A range too far
Mark Steyn
Open Range
124, selected cinemas
The last Kevin Costner movie I liked was Tin Cup, an amiable 1996 comedy about a golf bum all the more agreeable for its scuffy human scale, at least when compared with all the three-hour futuristic dystopian nightmare stuff he was cranking out at the time, So. when I first heard about Open Range, I thought, `Great! Another golf comedy! The broken-down golf pro's back giving driving lessons to bored housewives.'
Sadly not. Open Range is a western, Costner's first since Dances With Wolves. In the old days, when Republic Pictures put out 15 horse operas a week, a western was just another movie. But these days every western has to be iconic, and, when Costner's directing, every iconic western has to be uber-iconic. In Open Range, Costner plays Charley, greying and weathered. and Robert Duvall plays Boss, greyer and more weathered. They're two ol' cowpokes — Ireegrazers' who roam the range with their herd, feeding and moving on. But it's 1882 and times are a-changin'. One-horse towns like Harmonville are springing up, where the guy who owns the one horse treats the neighbourhood like his own personal fiefdom, and freegrazers are just mangy old varmints to be roughed up and sent packing. When Baxter, a mutton-chopped Oirish bruiser played by Michael Gambon, sets his men on Boss and Charley's boys, cows and dog, they decide to set things right.
As cowpokes, Charley and Boss don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk, lope the lope and, if they don't get to poke the poke as often as they might wish, when ol' Charley heads into town and finds the doctor's assistant is played by Annette Bening, he gits a-hankerin' for mebbe givin' up his wand'rin' ways.
On the other hand, there's an awful lot of talking the talk. Costner filmed Open Range near Calgary — big-sky country — and the endless vistas seem to have seeped into his script-editing. The prairie goes on forever, and the horizon goes on forever, and the sky goes on forever, and the scenes go on forever, in unhurried continuous takes. The sort of things other directors communicate with a glance are spelled out in capital letters.
Big country: `Man could git lost out here.'
How about that Annette Bening! 'Woman like that make a man think about settin' down roots.'
Don't cheat when you're playin' with yer pardners: 'Man's trust is a varble thing. Button. Don't wanna lose it fer a han'ful o' cards.'
Both Charley and Boss are loquaciously taciturn. Even though the script has been purged of every indefinite article and most pronouns, and any word endin' in `ing' drops the 'g', a 70-minute western goes on for almost two-and-a-half hours.
Craig Storper based his screenplay on a novel by Lauran Paine, and I'll bet the original didn't make such a meal of it. Lauran Paine is the author of not only Open Range but also Pinon Range, Oxbow Range, High Ridge Range, Thunderbird Range, Dead Man's Range and Range War. Few writers have such an impressive range. Apart from those, he's also given us Gathering Storm, Killer Gun, Gunman's Legacy, Border Town, Border Country, Moon Prairie, Thunder Pass, Thunder Valley, Rain Valley, Ambush Canyon, Cache Canyon, Lynch Law, Buckskin Buccaneer, Rogue River Cowboy, Six-Gun Atoners, The Outcast, The Horseman, The Homesteaders, The Mustangers, The Rawhiders, The Bandoleros, Arizona Ambush, Dakota Deathtrap, Montana Trail, Dark Trail, Vengeance Trail, Apache Trail, Trail To Trouble, Trail Of The Freighters, Trail Of The Sioux, Trail Of The Hawks, Trail Without End and hundreds more. And when you're rattling off a book every couple of weeks I can't believe you're overly concerned about burdening it with iconic status.
But Costner is determined to turn it into art. There's the excessive visual style: at one point. Charley looks through a window, and I noticed (living in a brokendown old homestead myself) that it's the authentic bubbly, blurry, wavery 19th-century glass. Nice touch. But in the next 15 minutes Costner gives you so many shots through the wavy glass that the attention to detail becomes a poseur's tic. There's a scene where the doctor's assistant serves tea to Boss and Charley and they can't get their gnarled old fingers through the handles of the china cups. Lovely moment: you understand that wanderin' cowboys can always go a-whorin', but that the daintiness and domesticity are far more mysterious. Alas, Costner hammers the china tea service symbolism into the ground right up to the closing credits.
When the movie eases up on the self-conscious artiness, it's an enjoyably square western. Costner revives the ornery old coot role and gives it to the late Michael Jeter, who scampers about like Walter Brennan and Gabby Hayes rolled into one. The heroes are too cool to do anything livelier than spit out the odd gob of tobaccy, so it helps to have some whiskery old-timer ahootin' an' a-hollerin'. Likewise, Costner has unashamedly taken the best bits of Shane, High Noon, My Darling Clementine and rolled them together very effectively.
Despite the presence of Miss Bening, when Costner directs Costner, the real love interest is himself, playing yet again the brooding loner haunted by his past. As he tells Annette, 'I bin places, I done things I'm not proud of.' He's not just talking about Waterworld and The Postman, but about all the men he killed in the Civil War. The themes of the movie — the vulnerability of civilisation, a soft society's dependence on hard men, a free people's willingness to rise up in their own defence — seem especially timely after the Spanish election. And Costner's best work in the film is the marvellous shootout. How can two men take on an entire town? Because, as Charley explains beforehand, half the guys you're up against don't want to be there, half of those remaining don't know how to use their guns properly. For anyone who knows what he's doing, the odds are always better than they appear. That too seems very topical.
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