Billy Bob Thornton's eagerly anticipated follow-up to his sleeper hit Sling Blade is a beautiful film with the uneven rhythm of a bucking mustang.  All the Pretty Horses reminded me a bit of Lone Star - both films were set several decades ago in Texas and Mexico, featured terrific music, gorgeous photography and a doomed, interracial romance - but without the interweaving stories and exquisite pacing that made John Sayles' 1996 film such a stunner.

A little background is necessary to understand why Horses isn't a better picture.  Columbia Pictures bought the rights to Cormac McCarthy's novel, which was the first in his 'The Border Trilogy" and the winner of the National Book Award in 1992 (Mike Nichols was originally attached to direct).  Thornton handed in a four-hour final cut to Columbia, who, in the meantime, had agreed to let Miramax handle Horses' domestic distribution. Miramax put a gun to Thornton's head and said, "We're not releasing this movie until it runs under two hours."

The result, as you can imagine, is condensed, choppy and, at times, a little messy.  And it's too bad, because Horses could have been a much better film without the ridiculous time constraints.  We can only hope the DVD release will include Thornton's original cut, or that 50 years from now, somebody will piece his vision of Horses together, a la Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. It could be an epic film, but there's a good chance we'll just never know.

Horses begins in 1949 San Angelo, a town in the western part of Texas where John Grady Cole's (Matt Damon, The Legend of Bagger Vance) family has owned a cattle ranch for several generations.  Cole wants nothing more than to work the land like his ancestors, but his city-slicker mom sells it out from under him to make a quick buck from an oil company.  So Cole and his buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas, Niagara, Niagara) head down to Mexico with virtually no provisions and a desire to ride through the country's wide-open, unspoiled spaces.

Along the way, Cole and Rawlins have a series of adventures, involving picking up a young, sharp-shooting runaway (Lucas Black, Sling Blade), getting jobs breaking mustangs on a 170-year-old farm owned by a wealthy landowner (Rubén Blades, Gideon's Crossing) and getting tossed into a Mexican prison that makes OZ look like Club Med.  Cole also falls in love with his boss' daughter, Alejandra (Penélope Cruz, Woman on Top), despite the meddling of her overprotective aunt (Miriam Colon, Lone Star).

From what I understand, Cole and Rawlins weren't very exciting characters in McCarthy's novel, and they don't do much to generate excitement on the screen, either.  Young Lucas Black steals the show as the only character with any personality.  There are a handful of supporting roles that seem haphazardly tossed in (like Bruce Dern, Robert Patrick and Sam Shepard), but their parts may have been more fleshed out in Thornton's original version of the film.

McCarthy's novel was adapted by Ted Tally, who won an Oscar for his screen version of The Silence of the Lambs.  It's difficult to fault him for the film's unevenness, but he does a decent job of maintaining the structure of each of the four volumes in McCarthy's book (it had no chapters - just four big sections).  There is some pretty silly existential banter about heaven and death and stuff that could have been lost.

You would expect Horses to have beautiful scenery and cloudy skies in spades, but unless it's integral to the plot or contains important dialogue, these shots vanish off the screen before you can even begin to think about appreciating it.  Again, this is probably due to the time restrictions placed on the film.  Barry Markowitz (Sling Blade) does a good job with what we're able to see.  As advertised, there are a lot of pretty horses, and Damon's character (who was only 16 in the book) does more murmuring to them than Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer (and for those of you who were freaked out by bad stuff happening to horses in that film, Horses includes only a scene where a cattle is branded).  Marty Stuart's score (with help from Daniel Lanois) is one of the year's best and should be an Oscar contender.

Thornton's direction is an effective blend of various cinematic techniques. He throws everything he's got into Horses - montage, flashback, slow motion, freeze-frame and fades to both black and white - but the film's final cut just doesn't do the story justice.  Unlike Sling Blade, Thornton didn't write or act in Horses, but he will in his next directorial effort, Daddy and Them, which is scheduled to be released next summer.

1:57 –

for violence and some sexuality