Is Kevin Costner Dooming Himself To Be The Captain Ahab of Westerns With ‘Horizon’?

Lynwood, California, has never been a place where the babies grow up to be cowboys. The town is a stone’s throw from Compton, the locale that’s the title backdrop to gangsta rap group NWA’s notorious debut album, Straight Outta Compton. Kevin Costner — whose upcoming projected four-picture project Horizon could be to Westerns what Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is to, well, “Mega” — grew up in Lynwood, in a working class family. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s he most likely watched a lot of stars on horseback on both his television and at the local bijous. (He’s acknowledged that he also read the Western romances of Lauran Paine, which will come up later.)  But he didn’t get on a horse himself until after his tenth movie. 

That was 1985’s Silverado, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Kasdan’s two prior directorial efforts, Body Heat and The Big Chill, were character-driven dramas in which William Hurt embodied different species of flawed masculinity. They didn’t feel like the work of a future Western-maker. But Kasdan’s scripts for Raiders of the Lost Ark and even The Empire Strikes Back showed his sure hand with genre adventure (and speaking of genre, Body Heat was a virtuoso film noir riff). For Kasdan, giving Costner the third lead in Silverado was a bit of an amends: the actor had played the character of Alex, the suicide and object of ensemble mourning in Chill, appearing in flashbacks that Kasdan cut out of the movie entirely. Costner was about 30 when he played Jake, the slightly goofy brother of Scott Glenn’s Emmett. Even when confined to a jail cell, Costner has bouncing-off-the walls energy. Kasdan’s ingratiating story pulls from a number of Western classics and deep cuts; the portion of the film where Glenn, Costner and Kevin Kline’s Paden and Danny Glover’s Mal, come to the aid of some robbed settlers brings to mind John Ford’s Wagon Master, the maestros’ supposed favorite of all his pictures. The movie is suffused with playfulness:  Monty Python’s John Cleese, playing an English-born sheriff, literally says “What’s all this then?’ making an entrance.

Costner would never be in such a purely fun Western again. In subsequent pictures like The Untouchables (the Ness-vs.-Capone period crime drama that does have an action sequence on horseback), Bull Durham, and especially Field of Dreams, he honed an earnestness that would define his performance and his filmmaking modes. (In Bull Durham that earnestness made him something of a comic foil for Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, but Costner doesn’t act like he’s in on any joke, a prudent move for the sake of  his character.) 

After having done a fair amount of history homework to augment his genre love, he swung big for his 1990 directorial debut, Dances With Wolves. Here he stars as a troubled Union Army officer whose abortive mission to oversee a fort leaves him in the company of a Sioux tribe, who adopts him and gives him the title name. Working from a script by the author of the source novel Michael Blake (Blake was one of the many Oscar winners in this movie’s awards tsunami, which wiped out Scorsese’s Goodfellas among other worthy pictures), Costner was able to thread a needle few Western filmmakers of the past had even considered: acknowledging the white mistreatment of indigenous peoples while still retaining a relatively standard white Western hero for the movie’s center. It did not satisfy every viewer, and there were some accusations of exoticizing indigenous cultures; seen through the lens of 2024, the movie, while not offensive, doesn’t play nearly so enlightened as its makers believed back in the day. But it’s still what you can call a ripping yarn. The movie was a huge box office hit prior to becoming an awards magnet, and it gave Costner new clout and cachet. 

Maybe some hubris, too. Cast as Wyatt Earp in the 1994 picture Tombstone, Costner quit the movie after its screenwriter and its producer declined tailor the picture to his character rather than crafting an ensemble piece. As a producer, he enlisted writer/director Kasdan, and the two concocted Wyatt Earp, which hit theaters about six months after Tombstone. With Kurt Russell taking Costner’s place as Earp, Tombstone had action-movie kick, character poignance, and didn’t take itself too seriously. The Costner/Kasdan picture, by contrast, was over three hours long and very serious indeed, with Costner in peak earnest mode portraying lawman Wyatt as uncompromisingly loyal to his brothers above all for the whole of his life. 

It’s not bad, exactly. The cast, which ranges from Gene Hackman to Michael Madsen to Catherine O’Hara, can’t be faulted. It’s just rather glum and a bit pedantic. Dennis Quaid imbues the melancholy gunman Doc Holliday with twitchy energy, but in the end, it’s the Holliday of Tombstone — Val Kilmer with his signature line “I’m your huckleberry” — that everyone still quotes. 

The box-office failure of Wyatt Earp did not deter Costner from continuing to think big.  The archetypal Western hero, that is, let’s put it, the Lone Man Who Only Wants To Enter His Home Justified but either 1) can’t find a home or 2) can’t get to his home for all the bad guys in his way, was revived in his filmography twice shortly after Wyatt Earp, albeit with genre variations. First came 1995’s Waterworld, an idiosyncratic futuristic after-the-flood extravaganza that was kind of laughed out of theaters, at least in part for an opening scene showing how Costner’s character recycles his urine into drinking water. It’s actually a pretty good movie in its gonzo way.  Then came 1997’s The Postman, a metaphor-heavy post-apocalypse tale (set in 2013 — looks like our reality dodged a bullet!) in which Costner’s title character seeks to restore order to a devastated and lawless U.S. by, you know, delivering…not just the mail but a call to arms to a downhearted populace. Costner directed this one and had final cut, yet declined to cut the picture’s nearly three hour running time. His performance and his directorial depictions of his character were, many critics complained, almost insane in grandiose self-regard. 

It was time to lighten up a little. You know, do a romantic drama, do a sports comedy with Bull Durham colleague Ron Shelton, play JFK in a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis. That sort of thing. Costner returned to directing in 2003 with Open Range and this time seemed to have learned a few things. Adapting a Lauran Paine novel in which cattle-driving cowboys have to contend with a nasty landowner who doesn’t like the beasts grazing on his turf, among other things, Range kept the storyline familiar, the running time just a few shorthairs over two hours, and the budget trim. Putting the stalwart Robert Duvall as his co-lead, and giving the great actor top billing, Costner had a hit. Much more than Wyatt Earp, Open Range is a picture that’s perfect to while away an afternoon with if you come upon it while channel-surfing, provided you still do something that archaic. 

You may think that Costner’s most compelling Western, or neo-Western, work is in the series Yellowstone, and yes, that show has established him firmly as the 21st century’s answer to Gary Cooper. But don’t sleep on the 2020 movie Let Him Go, which Costner produced and in which he costars with Diane Lane. In this complex and harrowing kidnap drama set in 1960s Montana, Costner and Lane expand on the chemistry they showed as Clark Kent’s adoptive parents in 2013’s Man of Steel. 

Which brings us to now, and to Horizon, portentously subtitled An American Saga. Costner brought the first chapter, a three-hour feature, to Cannes. He’s literally sold his property to make the picture, and when he was in France, he had his hat out to get more dough to make the final two chapters. It is perhaps no accident that he and his second wife are divorcing at this time. 

Horizon is a project he’s been developing for years, and it’s just grown since Costner got the idea. It’s clearly become an obsession, possibly a white whale. But if he’s to become the Ahab of what was once the American cinema’s preeminent genre, you can’t say that he didn’t actually build the ship he may go down on. Not to mix land and sea metaphors to an unseemly extreme.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the upcoming The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.