All the Pretty Horses
All the Pretty Horses may look pretty and have lots of shots of stampeding horses, but I think the aforementioned title is a bit of a misnomer. The story, itself, isn’t really pretty and doesn’t really involve horses at all. Well, maybe the book on which this film is based was prettier and had more horses in it, but I have not read Cormac McCarthy’s best seller, so I cannot tell. It does have pretty stars in it, though, if that means anything.
Our story begins in texas as two friends (Matt Damon and Henry Thomas) are heading out to Mexico to see the world and find work as ranch hands. They fall in with a rancher (Rubén Blades) who is looking to breed horses and also happens to have a pretty young daughter played by Penélope Cruz. Complications ensue. If you think you’ve seen this film before, you probably have. Cruz and Damon’s characters haven’t even said two words to each other before they are sneaking off to skinny dip in moonlit water holes. Of course, daddy doesn’t approve and Cruz and Damon are forced apart. There is heavy subplot at work here, which would take too long to explain, but involves a boy met on the road to Mexico (played by Lucas Black of Sling Blade fame), murder, time spent in a Mexican jail, an ill-fated reunion of lovers, horse theft, mystic healing, and, finally, a trip back to Texas.
All of this sounds worse than it is. Horses, as a whole, is not bad. The film’s director, Billy Bob Thorton, does a wonderful job of capturing the southwestern terrain and gets solid performances from much of the cast. The problem here is that we’ve seen all of this before and no one involved with this production has figured out a way to make to fresh or interesting. And it’s a shame that Cruz, star of such Spanish films as the Oscar-winning All About My Mother and Open Your Eyes, doesn’t have more to do here. She seems bored in most of her scenes and I couldn’t tell if it was real or acting. You may be bored, too, depending on how many movies you’ve seen.
This makes All the Pretty Horses all the more disappointing. For Thorton, whose last released film was Sling Blade in 1996, this should have been a slam dunk. Sling Blade was an intimate film, which seemed to know its way around Southern people and culture. here he seems divorced from the proceedings, which may explain why the film looks so good, but is empty in every other way.
This is not to say All the Pretty Horses isn’t worth a look on a big screen where one can appreciate its dynamic cinematography. Justify it this way: The film gives you lots of opportunities to go to the bathroom without missing a thing.