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Open Range (2003)
Posted by Digger, Sep 12, 2003
There are two kinds of Western fans: Shane fans and The Searchers fans. Me? I slept through half of Shane and never looked back. Yet the rub is that it’s considered an American classic, was nominated for best picture, and in the cruelest turn yet, placed higher on that soporific AFI list 6 years (my God has it been 6 years?) back. For a genre that centers around white imperialism, rampant violence, and the genocide of Native Americans, people sure do have a fondness for soft-spoken gunslingers who like nothing more than playing their harmonicas by the campfire and combing their horses’s “purrty” mane.
Genre: Action |
Cast: Kevin Costner, Annette Bening, Abraham Benrubi, Robert Duvall, Michael Gambon |
Director(s): Kevin Costner |
Producer(s): Jake Eberts, Kevin Costner, David Valdes, Craig Storper |
Rated: R for violence |
Length: 135 minutes | Released: Aug 15, 2003 |
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Stars: 2 out of 5
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Which leads me to Open Range, Kevin Costner’s surprisingly popular and well-regarded return to Dances With Wolves/Silverado/Wyatt Earp territory. Open Range is not only Kevin Costner’s return to directing but his return to the western, a form that’s probably done nobody better over the past twenty years except for maybe Clint.
Unmistakably old fashioned, the film feels like it should sit on a shelf with Far From Heaven as experiments in cinematic time travel (as a colleague put: “it’s got that 1953 Best Picture winner feel to it”). Open Range genuinely feels like it was made prior to the sexual revolution and social upheaval of the 60's when every woman outside the brothel was virginal and looked like Vera Miles, shaggy old mutts received as much screen time as leading men and gunfights were as magnanimous as they were bloodless. It’s the type of film a Shane fan can really get behind. It’s also corny enough to make Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman roll her eyes in embarrassment.
The film stars Robert Duvall and Costner as two “free-grazers” (cowboys whose cattle roam the unowned countryside, feeding off the land then moving on) who make the mistake of stopping over in a town run by evil rancher Baxter (the usually fantastic Michael Gambon in an unspeakably terrible performance). Baxter doesn’t take kindly to their kind are ‘ere, and maxes life hell for our two good old boys, killing one of their friends and critically wounding another. And most grievously, they killed Costner’s dog. And in a film this square, you just don’t mess with another man’s dog.
Duvall and Costner then spend the next 90 minutes sitting around (rather like the film does) lurking around town, flirting with Annette Benning’s haggard-looking (the D.P. must have held a grudge against her) doctor’s assistant, and musing on the future of the west, chocolate, what it means to be a man, princess tea sets, and everything else in between. Around the time Costner and Duvall stop their Spalding Gray impersonations, Gambon returns to the film–considering the role he plays as Open Range’s primary antagonist, it’s essentially a cameo, which does wonders in explaining why there’s no drama in this dreary windbag of a film–for a climactic shootout that while is too little too late, gives an idea of what kind of film this could have been had it spent less time trying to be like Unforgiven.
For you see, in keeping with the theme of the revisionist western, Costner’s cowboy isn’t just any hardened killer, but a hardened killer running from his past. It seems he fought in the Civil War and, hold on to your hat, he killed people there. And it wasn’t a couple... it was a lot. Yawn, this stuff was more believable when Mel Gibson said it in The Patriot and was more disturbing when Clint rolled into town killing any man who’d decorate his saloon with a friend of his. In Open Range Kevin lowers his voice and does his best to sound labored, but it comes across more constipated than tormented. There’s no underlying meanness threatening to break loose; if we can’t believe his internal struggle, that he really is a son of a bitch, then there’s no sense of tension that he may soon break.
But that’s Open Range in a nutshell: A series of picayune exchanges chugging along towards a rambunctious finale (which is than followed by an embarrassing and over long epilogue). Is it refreshing to find a big studio film this character driven in the summer? Certainly. But does that make the film any less of a chore to get through. Not in the least. I may be a Searchers fan but Open Range would probably put the Duke to sleep.
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