*** (out of ****)
Starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Blades, Lucas Black, Miriam Colon, Sam Shepard, Bruce Dern, Robert Patrick, and Julio Oscar Mechoso
Directed by Billy Bob Thornton & written for the screen by Ted Tally, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy
2000 PG13
The ranch way of life is dying in West Texas. Some men still wear Stetsons, carry revolvers, and ride horses. But the land is being fenced off, sold, taken over, and the independent farmers—like the Native Americans before them—are being shoved off in favor of a braver new world. John Grady Cole is still in high school when his grandfather dies and his mother sells the family land. But rather than go quietly into a world of pressed pants, automobiles, and indoor life, he and his best friend Lacey Rawlins decide to ride into Mexico, to find work as cowhands.
So begins “All the Pretty Horses,” based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, brought to the screen by director Billy Bob Thornton, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Sling Blade,” and Ted Tally, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Red Dragon.” Tales of young men striking out on their own for fortune and glory are in no danger of becoming a dead genre. Indeed, many elements of “All the Pretty Horses” are familiar: they find and lose the promised land, John Grady falls in love with the wrong woman, he and Rawlins fall in with dangerous company, and their loyalty is tested by bouts with corrupt law enforcers in Mexico. But unlike many tales that fall into the category of bildungsroman, the boys from “All the Pretty Horses” are striking out not to embrace the future, but to chase a fleeting past. Both the film and book become an allegory for the breaking of boys into men.
John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, both sixteen in the novel, are played by older boys Matt Damon and Henry Thomas. Their relationship is not one of witty banter or clever bickering, but the clipped conversation of young men who have known one another since boyhood. Rawlins is clearly the beta male of the duo, although neither of them will ever admit it. The dangerous company that leads to bloodshed is an even younger boy, who meets them on the road to Mexico, riding a too-impressive horse that they can’t help thinking is stolen. The boy is played by Lucas Black, who made a big splash in “Sling Blade,” and his recklessness with his horse gets John Grady and Rawlins into trouble even after they appear to be rid of him. The promised land is a giant ranch that has been in the same family for one hundred seventy years, where the two young men find work breaking horses. The wrong woman (Penelope Cruz), who captures John Grady’s heart, is the daughter of the land baron (Ruben Blades) who takes the boys in.
Despite succeeding in “Good Will Hunting,” “Dogma,” and an arguably great performance in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” New England pretty-boy Matt Damon is at first an unlikely choice to play John Grady Cole. He adopts a slow Texan drawl just fine, and some of us just can’t help being pretty boys; some who have read McCarthy’s novel might have envisioned a harder, more grizzly young man, but remember, he’s a sixteen-year-old in 1949, and when I was sixteen I don’t think I was shaving yet. The test of being John Grady is in his attitude. In many of his roles, Damon has a tendency to idle like an old Chevy, often with a chip on his shoulder, in need of approval, or out to make a point. In “All the Pretty Horses” he has subverted that tendency in order to keep his performance faithful to McCarthy’s novel. John Grady is a man of true self-confidence, not the artificial kind, and is modest, polite, speaks his mind, fails often but is always willing to admit when he is mistaken.
If he weren’t modest, or if there were no obstacle he couldn’t handle, then the movie might be unbearable. But John Grady is never smug or cocky, and is the kind of man other men are willing to follow. What’s more is that he lives by a code to stick by his friends; he is not just loyal to Rawlins but to troublemaker Lucas Black as well. He understands that true friendship means staying with your friends even when they do something stupid, and even when they have no one to blame for their hardships but themselves. John Grady’s grim gravity applies to love as well as friendship, and when things start to fall apart between him and the boss’s daughter, he treats her and her culture honorably, not selfishly. To him, right, wrong, and the truth are all bigger than human lives and happiness; you’ll see what I mean in the movie. “All the Pretty Horses” tests John Grady’s fidelity to his code, and is a richer movie because he is not completely successful.
Cinematographer Barry Markowitz, who has worked with Thornton on “Sling Blade” and “Daddy and Them,” is true to the old Westerns of John Ford, and gives us wide, sweeping vistas of cloud, sky, and countryside, with mountains and valleys and cacti as far as the eye can see. Screenwriter Ted Tally has kept much of the novel’s laconic Texanisms, and portrays love as an unavoidable, unreasonable force of nature. McCarthy’s novel contains many elements that could not be squeezed into a two-hour feature, including a long tangent about Mexican revolutionaries, many details of cowboy and vaquero life, and the long, repetitive silences inherent in traveling for days on horseback. The book also explores the nearly mystical relationship between a horse and its rider, and the symbolism between the breaking of wild horses and the breaking of John Grady is more explicit. But, despite a few instances early on that look like Marlboro ads, Thornton’s film is a direct reflection of McCarthy’s tone: John Grady’s story is not so much a high adventure as an elegy for a passing era. “All the Pretty Horses” is technically a Western, but the Wild West is gone, leaving no place for the young men who might have thrived in it.
Finished March 30, 2003
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