Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Pretty Horses’ never quite hits its stride

Billy Bob Thornton's film of Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" plays like the coffee table book version of the novel. It's a string of gorgeous pictures whose visual impact doesn't nearly resonate with a potency equivalent to the book's. Too bad, because Thornton obviously took the project seriously, is sensitive to the cadences and music of McCarthy's spare, laconic language, and gets a performance from Matt Damon that has a couple of nice things going for it. One is his expression of constant watchfulness. Damon's character, John Grady Cole, is older here than in the book. But there's an American combination of venturesomeness, opportunism and romanticism on his face as he responds to the fact that his recently deceased father's Texas ranch has been sold out from under him by lighting out for Mexico with a good buddy, Henry Thomas's Lacey Rawlings.

It isn't that Damon's Cole wants to wander the world in search of adventure, although he gets more than he wanted. Rather, he wants a new Eden to feel connected to. He's a man of the earth, reflected in his instinct for horses. He knows how to gentle them with murmuring reassurances before saddle-breaking them. In fact, few films depict in as much detail the working life of a ranchhand. Horses connect him to the earth and its forces, and Damon is persuasive in his scenes with them. Cole thinks he's found the paradise he craves when he and his pal arrive at a Mexican ranch about as far from the border as his Texas hometown, now shorn of opportunity, is on the US side. When the owner asks who the leader is he replies that there are no leaders, that the two are equals, friends.

Although he later is accused of crimes, especially by himself when he thinks he has violated his code of honor and loyalty, his biggest offense is that he is as insensitive to the fact that things are done very differently in Mexico as he is sensitive to horses. The horses and what they represent count for a lot here. So does the romance that flares up like a brush fire between the young cowboy and the ranch owner's educated upper-class daughter, played by Penelope Cruz. It's at this point that the film flattens out for the simplest and most inescapable of reasons. While Cruz is a beauty, there's little heat or chemistry between her and Damon. They seem merely to be going through the motions.

That shortfall, and much of what follows, designed to present Damon's chivalric young cowboy as an Arthurian knight of the earth, who wants to be able to feel connected to it, registers as honorably intended and often visually arresting, but essentially hollow. We don't feel the would-be cowpokes pushing off from any cumulative weight of lives spent in a isngle place when they leave a Texas that has cut them off from what they want. The dynamic, once they hit the road, and especially after they meet Lucas Black's runaway (several years their junior and as game and gusty as they come, but a born hard-luck magnet), feels just right, Black's twangy neediness being part of the reason.

What's onscreen in this "All the Pretty Horses" isn't meretricious or plasticized. But neither is it enough. To paraphrase Andre Malraux, it invokes, but it doesn't always supply, doesn't course strongly enough with the book's themes of blood and earth and dislocations. We miss a certain ominousness following the naive but stout-hearted buckaroos like a dark cloud across the Rio Grande. Also the weight of a murderous legacy of nearly a century of US-Mexican border wars. I'm not among those who see McCarthy as a latter-day blend of Faulkner and Mark Twain. With its lyrical and in some cases even mystical presence of the horses, and their link to a longing to connect to the natural world, "All the Pretty Horses" has its share of flights and depths and the archetypal American yearning for centeredness. But they're best accessed by reading the book.

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