Dan Webster reviews "Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1"

DAN WEBSTER:

Those of us who grew up watching Western movies reserve a special place in our hearts for the genre. And we do so even as, some of us anyway, recognize the many faults implicit in even the greatest of them.

Treatment of women, treatment of the indigenous tribal groups, treatment of the black, Asian and Latino populations, all—over the decades—have been given far less attention than to the standard story of a single man facing frontier hardships and succeeding, or failing, through his own individual efforts—often with a weapon in his hands.

For boys born shortly after the end of World War II, that prototypical man’s struggle was life-defining—at least it was until we began to mature and take an interest in the lives of those whose history has been largely ignored.

During the development of his Oscar-winning 1990 picture Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner must have reached the same level of maturity. Because as he worked from Michael Blake’s screenplay, he managed to buck tradition and go in a different direction.

Yes, the story centers on a white man, an army officer played by Costner, struggling to make sense of his life. Yes, the women (Mary MacDonnell in particular) are secondary to the overall story. But the indigenous characters—members of the Pawnee and Sioux tribes, but especially the characters played by the likes of Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant and even Tantoo Cardinal—are central to the evolution of the film’s white male protagonist.

That feel for a more comprehensive portrayal of the West continues in Costner’s newest film Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, the first 181-minute installment of a planned four-episode series. All are directed by Costner, who not only stars but shares screenwriting credit with John Baird (and story credit with Mark Kasdan).

It's difficult to judge what Costner has accomplished based solely on this first chapter. Maybe, when all is said and done, the overall result will resemble the stab at greatness that Dances With Wolves is. Maybe.

But despite the many powerful scenes that Costner manages to convey, from capturing the majesty of the Utah mountains and plains to exploring the interpersonal relations both of stalwart settlers and the indigenous peoples they are destined to displace, Costner’s film betrays a singular impression: it feels as if he’s trying to do too much at once.

It's as if he sees the so-called settling of the West the way Leo Tolstoy saw Russian life in his novel War and Peace. But as has been proven more than once, adapting a thousand-plus-word novel to the big screen is no easy task.

Costner, whose character—a drifter/horse trader named Hayes Ellison—doesn’t show up until nearly an hour in, tells several stories at once. There’s Hayes and his reluctant teaming with the sex-worker Marigold (played by Abbey Lee). There’s the Army officer (played by Sam Worthington) and his burgeoning romance with the comely widow (played by Sienna Miller). The widow’s own back story involves the massacre of her husband and son.

Then, too, there’s the wagon train, whose leader (played by Luke Wilson) must oversee a diverse, not always amiable group. There’s the posse on the trail of Marigold, intent on returning a kidnapped infant to the abusive family that claims it. And there are the tribal members themselves, half desiring to hide in their mountain lair under the guidance of an elder (played by Gregory Cruz) while half want to join a young renegade (played by Owen Crow Shoe) and fight the white people whom they see as invaders.

And over all this is the mysterious consortium that is beguiling those same westward-bound travelers toward what they believe will be their new heavenly home—called Horizon.

Some of the characters remain mere ciphers, and not all of the plotlines fit together seamlessly. Moreover, the final scenes of Chapter One are an awkward kind of preview of the rest of Costner’s planned 12-year saga. We’ll just have to wait to see how it all fits together, if indeed it ever does.

For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.

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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com/7blog.