For anyone worried that “Megalopolis” will be the only risky, expensive late-career epic from a Hollywood legend to premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival, breathe easy. With “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” (three more parts are planned), Kevin Costner has you covered.
The Oscar winner for “Dances With Wolves,” which accompanies his fourth feature film behind the camera, arrived at the film's premiere at the Cannes festival on Sunday as calm as a cucumber, wearing sunglasses, a wry smile and a neat mustache, but when he accepted the gala After the audience's prolonged ovation, Costner was visibly moved.
“I'm sorry you had to applaud for so long for me to understand that I should speak,” he said during brief remarks inside the Grand Lumière Theater after the applause subsided. “I think movies are not about their opening weekends. It's about his life. Approximately how many times are you willing to share it. And I hope you share this movie with your loved ones, with your children. I feel very lucky. I feel so blessed. And there are three more.”
After catching up on the first episode of “Horizon,” which hits U.S. theaters June 28, deputy arts and entertainment editor Matt Brennan and film editor Joshua Rothkopf tried to embrace it. Read their conversation below.
Matt Brennan: Josh, if the old saying of “one for you, one for them” is still true, then “Horizon,” the four-part western that followed (and ultimately conflicted with) Costner's hit TV series “Yellowstone “, is one in which he has been accumulating the fiscal and reputational capital for his entire life in Hollywood. And boy, does he spend it.
Running three hours for Chapter 1 alone, with plots originating in the Arizona desert, the Rocky Mountains and the plains of western Kansas, populated by characters equivalent to an army regiment, “Horizon” is, logistically if not formally, every inch. the equivalent of Francis Ford Coppola's “Megalopolis” in wild (deranged?) ambition. Unlike so many dumb movies, TV shows and beach reads of recent vintage that employ the adjective “American” as a marketing ploy, “An American Saga” here points out the true scope of Costner's vision, which encompasses Native Americans. , the pioneers who supplant them, the Union soldiers who protect them, the outlaws who attack them and the black, Mexican and Chinese workers, without whose work the American saga would have long since stopped.
They all converge on the city of Horizon, more idea than place, promoted on flyers and distributed by Eastern economic interests, but ultimately barely resolved; The few who have tried have seen their homes razed to the ground by Apache Indians whose lives and livelihoods they have disrupted. For now, however, we are scattered to the four winds, following a mother and her daughter who are among the only survivors of the latest attack and who are taken to recover at a nearby federal fort; gunslinger Hayes Ellison (Costner), who becomes embroiled in a revenge plot spanning several territories; and Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), the reluctant leader of a westbound caravan. Many other threads are introduced, some of them quickly and often bloodily finished, others barely a wave for now, to the point that Chapter 1 concludes with what can only be described as a preview of the rest of the saga. This is not just Costner's “Megalopolis.” This is the “Lord of the Rings” of him.
And inexplicably I liked it. More precisely, I found myself returning to the capacity for trust I cultivated in my days covering television. I'm invested enough in the arc of many of the characters, particularly Miller's Frances Kitteridge, in a budding romance with union lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), to see where the project goes from here. And I'm intrigued by the decision to use this lonely, miserable outpost, or the journey to it, as a lens through which to view the full set of social and political problems facing America in the 19th century (and today ). As to whether distributor Warner Bros. really expects general audiences to see and recommend this for so little payoff, that's another question. But luckily, I'm not compensated enough to take the time to respond.
So, what do you say? Is “Horizon” the crowning achievement of Costner's career or his cowboy Xanadu?
Joshua Rothkopf: Come back, Michael Cimino, all is forgiven. I mention the late director of Heaven's Gate from the 1980s because there is already a Xanadu Cowboy, one still struggling to graduate beyond his status as a famous Hollywood bomb and movie. damned. But we didn't know how good we had it: at least “Heaven's Gate” was filmed by the brilliant Vilmos Zsigmond and attempted some great ideas and form.
“Horizon” is television. I mean that literally, although I obviously can't prove it. It has dramatic hits every 50 minutes or so: a raid, a shootout, an orchestral explosion. “Chapter 1” feels like an improvisation of the first three episodes (along with a brief preview of the next few moments at the end) and a stylish Cannes premiere. It makes sense, Matt, that your “trustworthiness,” developed from covering television, allows you to connect with it on a deeper level than I do. For me, he's a pretender in a festival full of the opposite.
If “Horizon” is television, what kind of television is it? I can't help but be reminded of James Poniewozik's recent essay for the New York Times about what he called Mid TV, or “prestige TV you can fold your laundry on.” It's, you know, very good. “Horizon” is absurdly over-plotted and populated with redundant characters, giving it an epic “scope” that aspires to an EL Doctorow novel but is not justified, at least for now. (Charitably, it's one of those shows your friends would recommend to you with the caveat that it takes a few episodes to “get going.”) You choose your favorite character from a decent and unexceptional cast; For me, it was the Danny Huston exhibit. -heavy colonel who says things like “This is how they will reason in the face of fear” and waits for them to turn around.
Time passed. It probably helped that I love westerns. More problematic are some of “Horizon’s” banal formal decisions. Don't you have any problems with the uniformity of the look and color palette under professional lighting? Those silly fade-ins between scenes? The methodical editing that cuts everything into a pabulum-like television mince? I never thought Costner had a visual style to begin with, but at least on “Dances With Wolves,” he had cinematographer Dean Semler, who also did “The Road Warrior” and “Dead Calm.”
Did you feel like you were watching a movie? I wanted to check my email.
Sienna Miller in “Horizon: An American Saga.”
(Cannes Film Festival)
Brennan: Categorizing “Horizon” as television would explain its aesthetic, which reminded me of a trend that dates back at least to “Game of Thrones”: setting otherwise bland films with reverse shots on spectacular cliffs and dazzling vistas to distract from the lack of visual style.
But, just as on television (a medium for writers, after all), I found myself drawn into an internal discussion about the narrative and ideological possibilities of the “Horizon” structure that kept me engaged even when everything started to look like the home screen of my laptop. Unlike the more focused and gritty period westerns that have dominated the genre in recent decades, like James Mangold's “3:10 to Yuma” or Quentin Tarantino's “The Hateful Eight,” this one has melodrama, romance, action and even setbacks. comedy everyone milled together. I appreciated that traditionalism, which suggested to me the old “cavalcade of stars” approach to great moviemaking, even if the project's star power and serialized nature suggest prestige (or “media”) television.
For me, the much thornier problem, and one that is difficult to evaluate in a multi-part narrative, is “Horizon’s” handling of its Native American characters. In a film set in the 1850s and devoutly committed to classic Hollywood symbols, the presence of indigenous characters and languages from the opening frames of “Chapter 1,” as Apache children watch the father-son settlers from a vantage point rocky, believing (mistakenly) that it is just a “game” – is a promising indication that Costner intends to present the pioneers as outlaws in their own right, stealing native lands by legal means.
By the end of the film, however, I began to worry, and not just because the established Native characters lack definition, like the Kitteridges or Costner's Hayes Ellison. While “Horizon” develops Native characters primarily in relation to the political crisis they face, the “white-eyed” Anglos have love (and sexual) lives, religious organizations, and business concerns.
It reminded me of a line in the movie in which an Irishman in the Union forces says: “We don't make our history, any more than they make their climate.” In other words, from Horizon's point of view, the Anglos have families, while the natives have war; The Anglos have history, the natives have time. I can only hope that the description of the Apache characters will be deepened in “Chapter 2”, scheduled for August.
So now I've moderated my praise. Did you find any redeeming qualities in him?
Rothkopf: A difficult question, my friend. Let's talk about the writers' medium for a second. As you say, “Horizon” encompasses a lot of tones, but would any show writer have spent their first three hours compiling them in such a lifeless way as when this happened? We're talking about the development of at least 20 main speaking roles through impressionistic haggling, none of these plot threads interconnecting (at least so far).
It's a lot of film, I just wish it was a lot of feeling. We never get to meet the Kitteridges before a raid on their farm wipes out most of them. Wouldn't that have helped? It seems perverse to ask for a three-hour piece of entertainment to further connective tissue, but that's where I am with this.
I share your concern about the portrayal of Native American characters in the project, and the solution should be to give them more screen time, not, as we sometimes hear, have white characters use the term “indigenous,” anachronistic to Talk of the Century XIX. It would be better to depict racism honestly, not soften it.
Positive? I liked it when Luke Wilson appeared as the leader of a caravan leading a group of pioneers through the Kansas Territory, a group that includes a couple of crazy Brits who assume their traveling companions are their servants. The “Idiocracy” actor is an expert in slow-burning frustration; If it had been boiled down to a comedy, he probably would have enjoyed it more (speaking as someone who thinks Costner's best Western is 1985's “Silverado”).
And I know there was at least one person at Cannes who loved “Horizon,” although perhaps for different reasons: Francis Ford Coppola.
