by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
There’s been plenty of hype surrounding the release of The Martian, and if I do say so myself, all of it is very much deserved. The film, starring Matt Damon as an astronaut forced to survive alone on Mars until he is rescued, is simply one of the year’s best and is sure to bring in millions in returns, heaps of critical love, and some extra luster to its leading man’s star.
As much as I loved The Martian, however, it doesn’t replace the first time Damon found himself as a stranger in a strange land as my favorite turn by the actor. That honor still belongs to his performance in director Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses.
Written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally, All the Pretty Horses stars Damon as John Grady Cole, a young 1940s cowboy born and raised in the Texas Panhandle who, after the death of his father, decides that his future is not on his family’s ranch, but rather in the wilds of Mexico. With his best friend Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) in tow, John sets out across the border seeking work as a ranch hand. On the way, the two encounter a teenaged runaway named Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black) and a beautiful young woman named Alejandra (Penelope Cruz), whose love will cost John Grady both his heart and, quite possibly, his life.
The best thing about All the Pretty Horses is how it functions as an unconventional western. Make no mistake, this is a film which firmly belongs in this genre even if it doesn’t necessarily showcase the standard assortment of western movie tropes. This is a testament to the old west not often seen with different forms of love, honor, and loyalty on display in place of traditional saloons and gunfighting. Moreover, there’s a deep poetic quality to each of the characters as they ponder and wrestle with life, which beautifully shows another side to the distinct world they come from.
It is that questioning of life which also makes All the Pretty Horses a solid, if unconventional, coming of age story. The journey of John Grady is not one too often shown in films of such a setting, yet All the Pretty Horses shows how even in a western setting, the idea of searching for the answer to who a person is at a complex time in life and where they in fact belong, are aspects of life both timeless and universal.
At its core though, All the Pretty Horses is a story of forbidden love which is both new and familiar. The romance and the passion that develops between John Grady and Alejandra hits all the right marks to be not just another couple of beautiful actors paired together. There’s both beauty and fire in watching these two wild creatures, who have been somewhat wounded by the past, fall for each other. Though the two lovers defy convention by letting go of the worlds they come from in favor of one another, the existence and the future of their romance provides not just the biggest conflict throughout the film, but also speaks volumes about the world depicted.
While All the Pretty Horses is most definitely a tale of a young man out of his depths as a stranger in a totally foreign world, the world in question is never anything short of breathtaking. Thornton and cinematographer Barry Markowitz have shot the beauty of both Texas and Mexico in such a grand manner, capturing their majestic hills, rivers and valleys perfectly. It was truly a stroke of genius to juxtapose the serenity of the setting against the conflict-riddled tale of John Grady by essentially pitting beauty against torment.
They say that actors oftentimes make the best directors (at least as far as other actors are concerned) and nothing could be further from the truth when looking at the performances in All the Pretty Horses. In what was perhaps the actor’s biggest departure up to that point, Damon nails it as John Grady. From his first scene, there’s never a moment that you don’t buy Damon as a young Texas cowboy, while at the same time, going beyond mere mannerisms to find the character’s real inner self.
As Alejandra, Cruz is both wild and radiant in one of the most subtle, yet powerful roles of her career, giving her character a drive of her own as well as a gentle grace. Thomas, meanwhile, stuck with the second banana role, still manages to hold his own, giving Lacey his own brand of dignity and strength and its impossible for Black not to steal every scene he’s in with pure rambunction as Jimmy.
Behind the scenes controversy surrounded the post-production phase of the film when studio head Harvey Weinstein initially rejected Thornton’s sprawling three and a half hour cut of the film, forcing the director to edit his version down to its eventual two hour release. The drastically edited cut severely effected the film’s release when Damon himself expressed his disappointment with the finished version. The actor’s feelings were echoed by a majority of critics and audiences, both of whom responded coolly to the film.
There were however those who did indeed fall under the film’s spell, such as Roger Ebert, who awarded All the Pretty Horses one his top scores and the National Board of Review, who honored Tally with the year’s Best Screenplay award.
If Damon and the majority of those who saw the film were disappointed, I choose to believe that their reaction was aimed more at what the movie could have been rather than an actual dislike towards what ended up on screen. The fact of the matter is that Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses more than paid tribute to McCarthy’s novel by beautifully bringing to the screen this tale of life and love.
