December 11, 2000 | For a movie that involves roiling passions, explosive violence and calamitous reversals of fortune — not to mention lots of strenuous ropin’ and ridin’ on and off the range — All the Pretty Horses remains a curiously uninvolving piece of work. There is much to admire here, but next to nothing that enchants or delights.
In their efforts to faithfully translate Cormac McCarthy’s much-admired best-seller into a feature-length entertainment, director Billy Bob Thornton (Slingblade) and screenwriter Ted Talley (The Silence of the Lambs) frequently succeed at vividly dramatizing key scenes from their source material. But they offer words without music, prose without poetry, in the cinematic equivalent of Cliffs Notes.
If you’ve read McCarthy’s novel, you will miss the mesmerizing eloquence of his language — Faulkner by way of Hemingway, generously spiced with Tex-Mex patois, only sporadically disciplined by punctuation — and the distinctive cadences of his storytelling. And if you haven’t read the book, this movie will leave you wondering what all the fuss has been about.
On the plus side, Matt Damon gives an effortlessly appealing and persuasive performance as John Grady Cole, a West Texan who’s introduced in 1949 at a turning point in his young life. His grandfather recently has died, his estranged mother wants to get rid of the family ranch, and his broken-down father isn’t inclined to impede the sale. And so, accompanied by his equally discontented best friend, Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas), Cole saddles his horse and rides down to Mexico, seeking a place that “ain’t all fenced in and sold off and played out…” And if he can’t find that, he figures he and Rawlins will settle for steady work on a ranch somewhere.
Early in their journey, Cole and Rawlins are joined by another wanderer: Blevins (well-cast Lucas Black, an alumnus of Slingblade), a scruffy youngster riding a grand horse that almost certainly is stolen. Rawlins thinks the tough-talking, trigger-happy teenager will bring them nothing but trouble, and it doesn’t take long for his worst fears to be realized. After Blevins rides off on his own, however, the two West Texans are free to explore happier trails while employed as horse wranglers by a wealthy Mexican landowner (Ruben Blades).
Unfortunately, Cole makes the mistake of falling for their employer’s beautiful daughter (Penelope Cruz). Even more unfortunately, Cole and Rawlins are arrested as accomplices of the inconveniently trigger-happy Blevins. Bad things happen on their way to a hellish prison. Worse things occur once the two friends are behind bars. And even after his incarceration ends, Cole finds he has more tough life lessons to learn.
Damon and Thomas banter and bicker just like long-time friends, and further increase the credibility quotient by being sufficiently convincing as experienced wranglers. Thomas actually is a native Texan, but Damon, who hails from the Cambridge badlands of Massachusetts, has the slight edge when it comes to moving like someone who has spent a lot of time in the saddle.
Just as important, both actors sound perfectly natural while understating the dryly laconic, artfully stylized dialogue that scriptwriter Tally takes practically verbatim from McCarthy’s book. After being released from prison, Cole patiently listens while someone tells him how much trouble he has caused, then replies: “Well, I’ve been inconvenienced some myself.”
But the star-crossed romance between Cole and Alejandra, the landowner’s beautiful daughter, never catches fire with the urgency you expect from such a Romeo and Juliet relationship, largely because Damon and Cruz fail to generate much on-screen heat. And the movie, as a whole, feels disjointed, elliptical and annoyingly incomplete, leaving the audience to wonder if there will be more depth and texture, or at least a bit more continuity, on the inevitable “Director’s Cut” DVD.
Thanks to the impeccable cinematography of Barry Markowitz, All the Pretty Horses is never at a loss for images that rivet your eye. But all the pretty pictures in the world are no substitute for a drama that touches your heart.
