is slow-moving and self-serious but entirely watchable and rarely dull; I’d rather spend another few hours in its company than rewatch, say, the Yellowstone spin-off miniseries 1883, another recent wagon-train story.

But that comparison speaks volumes: Whatever Costner is making here, it’s not really built for the movies even if its scale demands the biggest screen. Even a multipart cinematic project needs some closure for each installment; imagine if The Fellowship of the Ring had ended without its titular fellowship ever meeting up, and you’ll have a sense of the weird unfinishedness of Horizon’s first three hours.

In the end it’s a movie that asks too much of a normal moviegoer: It’s not our fault that Costner has 30 years’ worth of directorial regrets, and not our responsibility to give him this much time, for this little payoff, to claw those lost years back.