Ranch dressing

Thornton, Damon break All the Pretty Horses

By Peter Keough

**1/2 Directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Written by Ted Tally based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. With Matt Damon, Penélope Cruz, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Rubén Blades, Miriam Colon, Robert Patrick, Bruce Dern, and Sam Shepard. A Miramax Pictures release.

HO HUM:Grady (Damon) falls in love in a brief and banal montage with Alejandra (Penélope Cruz).

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses enjoys a reputation that eludes me; I find it a turgid, pretentious, self-indulgent imitation of Hemingway and Faulkner, an adolescent fantasy about cowboys and courage and a man doing what a man’s gotta do. Billy Bob Thornton is a different story. He co-wrote one of the last decade’s great underrated movies, One False Move. He directed one of that decade’s more overrated independent movies, Sling Blade. And he’s always entertaining, if over the top, when on screen, sometimes approaching genius, as in 1998’s A Simple Plan. Put the two together and I’d expect something operatic, perhaps embarrassing, maybe inventive. But not dull.

All the Pretty Horses is pretty dull indeed, with gorgeous cinematography from Barry Markovitz dressing up a litany of macho clichés. Were it not for the flashes of Thornton’s inspiration, or at least idiosyncrasy, and the integrity of the cast, this would have been a movie Robert Redford could be proud of, a beautiful but empty canvas marked with gestures at great themes and towering emotions.

Adapted by Ted Tally, whose fortunes have ranged from an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs to ostracism for Mission to Mars, the story is simple — pardon me, primeval. In postwar southern Texas, cowpoke John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) finds himself sold down the river by his mom, who stole the ranch from her ex-husband (Robert Patrick, who grimaces briefly) and now is selling it to the oil company so she can pursue her vain ambition as a stage actress (in the world of Cormac McCarthy, it seems, the world is divided into whores and horses).

Disinherited, Grady joins up with his buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) and heads to Mexico, the last frontier, in search of work (this is clearly pre-NAFTA) and adventure. Eventually they sign up at the ranch of Don Hector Rocha y Villareal (Rubén Blades), where Grady demonstrates his expertise in breaking horses (a brief but splendid montage) and falls in love (another brief montage, this one banal) with Alejandra (Penélope Cruz), Don Hector’s haughty and highstrung daughter (we know this because she rides stallions bareback). It won’t do to have the help fall in love with the boss’s daughter, even superficially, and so with Alejandra’s draconian aunt (Miriam Colon) pulling the strings, Grady and Lacey find themselves dragged out of the bunkhouse one morning by Federales on what looks like a one-way trip to the penitentiary.

Thornton’s talent shines here, as it does in earlier scenes where the pair get entangled in the events that return to undo them. Back when they crossed the river into Mexico, they joined up briefly with Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black, the boy from Sling Blade, who puts in the film’s best performance), a tough teenager escaping from an abusive home on a horse of dubious ownership. The contrived McCarthy-ite dialogue among the three sounds almost natural, the bonding is believable, and key moments, like Jimmy’s sitting in the mud in terror at a passing thunderstorm, arrest the eye. At times these sequences evoke Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Thornton gets even more daring in the prison scenes and in their aftermath, where he indulges in a little Mexican surrealism à la Alejandro Jodorowsky, including hallucinatory asides of sundrenched chats with the deceased about death (“It ain’t like nothing at all”) and a heavenly chorus of convicts. A penultimate episode in the desert with a police captain taken hostage, a gunshot wound, and a grateful old man is strangely moving, though in retrospect it seems gratuitous. It might call to mind The Wild Bunch, but not for long.

For in the end, despite Horses’ pretense of primality and purity, self-congratulatory platitudes, delivered by no less than Bruce Dern as an honest country judge, prevail. The most compelling moment in the movie’s love story comes when a complete stranger does a tap dance — which suggests that though Thornton and McCarthy may be good judges of horse esh, they are greenhorns when it comes to the stirrings of the heart or the substance of genuine drama. n

Horse of a different color NEW YORK — Intrigue has surrounded Billy Bob Thornton and Matt Damon, and not just about their love lives and diets. It seems to have taken forever for Thornton’s third film, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, to get released. And his second film, Daddy and Them, has also gone unseen, though it’s long been finished (as has his relationship with that film’s star, Laura Dern, whom he dumped for Charlize Theron, his co-star in Pushing Tin and now his latest wife). All in all, a lot more has been going behind the scenes than does in the movie itself, and in the meantime he has shown little to fulfill the promise of his Oscar-winning (Best Adapted Screenplay) Sling Blade back in 1996. “Well, I did several movies in a row, right?” says a gaunt Thornton, his good-old-boy charm set off by his Metallica T-shirt and a set of rosary beads given to him by a friend while he was in hospital recovering from a nutritional problem. “You know, right after Sling Blade, I did [as an actor], gosh, Armageddon, and Primary Colors, and Pushing Tin and A Simple Plan and all that stuff. I kind of booked myself up and, plus, you know, I want to be a director only to see a vision. I’m not particularly someone who just wants to look for the next directing gig. I’d rather do my own things. “With All The Pretty Horses, however, I loved the book; it’s the kind of thing that I might write anyway, not nearly as well. I couldn’t pass it up. I did direct another movie called Daddy and Them in between, a smaller movie, but we’ve always been holding that back to put it out after All The Pretty Horses, so it’s been sitting there ready for almost two years. So that’ll come out after, but it was actually shot between Sling Blade and this. We don’t want to compare it to the hoopla surrounding the bigger movie, you know, overshadowing. I want to give it a chance, it’s basically what it is.” Fair enough. But about that vision thing — isn’t Miramax, Horses’ distributor, known for taking editing liberties on films it nds overlong? And didn’t Matt Damon in Talk magazine remark that the four-hour version (the final cut is under two) of the lm was the best movie he’s ever been in? “Well, the four hours wasn’t a cut,” says Damon. “It was an ‘assembly.’ But a lot of people have been asking about that. I think it was kind of like a misunderstanding. The assembly of The Rainmaker was like six and a half hours, you know? Usually, the assembly of a movie is everything that you’ve shot, and you kind of put it in and you look at it and you decide what the movie is and what you can lose, and so I just, I loved every scene that we shot in the movie. But, I don’t know, I mean, I think the cut we have now is the one that everyone felt good about. And it’s the whole movie, there’s nothing really cut out except for a couple of scenes that were kind of extraneous. And I was just proud of all the work that was in it, and I’ve never felt this way about anything I’ve done before. And it’s just my own opinion, and anyone’s welcome to disagree with it, but it’s the first time in my life that I don’t really care.” Thornton points out that this controversy about a four-hour cut is just another example of how rumors get started. “It was in the papers recently that I was in the hospital because I only eat orange food. I was on some entertainment show once because they were doing ‘What The Stars Eat,’ and they said every day the first thing I do is I get up and go to the Sunset Marquis and I eat papaya. That’s true. So that became, ‘I only eat orange food.’ Well, I do eat orange food in the morning, but then I eat black food at night.” — PK