| Kevin Costner,
who directs and stars in Open Range, has made the
best Western since Unforgiven. In fact, Costner’s
character, the haunted-by-his-past Charley Waite, is essentially
a sentimentalized version of Unforgiven’s William
Munny—a reformed killer who transcends his fallen nature
and finds salvation in the love of a good woman. The fact
that Open Range doesn’t have the dark Calvinist
vibe of Unforgiven (or much of it) doesn’t
keep it from being enormously entertaining—and, in the
build-up to the shootout and the shootout itself, downright
heroic.
The storyline is classic
showdown, and those idiots who condemned the film for nakedly
pitting good versus evil are either ignorant of the conventions
of Westerns or blind to the gracefulness of the characters
in this one. While grazing their herd in open range, a couple
of cowboys (Costner as Waite and the great Robert Duvall as
his partner, “Boss” Spearman) run afoul of a local
cattle baron, Denton Baxter, a ferocious Irishman (ferociously
played by Michael Gambon), who isn’t about to let anyone
else use his land. To teach the free-grazers a lesson, Gambon
has his thugs attack Waite and Spearman’s two-man crew,
killing one and seriously wounding the other, a Mexican boy
(Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Diego Luna). Waite and
Spearman retreat to a nearby town (also controlled by Baxter),
to get help for the wounded kid from a friendly doctor and
his pretty middle-aged sister (Annette Bening). The rest of
the film is a prelude to the settling of scores between the
two free-grazers and Baxter and his men, which comes in what
is perhaps the most violent, thrillingly choreographed gunfight
since The Wild Bunch.
Open Range touches
the bases we expect to see touched in preludes to monumental
battles—the fundamental decency of the protagonists
is announced through dialogue and action; a redemptive romance
is inaugurated between the troubled Waite and the serene Bening;
the townsfolk are slowly rallied to the side of the free-grazers;
the “some-things-are-worth-dying-for” moral is
made plain; and the triumph of the virtuous few against the
evil many is prepared. As corny as the foregoing may sound,
it all plays remarkably well—thanks to Robert Duvall,
chiefly, but also to the adventuresome way Costner has freshened
up the clichés.
To round his stereotypical
characters out, Costner gives them the opportunity to express
their feelings more directly and more often than strong, silent
western types generally do. And in scenes like the one where
Costner, after bidding Bening a traditional strong, silent
farewell, turns back to tell her outright how much he loves
her, he creates a touchingly intimate moment out of a traditionally
ceremonial one. Unfortunately not all of the film’s
New Agey candor plays this well, e.g., the maudlin, redundant
sequence in the bar where the wounded Costner struggles to
explain himself, when we already understand the little there
is to know about him, and so does Bening. (There are reasons
beyond taciturnity why some things were left unsaid in Westerns.)
Nonetheless, most of Open
Range is exciting action melodrama, one of the few in
recent memory in which you care for the protagonists and fear
for their survival. Costner has a genuine gift for staging
combat—the gunfights are tremendous—and a talent
for acting homicidally tough. Almost all of his scenes with
Duvall, without whose touching variation on Lonesome Dove’s
crusty Gus McRae the film would be weightless, are well-crafted.
And though Costner tends to a boyish smarminess in his pitch-and-woo
scenes with Bening, there are moments between these unapologetically
middle-aged lovers that have a witty grown-up tang.
Open Range may
be trying too hard for full disclosure in spots—and
it certainly ends too many times—but it is still a terrific
western, and one of the best films of a year in which pretentious
feel-bad tripe like 21 Grams and pointless feel-bad
tripe like Monster were elevated way above it.
Though a couple of night
scenes look a bit mottled, and too much edge enhancement has
been added throughout, Buena Vista has otherwise done a fine
job transferring what was, in fact, a great-looking film.
(James Muro’s cinematography—with Alberta, Canada,
substituting for Montana—is gorgeous.) At the same time,
I feel compelled to note that as good as this transfer is,
the DVD of Open Range is a pale copy of what I saw
in theaters. The subtlety of Muro’s lighting—the
way that window-light or lamplight, for instance, models Bening’s
and Costner’s features in the scenes in Sue Barlow’s
sitting room and kitchen—is simply compressed to chiaroscuro.
As I said in our last issue, film is film and video is video.
And Open Range is a classic example of how great cinematography
is coarsened, even in a first-rate transfer—its smoothness
of tone and hue turned into discrete steps of brightness,
contrast, and primary color; its subtler details simply crushed
to featureless black and white at the extremes of the spectrum.
|
Open
Range (2003). 