Despite its decades of
decline, the Western, that grand and glorious American form, will never
entirely succumb to the vagaries of taste and time. Expressing, no matter how
crudely and falsely at times, some notions of ourselves as a people, it simply
means too much to our history and more important, to our mythology. Its
celebration of adventure, violence, and freedom, its display of a vast,
dramatic landscape, its dedication to an ideal of movement and potential, even
its pervasive undercurrent of melancholy all suit the national fantasy we often
regard as the American dream.
           Together with his previous work as both actor and
director — Silverado, Wyatt Earp, Dances With Wolves —
Kevin Costner’s new movie, Open Range, demonstrates a measure of his own
commitment to the form. He’s ridden those dusty, dangerous trails before and
apparently profited from the experience. The film itself, which he directed and
stars in, resembles numerous predecessors, inevitable in any addition to a
history that spans a hundred years in American cinema and two hundred in
American literature. The accumulated layers of its rich past necessarily reveal
themselves in virtually any contemporary reinterpretation of a firmly
established, thoroughly familiar, and densely populated genre, so that the
movie recalls many others that precede it in its long tradition.
           Costner plays Charley Waite, who — with his friend and
mentor Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and two cowhands — drives a herd of
cattle across the open range of the title. The men encounter trouble in the
person of a powerful rancher, Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon), who refuses to
allow anyone to drive cattle across the range, which he regards as his private
fief. He enforces his entirely illegitimate claim with the help of a gang of
hired gunmen and a corrupt marshal, controlling the little Western town of
Harmonville where most of the action takes place.
           When Baxter’s thugs kill one of the cowhands and
seriously wound another, Spearman and Waite naturally decide to fight back,
moving the action from the empty, beautiful landscape to the muddy, squalid
enclosure of the hamlet, thus in a classic maneuver shifting Open Range from one subgenre to another, from a cattle-drive Western to a revenge Western,
and in the process emphasizing some of the economic conflict that often
enlivens the form.
           Because of its values of honor, courage, loyalty, and
freedom, the genre and its geography demand the transformation. Besides, as
every Western hero knows and says in one way or another, “A man’s gotta do what
a man’s gotta do.” Once the two men choose their course of action, the rest of
the picture depends upon the relatively simple business of their plans for a
showdown with the gang, and, as a natural result, their preparations to face
the prospect of their own deaths.
           Following another Western tradition of significant
silences and profound pauses, the occasion offers the two men a number of
opportunities for laconic philosophizing. From the opening sequences, in fact,
the two friends discuss their values in words of one syllable as they instruct
their younger companions in the proper conduct of one’s life, reveal some
hidden truths about themselves, and affirm their friendship. Charley, who falls
in love with the town doctor’s sister (Annette Bening), even manages to woo her
with his honesty, his simple dignity, and, despite his brutal history as a
gunslinger, a certain gentleness of speech and manner.
           Until its climactic gunfight, the picture proceeds
deliberately, building its action upon the relationship between the two men and
its meanings upon the terse eloquence of their prose. The camera sweeps across
the great green spaces and the magnificent mountains, settling always on the
countenances of the two actors, their faces at times as rugged and expressive
as the land they roam. Both Costner and Duvall inhabit their characters fully,
underplaying throughout, suggesting both thought and emotion through a minimum
of gesture and a stringently understated manner of delivery: beneath the
surface of violence, the Westerner is essentially a man of dignity and silence.
           Despite the equality between the two actors and the
relaxed ease of the athletic Costner, Robert Duvall really dominates the
picture. His hard-bitten manner, his tight self control, and his calm, ironic
style convey deep feeling through a paradoxical repression. Neither young nor
handsome nor physically imposing, he seems as perfectly at home in the setting
as any of the great cowboy heroes, and he can squint meaningfully across an
expanse of country just as well as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. More
disciplined and less sentimental than Dances With Wolves, Open Range represents a significant achievement for Costner and for Duvall, yet another
triumph in a distinguished career.
Open Range, starring Robert Duvall, Kevin Costner, Annette
Bening, Michael Gambon, Michael Jeter, Diego Luna, James Russo, Abraham
Benrubi, Dean McDermott, Kim Coates, Herb Kohler; based on the novel The
Open Range Men by Lauran Paine; screenplay by Craig Storper; directed by
Kevin Costner.
You can hear George and
his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5 Fridays at 7:20 a.m., rerun on Saturdays at
8:50 a.m.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2003.
