[COLUMN] Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga is an Old-Fashioned Western for a New Era | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is a mess of contradictions, a series of competing and conflicting impulses that never really cohere into a convincing statement, but remain strangely compelling.

Horizon is undoubtedly a product of Costner’s singular vision. He serves as co-writer, director, producer and lead actor on the four films. The result is a breathtakingly old-fashioned classic western, one devoid of even the introspection of John Ford’s later work like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Cheyenne Autumn, but which has neatly sidestepped six decades of the genre’s evolution to end up with a structure close to prestige television. It is truly remarkable. It is almost an avante-garde dad movie.

In interviews promoting Horizon, Costner has repeatedly pointed to How the West Was Won as a formative influence. As a seven-year-old kid attending a birthday party, Costner stumbled into a screening of How the West Was Won playing in a Cinerama dome. “It was something real about that movie and I never left my seat,” Costner explains of the experience, “it had an intermission and I never left my seat.”

How the West Was Won was a massive commercial success, the highest-grossing movie of 1963 behind Cleopatra. However, it was also somewhat stale. “Everything in this latest feature on the king-size Cinerama screen is a dutiful duplication of something you've already seen in anywhere from one to a thousand Western movies in the past 60 years,” opined Bosley Crowther in The New York Times. The following year would see Sergio Leone reinvent the western with A Fistful of Dollars.

How the West Was Won was not a single narrative of westward expansion. Instead, it was a collection of five vignettes from three different directors (including John Ford) stitched together with narration from Spencer Tracy. The obvious subtext was that the myth of the American frontier was so vast that it could not be captured on a single canvas, an idea literalized through the movie’s format. The movie was designed to be projected in Cinerama, a method requiring three projectors.

Horizon is an extension of that idea. As with How the West Was Won, Costner isn’t telling one cohesive story against the backdrop of the American west. He seems to be trying to cram every possible form of classic western into the framework of this four-film epic. Indeed, there is so much to be dutifully set-up in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 that the end result feels less like a movie and more like an extended set of introductions.

A few of the movie’s threads spin out of the eponymous settlement: the initial claim on the land parcel, and the murder of those settlers by Native Americans; the subsequent building of a town on that same land, resulting in another bloody massacre; this leads to a romance between widowed survivor Frances (Sienna Miller) and Union soldier Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), and a revenge western about scalp hunters led by Tracker (Jeff Fahy).

However, there are also major threads that are completely unrelated to the settlement, at least by the end of this first movie: a woman named Lucy (Jena Malone) fleeing her abusive husband James (Charles Halford); a grizzly old cowboy named Hayes Ellison (Costner) who becomes a fugitive with sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee); and a wagon train pushing westward under the supervision of Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). It is a lot of movie. However, it is a lot of very traditional movie.

In interviews, Costner admits that he has little time for revisionist westerns. When Vanity Fair asked whether Costner paid attention to “the evolution of the western in movies”, Costner very simply responded, “No.” Insisting that filmmakers “don’t have to put a spin on the West to make it dramatic”, Costner suggested that he had difficulty engaging with postmodern takes on the genre, “It is just like, does it spin me out? Does it take me out?”

Horizon is an unexamined western. The film’s two inciting incidents involve violence against the settlers by the indigenous population, a throwback to an old-fashioned sort of western storytelling. As director, Costner doesn’t hesitate to pair off his 69-year-old leading man with a 37-year-old romantic interest, even if he frames the inevitable sex scene – in classic Costner style – as what Jesse Hassenger has described as “Dutifully Transactional Costner Sex.”

However, there is also something undeniably appealing in Costner’s nostalgia. Horizon is shot on digital rather than film, but it looks gorgeous. Costner shot much of the movie in Utah, utilizing Monument Valley, a location made iconic by John Ford. With a reported budget of $100m, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 looks better than many of the year’s more expensive blockbusters. It is wonderful to see a movie of this scale using real locations.

At the same time, there is something interesting bubbling beneath the surface. As the basic premise suggests, this is Costner’s grand statement of the American frontier. Costner is one of the grand poets of the American experience in mainstream cinema, an avatar and an embodiment of the nation’s ideals. Even setting aside the western genre for a moment, is there any other actor as closely associated with baseball, “America’s pastime?”

As a filmmaker, Costner lacks the introspection that defines the other great cowboy actor and director of his generation, Clint Eastwood. Costner’s Dances With Wolves and Eastwood’s Unforgiven won the Best Picture Oscar only two years apart, only the second and third westerns to win the prize, but their perspectives might as well be separated by decades. Unforgiven is a deeply cynical piece of work, while Dances With Wolves is oddly romantic.

Of course, there is a certain brutality to Costner’s westerns. Horizon begins with two separate massacres on the site of the eponymous settlement. Dances With Wolves begins with John Dunbar (Costner) riding into the middle of a firefight in a suicide attempt when faced with the amputation of his leg. Dances With Wolves ends with the destruction of the indigenous population that Dunbar has befriended and embraced, an acknowledgement of the human cost of Manifest Destiny.

Costner’s films are populated with visions of destruction and devastation. Costner’s second film as director was The Postman, in which he plays an actor wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland who finds himself impersonating an employee of the Postal Service. Costner casts himself as a guy playing the literal embodiment of American civilization against the backdrop of a lawless frontier. This is a recurring fascination for the filmmaker.

It even extends beyond those films where Costner is credited as director. Although Waterworld was credited to director Kevin Reynolds, Reynolds quit the movie before release and would claim Costner should always direct his own movies because “that way he can always be working with his favorite actor and his favorite director.” Waterworld imagines a future in which the planet has been flooded, civilization has been washed away. Costner plays the Mariner, a sailor looking for a new world.

There is an element of this in Horizon as well. The eponymous settlement is destroyed before it is even built, and then destroyed again after it is built. That nighttime set piece, one of the movie’s best sequences and a reminder of Costner’s skill as a director, is downright apocalyptic in its imagery. The American myth cannot be made real before it is brutally torn down. The frontier is marked with graves and built atop soil soaked in blood. Characters hand out fliers for the settlement of “Horizon”, but it has never truly existed.

However, Costner remains romantic. For Costner, America isn’t an object that actually exists. It is a romantic ideal towards which his character might aspire. Costner’s films acknowledge that the reality of America is horrific and brutal, but his characters still reach for the horizon. There is an appealing simplicity in this recurring motif, one that manages to avoid any of the complicated conversations that would need to take place if that destiny were ever to fully manifest itself.

In some ways, this feels like a minor concession to modernity. After all, Costner grew up in an America that was decidedly more cynical than the one that produced the westerns he watched as a child. How the West Was Won released the same year that Kennedy was shot, an event that is often seen to mark an end of a certain kind of American idealism. Costner understands this; it is the central thesis of Oliver Stone’s JFK, one of Costner’s defining roles.

There are other markers of modernity in Horizon. While the narrative sprawl of How the West Was Won was conveyed in a fundamentally cinematic manner, to the point that it required two more projectors than the average movie, the scale and scope of Horizon evokes something much more fluid. The first of four planned installments, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 feels less like a fully-formed feature film than it does a television pilot, setting up plots and characters.

Assuming that each of the four films runs to about three hours, Horizon will run to a total of twelve hours – about the length of a single season of prestige television. The labelling of the individual installments as “chapters” also evokes prestige television. Even the structure of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 feels like three television episodes stitched together; Costner doesn’t appear on screen until an hour in, and the wagon train plot is introduced at the two-hour mark. It even ends with what is effectively a “next time on Horizon” trailer.

Of course, Costner has spent the past six years in the world of television, working on Taylor Sheridan’s western series Yellowstone. It seems inevitable that some of the show’s influence would rub off on him. While Costner insists that he first conceived of Horizon as “a conventional Western with a beginning, middle, and end” in 1988, some of the earliest mentions of the collaboration between Costner and Horizon co-writer Jon Baird make reference to “the Horizon miniseries.”

This is one of the more engaging internal contradictions within Horizon. In terms of content and tone, Horizon is a throwback to the unreconstructed westerns of the early 1960s. In execution, it feels oddly like a product of prestige streaming television. Reviews of Horizon tended to observe that “they don’t make ’em this anymore!” Watching Horizon, one gets the sense that not even Kevin Costner can make them like this anymore.