All the Pretty Horses (2000) – DVD

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Penélope Cruz
screenplay by Ted Tally, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Billy Bob Thornton

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The difference between Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses and its current, honourable film adaptation is a matter of weighting. There's nothing in the movie that doesn't happen in the novel, and the film's golden, sun-burnished look is gentle and humane. The film loves its wayward characters and sympathizes with their plight, but when it's over, it turns out to have merely been a story–a series of events with a dramatic payoff. The body is always imperilled, but the soul is never touched; it never puts together the motives the characters have in protecting their honour and desires, and it never suggests that there are powers beyond their control that force them to make decisions. While All the Pretty Horses is always friendly and never dull, there is a certain letdown in its refusal to make connections to larger forces and its clumsiness with the novel's very powerful symbolism–which, however questionable it might be, has a lesser dramatic force than its literary namesake.

For starters, the film is more obsessed with events. Taking place in 1949 and dealing with a Texas boy named John Grady Cole (Matt Damon), it whisks us through the actions leading up to the loss of the family ranch. With land rights signed away to his late father's stage-actress ex-wife, John is left with no legacy and no real home. Cast adrift, he decides with his friend Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) to light out to Mexico in search of ranch work and to build a future there. It's here, however, that the film's troubles have begun. Where the novel created more of a context for John Grady's flight–it doted on the humiliation of his idiot father and, by extension, John himself, All the Pretty Horses careens through the actions and conversations as if they are merely the catalyst for linear events to come. In so doing, it destroys the novel's meditation on the death of an entire way of life.

Things do pick up once they find themselves mixed up with Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black), a younger boy with a shady past whom they encounter on the way. Even readers of the novel, who will be taken by surprise by Blevins's early arrival, will enjoy having their memories jogged; the film becomes sort of a greatest hits version of the novel, with dramatic high points arriving one after the other. So directly after our introduction to the boy, we watch as he loses his horse in a rainstorm (a scene which you have to see to understand); soon thereafter, the two older friends reluctantly help him steal it back from the cowboy who found it and claimed it as his own. At this point, the film moves at a breakneck clip, and there is little opportunity to be bored by its forward march as it makes a beeline towards its inexorable conclusion.

But while there is little opportunity to be bored, there is little room to do anything else. Even if you haven't read the book, I would wager a guess that you'll still think something is missing. There doesn't appear to be anything at stake in the boys' ride to the cowboy life; where the novel made it clear that the boys were standing up for their dignity as ranchers in the twilight of the cowboy way, the film makes it look like they just had nothing better to do. Also, by keeping a tight rein on narrative economy, the film loses the book's existential shock: Where in the novel we see the characters buffeted by the waves of the cosmos, giving their actions that much more poignancy, the film makes them the masters of the aesthetic, giving them greater stature than they had on the page and torpedoing the grandiose pathos of the book–and with it, the urgency it provides their plight.

So I found myself swinging back and forth with All the Pretty Horses, here admiring the performances and the warm glow of the cinematography, there wishing for a little more context to the world in which the characters inhabit, there again watching a nice sequence where they break in horses at their new ranch job–did I mention the job? After John Grady and Lacey split up with Blevins, they eventually find work at a Mexican ranch run by an exceedingly wealthy man (Reubén Blades) who takes a shine to John and his skill as a ranch hand, asking him for advice in running things–until he makes the mistake of falling for the man's daughter (Penélope Cruz), an amour fou that winds up getting both John and Lacey in terrible danger. All of this is well and good, but the point is, what does it add up to? What comes of the trials of our leads, and what does it wind up teaching them? These were questions that never came up in the novel, because the eerie suggestiveness of the style told you all you needed to know about the inner lives of its characters through external events, but here we simply have things happening one after the other.

Perhaps I shouldn't protest too much. As I made clear at the beginning, All the Pretty Horses is far from bad, even for someone who's encountered its source; it tries its damnedest to deal with the events of McCarthy's novel in as oblique a manner as possible, occasionally hitting the jackpot. There's a nice, extended sequence in which the two boys break in 16 horses in four days, where we watch as they wind up getting thrown from their saddles time and again until they manage to bring the horses down, and the film is, in its limited way, visually inventive, resisting the temptation to David Lean-ize the landscape and instead make it seem like home instead of like an exotic vista. As befits Billy Bob Thornton, director of that classic of disillusionment Sling Blade, we have characters who find that the world is not as kind as they would have liked it to have been, and we feel their pain as their plans crumble into disaster and the world has their way with them.

But I still feel compelled to shore up the film's weak points, which I think are instructive. They show the value of style as a weapon with which to frame a story. All the Pretty Horses cries out for the elegiac distance provided by other films of discovery, such as that which Jim Jarmusch brought to Dead Man or that Gus Van Sant brought to My Own Private Idaho. In those films, we are trapped in the lead's disorientation at the world around him and thus given a definite context for understanding events, whereas All the Pretty Horses comes perilously close to being a slightly more adult Boy's Own tale of adventure and excitement. This may not be the filmmakers' fault, as it has been rumoured that over an hour was cut in order to make nice with the Miramax brass. I presume that much "unnecessary" footage was excised to keep the nice straight line of the narrative. If you've read the novel, you may find yourself providing the context of the mute God that runs the cosmos, studiously avoiding the mortals who try to stake their claim, but you'll never feel it the way that you will in Jarmusch or Van Sant, and the film ultimately becomes one story in a sea of many, all jostling for attention even while they add up to pretty much the same thing. Originally published: December 30, 2000.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers While DVD would've been the perfect avenue for Billy Bob Thornton to proffer his director's cut of All the Pretty Horses, I suspect bureaucratic entanglements between co-distributors Miramax and Columbia Pictures prevented this from happening. (Miramax released the film as we know it in theatres, and now Columbia TriStar has done so on video; it was originally to be the other way around.) Or mayhaps Thornton simply had his fill of the editing room last year, where he spent an inordinate amount of time whittling meat off All the Pretty Horses' bones. What almost disappoints me more than the current version's truncation is its abundance of visible cuts within a given scene; Thornton proved in Sling Blade that he knows how to shoot a master shot and knows when to employ one, and the dearth of long takes in All the Pretty Horses fails to authenticate it as Thornton's own on the most basic stylistic level.

Not that the DVD disappoints visually. At all. The 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer perfectly captures Barry Markowitz's Panavision lensing of dusty border town landscapes at daybreak; there's an uncommon absence of edge-enhancement for such a crystalline image. Between this and Superman, I feel like a stunned virgin to the format again. The included Dolby Digital 5.1 soundmix is also a winner; most of its low-frequency energy is devoted to the numerous fleeting bolts of lightning, though the surrounds in general receive an awful lot of attention from the natural ambience. Fifty-one minutes into the picture, Alejandra knocks on Cole's bedroom door, and like an idiot, I paused and went to my back entrance to see who was there. Extras are not nearly as plentiful as the cover art would have it seem: the usual helpings of filmographies and 4:3 trailers (All the Pretty Horses (which contains a curious remnant: Sling Blade's Daniel Lanois did not compose the release print's score), Legends of the Fall, Dogma, and All About My Mother). Tellingly, neither these notes nor the packaged booklet charts Thornton's post-production trials and tribulations. (Note: English translations of Spanish-language scenes display as video subtitles.)

117 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English, French subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia TriStar