OPEN RANGE, Touchstone Pictures, 2003.
Dir. Kevin Costner. Perf. Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall, Annette Bening. Review by Dominic
Open Range commences with free ranging drovers “Boss” Spearman (Duvall) and Charley Waite (Costner), along with two cattlehands (Abraham Benrubi and Diego Luna), driving a herd across the West’s greener pastures. On a trip for supplies in a nearby town, however, one of their boys is badly beaten and the other bushwhacked on orders from land-baron thug Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon). Baxter, with town marshal inserted firmly in back pocket, proceeds to push the rangers around for trespassing on “his” land—until pushing back seems about the only thing for it.
To begin at the beginning: Costner’s film is too preoccupied with its rolling scenery, and to far too little effect; its early scenes would certainly have benefited from more natural lighting and a harder focus—in short, from a bit more grit. Each sequence seems to take place when the day’s light has reached the unnatural apex of perfection. Overall, though, there is much to recommend about Open Range. Its ultimate promotion of the romantic subplot to narrative centerpiece—a move that, while it raises the stakes of the gritty, all-guns-blazing finale, does not serve this purpose alone—is one of the film’s more pleasant surprises.
Costner himself delivers a convincing performance, subtle enough to convey emotional complexity but straight-up enough for a glossy Hollywood jaunt like this. In fact, much of the mastery of Open Range comes from its seasoned understanding of just how to present itself: the result is an appeal that reaches beyond the hard core of Western fandom without being a populist exercise in contrivance. The minimal but striking presence of Kim Coates (whose credits include the drifter in Mad Max’s soggy sibling Waterworld) as Baxter’s resident psycho is also worth watching for. The climactic shoot-out, if unnecessarily delayed, delivers spectacularly with a duck-and-cover energy that adapts the style of contemporary War epics into a thoroughly engaging barnyard blast-fest.
At 133 minutes Open Range has been tagged by several reviewers as an “Epic Western,” although in reality it contains all the conceptual immediacy of, say, High Noon (1952) and none of the disheveled adventurism of epics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) or The Wild Bunch (1969). The film is merely overlong. Indeed, one of the charming aspects of Open Range is, I feel, its very simplicity—an inoffensive mixture of ambition and earthy good-sense that stacks up particularly well against the bloated indulgence of Costner’s previous efforts. Open Range is not trying to change the face of the Western, signal the revival of, or re-write the Western. It’s just trying to be a good one. And it is.
Costner himself delivers a convincing performance, subtle enough to convey emotional complexity but straight-up enough for a glossy Hollywood jaunt like this. In fact, much of the mastery of Open Range comes from its seasoned understanding of just how to present itself: the result is an appeal that reaches beyond the hard core of Western fandom without being a populist exercise in contrivance. The minimal but striking presence of Kim Coates (whose credits include the drifter in Mad Max’s soggy sibling Waterworld) as Baxter’s resident psycho is also worth watching for. The climactic shoot-out, if unnecessarily delayed, delivers spectacularly with a duck-and-cover energy that adapts the style of contemporary War epics into a thoroughly engaging barnyard blast-fest.
up particularly well against the bloated indulgence of Costner’s previous efforts. Open Range is not trying to change the face of the Western, signal the revival of, or re-write the Western. It’s just trying to be a good one. And it is.