|
 Kevin
Costner’s Open Range is a lot better than his last directorial
effort, The Postman, a movie so extravagantly awful that
he still hasn’t climbed out from under it. Costner has a weakness
for bland grandiosity, and often in Open Range, as in Dances
With Wolves, he seems to think that simply by shooting beautiful
scenery he can create a classic. But the vistas are gorgeous, and
the end-of-an-era lonesome-cowboy stuff has a cornball resonance.
Costner plays a free-grazer—a wandering cowboy who lives off the
land with his cattle—and Robert Duvall is his best buddy and father
surrogate. They spend a lot of time being soft-spoken and acting
manly—in this movie, as in most Westerns, it amounts to the same
thing. This is the kind of film where two characters can ride together
for ten years before they finally fess up and reveal their real
first names to each other. When a woman enters the picture—a nurse
played by Annette Bening—we’re aware of just how civilizing an influence
she is on the men. This, too, is a classic Western pose.
In fact, just about everything in this movie has its antecedent:
a little bit of Shane here, a chunk of High Noon there,
and so on. And yet it’s all rather pleasing, in a regressive sort
of way. Costner may think he’s breathing new life into a moribund
genre, but what he’s really doing is flattering himself by cooking
up as many homages as he and his screenwriter, Craig Storper, can
accommodate. He’s measuring himself against the masters. But the
greatest Westerns aren’t this self-consciously mythic. Nor are they
so shamelessly sappy: Not only does the cowboys’ pet dog get shot,
but Costner rescues another pooch from drowning. What rescues the
movie is Costner’s low-key charisma, which remains sturdily intact
despite a dreadful spate of recent clinkers. He’s always at his
best when he’s a little ornery, and Duvall is the same way. His
grizzled performance is so thoroughly in character that he even
chews as if it were 1882. (2 hrs. 15 mins.; R) — PETER
RAINER
Opens August 15
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
|
