[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Six - Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

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2024-05-20 14:00:13

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2024-05

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With the first week of the festival wrapping up, and the half-way point here, Cannes is finishing up its big-ticket items. Today and tomorrow bring new films from Kevin Costner and David Cronenberg, along with the starry Donald-Trump-biopic The Apprentice.

One of the most hotly-sought tickets of the second-half of the festival was for the premiere of Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (★★★☆☆), a personal passion project that puts Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis to shame. Costner is literally betting the farm on this epic series of westerns that will reportedly expand to include a total of four films. The second film is already locked and will release later this summer. Costner is flying back from Cannes to the set of the third movie.

Costner reportedly walked away from Yellowstone to work on the film, investing his substantial paycheck from the beloved series into the movie. He has also seemingly mortgaged his own ranch to realize his vision. With all this in mind, as different as Coppola and Costner might be from one another – and with all due respect to Ron Howard visiting the festival with his documentary Jim Henson Idea Man – it is perhaps instructive to compare and contrast Horizon and Megalopolis.

Both are movies from legendary filmmakers that had to struggle to secure distribution, existing in tension with the realities of modern Hollywood. Indeed, both movies have an elegiac feel to them, mourning the end of a certain kind of filmmaking. Coppola’s Megalopolis is an ode to Hollywood’s abandoned futures, to the ways that Coppola tried and failed to reinvent the form and the business. In contrast, Horizon looks to Hollywood’s past, a love letter to a bygone mode of filmmaking.

People often decry the death of the western, but that’s not entirely accurate. In reality, there are plenty of westerns released in cinemas on a regular basis. Indeed, there is a solid argument to be made that both Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes are westerns. Stepping outside of the genre space, there have been plenty of high-profile westerns over the past decade, from Bone Tomahawk to The Hateful Eight to The Revenant.

However, there have been relatively few straightforward westerns, movies that unironically embrace the form and the genre, rather than deconstructing or analyzing it. Horizon stands out as a particularly retro western. The plot, for example, owes a great deal to John Ford’s The Searchers, unfolding in the wake of a brutal attack by indigenous warriors. The film features sequences of characters circling wagons and even a sex worker who seems to have a heart of gold (Abbey Lee).

Even the cinematic language harks back to the westerns of the 1950s. Costner and cinematographer J. Michael Muro opted to shoot the film in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, a format that was introduced in 1953 and was the same ratio employed on The Searchers. The film even shot in Monument Valley, the classic western location mythologized by Ford. Horizon feels like something of a cinematic throwback. They literally do not make them like this anymore.

Horizon is visually breathtaking. There’s a tendency to dismiss computer-generated effects as an artform of themselves, and it is very clear that Costner did use some computer-generated imagery making Horizon. However, it’s exhilarating to see a major big budget release like Horizon that takes such pride in shooting on real locations. Horizon looks better than many of the year’s more expensive blockbusters, and I will be checking out the IMAX screening tomorrow morning just to soak it in.

However, the film does have a number of significant issues. As enthusiastic as Costner might be for the western tropes that he embraces in Horizon, the film feels weirdly out of time. It honestly seems like Costner hasn’t changed that much as a storyteller since Dances With Wolves, more than three decades ago. This is somewhat uncomfortable in the film’s handling of the indigenous population displaced by the European settlers.

To give the movie credit, Horizon goes out of its way to make it clear that the sort of violence that populated westerns of the 1950s was relatively uncommon. More than that, one of the smarter decisions that Costner makes with this first film in a presumptive four-film franchise is to juxtapose the opening and closing action set pieces in such a way as to underscore that no group within the American West held a monopoly on brutality. Still, it’s a little clumsy and retrograde.

The other – bigger – issue is that Horizon is very much a “part one” movie. To give Costner credit, the film is candid about this; the opening title card reads Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 and the film closes with what is effectively a “next time” trailer for the second film in the series, which will release just six weeks after this one. However, it is also clear from watching Horizon that this isn’t just the first part of a two-part movie event. It’s the first of four presumed chapters.

The narrative is sprawling, cutting across the western United States. The ensemble is huge, and most of the cast is introduced quite disconnected from one another. Indeed, it’s notable that it takes Costner about an hour to appear on screen as cowboy Hayes Ellison, despite giving himself top billing. Although the film runs over two-and-a-half-hour, the issue is that it feels like most of the cast have barely been introduced, let alone made any meaningful progress on their journeys.

Of course, the counterpoint to this criticism is that this may be why Costner is releasing the first two parts in such close proximity and it’s possible that the second chapter will take all of these already-established characters and let them have actual arcs. Still, this makes it very difficult to judge Horizon on its own merits as a big summer release. It isn’t that it feels like a half a movie, its that it feels like a quarter. In its own way, this is the most modern aspect of the film: it feels like a television pilot.

But, all of that aside: man, it’s good to have Costner back. If nothing else, Costner can direct the hell out of a western. Indeed, the action sequences that bookend Horizon are genuinely thrilling set pieces with a real sense of scale and spectacle. In this context, it feels like a good thing that Costner hasn’t lost a step since the 1990s. His action is clean, clear, and easy to follow, making great use of physical space.

More broadly, there is a sense of Costner as one of the great poets of the American Dream. Horizon is more than just a “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” western. It is also a reflection on the American Dream. Throughout the film, characters pass right by the eponymous riverside settlement, including the drifter who is the focus of the movie’s first stretch (Angus Macfadyn) and an entire platoon led by First Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington).

This is because the settlement doesn’t actually exist. As Colonel Houghton (Danny Huston) explains, it is an idea. It is something that can be glimpsed by those pure of heart, who recognize the potential of this great land. Horizon contends -that America is an idea more than a concrete place, an aspiration rather than a reality. The film stops just short of suggesting a “shining city on a hill”, but it is notable that there’s a recurring emphasis on hill imagery, and of characters trying to ascend.

However, there is something more than that as well. Within Costner’s filmography, it probably makes sense to compare Horizon to Dances With Wolves or Open Range, but the film also reflects the thematic concerns of Waterworld and The Postman, Costner’s back-to-back apocalyptic westerns. In Horizon, America is constantly on fire. The Civil War rages in the distance. The film opens with a settlement burnt to the ground. This the birth of America, but it also a moment of existential crisis.

This speaks to something inherently optimistic in Costner’s vision of America, getting back to the film’s relative lack of cynicism. Costner understands that the world is on fire and that the nation is collapsing around him, but that does not diminish his romantic belief in America. To Costner, because America is not real, it cannot be destroyed. Communities can be razed and wars might be fought, but the beauty of America, to Costner, is that there’s always still time to begin again.

While Horizon arrived with a great deal of attention and publicity, one of the joys of any film festival is that of discovery. There is something magical about the film that you just squeeze in between two bigger-ticket items that manages to genuinely surprise you. It’s often a film you’ve never even heard of, maybe from a filmmaker with whom you are only fleetingly familiar. Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight (★★★★☆) was just such a film.

Sister Midnight is the second feature film from Kandhari, coming almost two decades after his debut with Bye Bye Miss Goodnight. Although Kandhari has kept busy directing short films and music videos, it is a shame that it took so long for Sister Midnight to come together. This is an incredibly charming work from an inventive director who feels like he should have a much larger body of work to his name.

The plot of Sister Midnight is fairly straightforward. A young bride named Uma (Radhika Apte) finds herself disillusioned inside her arranged marriage to Gopal (Ashok Pathak). She has moved from her village in the countryside to Mumbai to be with him, and very quickly discovers that marriage is not everything that she expected or wanted it to be. At the same time, Uma finds herself undergoing a strange transformation; her skin is whitening, her stomach is rumbling, she can’t sleep at night.

To reveal too much of Sister Midnight would be to rob the movie of its magic. Indeed, the only real criticism to be made of the movie is that it arguably spends a little too long building to the reveal of what it is actually about. Nevertheless, it’s a film with a lot of charm and wit – powered by a dark sense of humor and by a wonderful lead performance from Apte. Nevertheless, it’s Kandhari’s direction that is the real star.

This might be a somewhat reductive take on the film, but Sister Midnight is best understood through the question, “What if Wes Anderson directed an Indian monster movie?” Kandhari draws heavily from Anderson’s style and aesthetic: static, symmetrical composition; insert shots; a soundtrack of mid-century country and rock’n’roll; limiting the actors’ movements to one dimension within the frame, from left-to-right or front-to-back; and even some delightful stop motion effects.

It’s a genuinely eccentric film, and refreshing take on a somewhat tired genre that finds a new way to approach familiar material. It helps that this is all grafted onto a character study that would be compelling on its own terms. As Uma, Apte strikes the perfect balance of making the character sympathetic without ever making her particularly likeable. The audience understands Uma’s frustrations and anger at her circumstances, even if the character is occasionally thorny and unpleasant.

The result is a wonderful little film that arrived to little fanfare and managed to impress. It’s a genuine surprise. In its own way, it’s as much a demonstration of the potential of Cannes as something like Horizon. With a bit of luck, the positive reception to the film will put Kandhari on the map and will mean that it won’t be another two decades before he gets the chance to make his third film.

At film festivals, sometimes it’s the films that you aren’t aware of that surprise you. However, sometimes it’s a movie that manages to not only deliver on the promise of its filmmaker’s talent, but which also manages to surpass one’s expectations of it. Such is the case of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (★★★★☆) which premiered in the festival’s late-night strand and played phenomenally well. It might just be my personal favorite film of the festival so far.

Cannes has a reputation as a very respectable film festival that screens prestige plays and austere projects like The Girl With the Needle or The Damned. However, one of the biggest surprises of this trip has been the strength of the festival’s midnight strand. There is something about watching pulpy schlock like Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In and The Surfer with a crowd of several thousand people who are very firmly on these movies’ wavelength.

The Substance is a similar sort of vibe. It’s Fargeat channeling Cronenberg-as-Kubrick for a delightfully gnarly and stylish body horror that manages to tap into fear both universal and specific. This is a film about the idea of hating one’s own body, but also about the way that the male gaze commodifies and objectifies the female body. It’s bold, vivid, and loud. It is also extremely gross. In other words, The Substance is the good stuff.

The film is build around aging star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an Oscar-winner who has reinvented herself as a fitness icon. However, on her 50th birthday, her manager Harvey (Denis Quaid) decides that Sparkle is past her sell-by date and seeks to replace her with a younger model. A chance encounter at a doctor’s office draws Sparkle to the eponymous miracle cure, a treatment that allows her to create a younger version of herself, who she names Sue (Margaret Qualley).

“You are one,” the disembodied voice that supplies the medicine keeps reminding Sparkle. In order for this system to work, Elizabeth and Sue need to find “a balance.” Elizabeth can only live as Sue for a week, before transferring back into her old body. However, over the course of the film, Elizabeth and Sue find themselves at odds with one another and in conflict over control of their bodies. The situation very quickly escalates, and the pair find themselves drawn in a dark direction.

Moore is genuinely wonderful here. It’s a shockingly brave performance from an actor of her age, particularly a woman. Moore is a Hollywood legend, one of the icons of the 1980s and 1990s, and so it’s a bold choice for her to make a movie that is so explicitly about what that feels like three decades later. To put it frankly, the involvement of Demi Moore lends The Substance a sort of prestige and cachet that it wouldn’t have with a lead who was less of a movie star.

However, there’s more to the casting than that. Moore is playing with her own image as a celebrity who has grappled with ageing in the public eye: dating Ashton Kutcher as an older woman, relaunching herself as a sexy 40-something in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. It’s remarkable to see Moore make a movie that is so candidly grappling with that transition. The Substance asks Moore to be literally and emotionally naked, and she commits. The result is one of her best performances.

Moore has a more than capable partner in Coralie Fargeat, who broke out with her previous film, Revenge. Fargeat is an extremely visceral filmmaker, which is what you want from somebody making body horror. Through the use of close-ups, inserts, and exceptional foley work, Fargeat has a distinctive directorial sensibility that makes her movies tactile. Watching both Revenge and The Substance, there is a strong sense that one could touch those movies – and they’d probably be sticky.

The Substance looks gorgeous, with particular credit due to Stanislas Reydellet's production design, Benjamin Kracun's cinematography, Emmanuelle Youchnovski's costuming, and to the entire team responsible for the movie’s practical effects. Just like Revenge, The Substance pops off the screen, with bold stylistic choices, clean symmetrical framing and genuinely striking imagery. Fargeat boldly riffs on Kubrick’s The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey while making a grimy little horror.

It's also worth acknowledging the supporting turns from both Qualley and Quaid. Between The Substance and Kinds of Kindness, Qualley is having one hell of a festival. There is something to be said for Qualley’s generosity as a co-star in both movies, understanding that she’s there in a supporting capacity. Quaid, on the other hand, goes all-in on a delightfully demented performance of pure id. His venal manager also gets one of the most memorable introductions in recent memory.

The Substance taps into the most universal fear of the body horror genre, the realization that the self and the body are not always the same thing. It does this through a cogent exploration of the exploitation of the female body. Fargeat leans incredibly hard into the male gaze during the first half of the movie – Margaret Qualley’s ass might be credited as fourth lead – only to beautifully and monstrously subvert that in the film’s demented final stretch. It’s glorious.

The Substance is a substantial accomplishment.

Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –