Kevin Costner’s Earnest Western Returns in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
As with Wes Anderson’s playfully oversaturated Asteroid City, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 has made a name for itself pre-release. Out of context on the internet, its frames seem garish, overcooked, even tasteless. The flushed color for both films is alarming when experienced as furling frames of hot-washed landscapes in trailers that find us between our friends’ posts mid-doomscroll. But the siloed and deliberated delivery of a film has long been a core tenet of cinema (Christopher Nolan invoked on purpose, our most popular martyr for the cause), a portal that ushers us into the director’s world.
Cinematic frames, cinematic sound, cinematic language—they need cinematic staging AKA the theater (or at least a theatrical home viewing) to be experienced. Golden light splaying across a gaping morning gorge just doesn’t hit on YouTube, nor do the falling flakes of snow-blue Montana mountains in a flurry, nor the brushed grasses of vast prairies bent by perennial wind. But in the theater, Costner’s mammoth vision of frontier America can be breathtaking.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1’s plot is anything but straightforward, the film made up of three (arguably four) stories trying to shoulder and set up the narrative weight of a four-part, 12-hour cinematic event well-enough with one movie in order to warrant the rest. It’s spread a bit thin, but not distractingly so if you anticipate the stories as parts of a whole. Through episodic logic, Costner and co-screenwriter Jon Baird balance the film quite well.
It’s 1859 and the stories are split into three locations: the San Pedro River Valley (home to the new settlement of Horizon), the Montana-Wyoming mountain range territory, and Western Kansas on the Santa Fe Trail. In the first, new settlers struggle to fend off Native Americans protecting their land. In the third, we follow a wagon train of new Americans trekking across the country, Costner’s penchant for Western realism making entertainment out of everyday frustrations of the 19th century, like when drinking water is used as bath water and vice versa.
The fourth story concerns the Native Americans occupying the lands near the new settlement, but it isn’t given the time of day. Hopefully future installments will level that out. Costner leads the second story as a bad boy gunman-grifter who can’t shake the ladies, wants help from no one, and goes by “Hayes,” like Costner’s son, who, in a roundabout way, was named after this character. In other words, Costner has been trying to get Horizon made since long before his son was born.
A Megalopolis-sized endeavor for the multi-hyphenate—the only kind he cares to take on—getting the first three parts made has cost Costner $98 million out-of-pocket so far, which has required him to relinquish a lot of his assets. “I don’t need four homes. I’ll risk those homes to make my movies. I want to leave them to my children, but my children will have to live their own lives,” Costner said plainly at the Cannes press conference the morning after the premiere.
Homeric undertakings such as these are the defining career trend for Costner, whose ambition as a director is the only thing that outperforms his charm as an actor. The epic, Oscar-sweeping Dances with Wolves infamously took Best Picture over Goodfellas, setting the filmmaker up for directorial success. But the back-to-back bombs (also of Homeric proportions) that were Waterworld (which Costner more or less directed—he had the power to fire the director, and he did) and The Postman left Costner in the dust. His third, Open Range, marked a strong yet much quieter effort before he left directing behind entirely…or so it seemed. With Horizon, he aims to more than double his directorial filmography and add his first four screenwriting credits to his tool belt.
As the first film he’s directed in 21 years, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 runs right down the middle of Costner’s career obsessions, both in story makeup and the characters he writes for himself. Dances with Wolves, The Postman and Open Range all reside in the American West sans modern civilization with nomadic men (by choice), roaming sweeping landscapes with even more sweeping orchestral scores, combining Western realism with storybook idealism. His first two films also sat at three hours, just like Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (and JFK and Wyatt Earp…the man loves an epic scope).
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