‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ Review: The Beauty, and the Bloodshed

Midway through Kevin Costner’s big, busy, decentered western “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” the actor Danny Huston delivers a brief speech. The year is 1863 — two years into the Civil War — and his character, a colonel in charge of a military fort in the southwest, is discoursing on a nearby settlement called Horizon. Apaches have recently burned the hamlet to the ground, killing scores of settlers. You simply need look at the land, the colonel says, to see why the newcomers will keep coming.

“You may recall that’s what drove us across the ocean to this country in the first place.”

Huston, an imposing presence with a rich, sepulchral voice that can suggest depths, delivers this nod at Manifest Destiny with arid sobriety. His words certainly sound meaningful yet this reference to American expansionism just hangs in the air, untethered from history or ideology. Given this nod as well as the film’s large scale, crowded cast, multiple story lines and nearly three-hour run time, it’s reasonable to assume that Costner will add context, commentary or, really, anything. Yet all that’s clear from “Chapter 1,” the lead-in for his splashily publicized four-film cycle, is that the land was vast and beautiful, and everyone wanted a piece.

“Chapter 1” is the first movie that Costner has directed since his 2003 western “Open Range,” an earnest period drama about free-grazing cattlemen facing down a wealthy rancher. What’s striking about that film, beyond how Costner draws from so many different genre touchstones — John Ford, Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah, among others — is how he tries to honor old-fashioned westerns that he so clearly loves while also complicating the myth of the American West through his character, a violence-haunted gunfighter.

A version of that same man — tough, terse, good with a gun, not bad with the little ladies and now named Hayes Ellison — rides into “Chapter 1” about an hour in, handsomely framed against a bright blue sky. What takes him so long? Given how the movie plays like an extended prologue, I suspect that Costner timed his entrance for a four-part project rather than for a stand-alone film. That makes it tough to get a handle on precisely what he’s up to here, other than gesturing at history, re-engaging with an archetypically American genre and readying the foundation for an epic that will continue when “Chapter 2” opens in August.

Written by Costner and Jon Baird, “Chapter 1” features uneven lines of action that jump across the map, from the southwest to the Territory of Wyoming. In one section, bad men with good cheekbones, their dusters trimmed with animals skins à la Gladiatorial Rome, chase after a righteously violent woman (Jena Malone in a lively, credible turn). In time, they end up in one of those frontier towns with muddy streets and desperate characters, a sinkhole where Hayes rides in with some gold and exits with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a lady of the evening (and afternoon). In another section, Luke Wilson leads a wagon train peopled with tough Americans, Laplander goons and two British twits itching for some punishment.

The story line that revs up the action centers on the settlement, a riverfront hamlet on a ribbon of green that winds through the desert and has attracted the attention of a tribe of White Mountain Apache led by Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz). Soon after the movie opens, the settlers are swinging their partners to fiddles like good John Ford folk; not long after, many are dead, cut down by Apaches. Among the survivors are the newly widowed, impeccably manicured Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), who take refuge in the fort. There, they meet a first lieutenant, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), a thoughtful soul who refers to Native Americans as Indigenous.

The word Indigenous has been used to describe Native Americans for centuries, yet its casual use, by a white officer no less, jumps out. Its use here announces Gephart’s sensitivities, and it telegraphs Costner’s own concerns. He remains best known, of course, for his epic 1990 western “Dances With Wolves,” which he also directed and starred in, and involves a white Union lieutenant’s relations with some Lakotas. Notably, “Dances” opens in the 1860s, when most of “Chapter 1” is set. At this point in Costner’s latest saga, though, the war and its fissures remain largely implied, agonies hovering right outside the story’s boundaries.

Instead, the violence that defines “Chapter 1,” giving its sprawl some sharp contours, takes place during two separate massacres. The first occurs at night in Horizon on an evening when much of the town has gathered for the dance. A group of Apache, who live in the region and want to preserve their ancestral home, destroy the town in a conflagration that Costner films intimately and, for the most part, with an objective point of view. By contrast, the second massacre — orchestrated by a posse of Horizon survivors and bounty hunters against a different tribe — is largely seen through the eyes of a white boy. He’s a survivor of Horizon and as this slaughter unfolds, he weeps, dropping his gaze and falling to his knees.

The attack is driven by expediency and greed: Each Native scalp comes with a sizable bounty. The posse has been chasing the Apache who razed Horizon, but when its members decide that scalps are interchangeable, they descend on another tribe. The bounty and the men’s murderous greed gesture toward the genocide underway, and to the economic forces driving the country. Yet while the massacre weighs heavily on the story, it doesn’t illuminate what Costner is after. Instead, by bookending it with two massacres, he creates a parallelism that’s fundamentally lopsided. For one, there isn’t a Native child serving as a witness, averting his eyes as the white child — who’s meant to be a viewer surrogate — later does.

The parallelism suggests that both the settlers and Native Americans have blood on their hands, a reductive take, at best, which lets everyone off the hook. A more complex and coherent picture may emerge when “Chapter 2” opens. Costner is shooting the third part; it’s unclear when or if the fourth film will happen. I hope that it does even if “Horizon” is wildly uneven, at times exasperating and filled with distracting details that eat away at its period realism. Among other things, no one seems to know how to spit tobacco, and to judge from the women’s perfect updos and tidy eyebrows, everyone on this frontier has a stylist in tow.

It’s easy to smirk at these and other miscues; Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West, and among the good scenes mixed in with the groaners is a beautifully filmed chase set against a midnight-blue sky that finds two riders galloping after a third, who changes horses mid-chase. With its pounding hooves and racing rhythm, the scene catches the visceral, fight-or-flight thrills familiar from better westerns, and it shows what Costner is capable of as a director. He tends to handle this material too reverentially, as if bordering it in gold leaf, even as he makes you want to see what kind of country — hard, stoic, redeemable, lost — he sees in that frame.

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1
Rated R for bloodshed, discreet sex and partial nudity. Running time: 3 hours 1 minute. In theaters.