This much-storied and long-in-the-making film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s widely cherished Western novel is neither the sacrilege that McCarthy’s true believers feared nor the epiphany for which fans of the Western film genre had hoped. Instead, All the Pretty Horses is a more-than-decent horse opera with some good performances and better-than-average dialogue and themes transferred directly from the novel by screenwriter Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs). This fairly faithful reworking of the novel, however, lacks inspiration. Rarely does any residue from the images or characters emerge from the screen to amble through our minds like some drifting prairie tumbleweed. Of course, this film production should come with a disclaimer: Thornton’s first cut was rumored to run about four hours, but following some release delays, changes in distributors, and recuts, this final, director-sanctioned version comes in at just under two hours. Some of what’s missing is clear — a section that takes place in a Mexican prison seems especially truncated — but other sections are so vague and underdeveloped that you have to suspect that additional minutes would make matters worse, rather than better. In this regard, the romance between Matt Damon’s John Grady Cole and Penélope Cruz’s Alejandra Rocha comes across as a tepid abstraction, less a full-bodied love affair than someone’s poetic idea of a love affair. Perhaps it’s a lack between the two leads of that ineffable thing called “chemistry,” or maybe it’s a lack of vision. Either way, this centerpiece does not have the weight to anchor the film. On the other hand, the central male relationships are beautifully portrayed. Henry Thomas does his best work since E.T. as Cole’s quiet sidekick Lacey Rawlins, Damon turns in a solid if unexciting performance as the story’s primary focus, and Lucas Black (Sling Blade) practically steals the whole show with his mercurial performance as Jimmy Blevins, the tragic plug of a boy who wants to be a man and who maybe is a horse thief and maybe he isn’t. Certain of the book’s ideas translate to the screen just fine: the passing of the West, the evolution of boys to men, the meaning of honor, and the cowboy existentialism that frequently comments on God’s absence or presence, or wonders about things like whether it’s possible to believe in heaven without believing in hell. All the Pretty Horses has the overall effect of a sketchbook, like smatterings of ideas and images incompletely developed. It’s not the dumb thing you do that gets you into trouble, Rawlins tellingly observes, “it’s the choice you make before it.” The same might be said for this movie. It seems the victim of dozens of mini-miscalculations, together those choices add up to trouble. Yet, the film’s elegiac tone and honest heart come through. Vaya con dios, Billy Bob.
This article appears in December 29 • 2000.
