Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2: Kevin Costner serves up more comfort food for cowboy fans
The second instalment of Kevin Costner’s four-part self-funded western has arrived with more beautiful vistas and traditional cowboy movie pleasures, but its convoluted plot sags when it should soar.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival
You can’t help but feel sorry for Kevin Costner. One moment he was riding high with The Untouchables (1987), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and JFK (1991) and the next he splash-landed with Waterworld (1995). Even though it’s still the best part of the Universal Studios Tour, there’s no doubt it put a dampener on his career.
But now, he’s doing things his own way. Like one of the stoic cowboys he’s so good at playing, he rides in from the mesa, not so much indifferent to fashion and trends but unaware that such things even exist. He made pots of money with Yellowstone (2018-2020) and its spin-offs, and used them to finance a wondrous dream project: a four-part epic western that ignores all the twists and turns of the revisionism of the last 50 years and instead sticks to the trail that heads west to the sunsets, risking the bandits, the lawlessness and the unforgiving beauty of the landscape.
The first chapter was a triumph for those of us who long to see big screen vistas of the old west. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 begins with Mr. Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi) sending out more naive settlers to the nascent western town of Horizon. The town itself is being built to a soundtrack of nickering horses, clanging blacksmiths and the spitting of tobacco. It’s a poor prospect where the only thing that is growing is the cemetery, as one wit observes. There are numerous characters who are approaching Horizon from afar and some who seem to be going in entirely the wrong direction. Sienna Miller’s Frances Kittredge has lost her family to an Apache raid but along with her wilful daughter Elizabeth moves back to Horizon to be closer to her son’s grave. Kittredge’s one-time lover, a Union soldier played by Sam Worthington, heads off to fight in the Civil War, reasoning that if he has to go to war, he wants to do so in a conflict he understands and agrees with. Presumably we’ll see him in Chapter Three.
Luke Wilson continues to lead his wagon train westward towards the town of Horizon, though turns out to be unsuited to the task of lawman when a young woman, Mrs. Proctor (Ella Hunt), finds herself the prey of two rapists. The whole community gives the men little beyond stern looks as she suffers under their combined brutality. As with the TV series Deadwood (2004-2006), the women will have to look after themselves as the men avoid the often fatal confrontations unless it directly involves them. A young sex worker who we last saw abandoning her baby into the care of a Chinese family, Marigold (Abbey Lee), continues to flee a vengeful posse and Costner himself returns, delaying his entrance some 30 minutes, as Hayes Ellison, who gets a job at a cattle ranch keeping the cowpokes in order alongside an obvious psychopath. His performance remains a highlight of the series and one day, when the dust has settled on the saga, it’d be fantastic to see a cut of the film which is just his story all the way through: muttering pithy put downs and tying people to chairs.
If you’ve already sat in the saddle for the first chapter, Horizon Chapter 2 will deliver many familiar delights: comfort food for cowboy fans everywhere. But it does sag when it should soar. The timeline is unclear and multiple events occur in different plots. Some of the performances rely on a very limited repertoire of gestures – a lot of shawl work and dry crying for the women and spitting and wincing for the men. The attempt by the Dances with Wolves (1990) director and his co-writer Jon Baird to correct the western filmic record gives us a subplot of about a family of Chinese immigrants into Horizon (who care for Marigold’s child) and a friendship between Elizabeth and a native American. Like some of the acting, these feel like gestures, but it’s difficult to judge as, even at Chapter Two, it feels as if this story is only just beginning.
The sizzle reel which concludes the film promises further vistas, though the subsequent chapters have yet to be completed. But even with its messiness, Horizon continues to hold a unique place in the cinematic landscape, an ambitious sequence of films, high on their own nostalgia and enjoying their simple pleasures. Although Kevin Costner no doubt wishes to be Hayes Ellison, he actually more resembles Mr Pickering – he’s got us all to go to Horizon based on false advertising with the hope that our enthusiasm will build the film we ultimately want to see.