All The Pretty Horses

All The Pretty Horses

Billy Bob Thornton’s “All the Pretty Horses” is a Western of mourning about two young cowboys and then a third, who ride from Texas into Mexico in search of what’s left of the Old West. The movie is that simple, and that grave. It has adventure and romance in it, but it isn’t about them; it’s about the mythic idea of heading south on a good horse, with a change of clothes, some camp gear and a gun, and seeing what happens. It takes place in 1949; a few years later its heroes would have headed down Route 66 in a Chevy convertible.

The movie stars Matt Damon as John Grady Cole, Henry Thomas as Lacey Rawlins, his best buddy on the trail they’ve known each other since grade school and Lucas Black as Jimmy Blevins, a kid they pick up along the way. He seems to be sitting more horse than John or Lacey can quite persuade themselves he paid for. They let him come along; one predicts he’s going to get them into trouble, and he does.

They get involved, in Mexico maybe or maybe not by accident but certainly unintentionally on their part at least initially although not without forewarning on Blevins’ part in an incident involving stolen horses that necessitates their leaving town in some haste. The kid knows it’s his fault and does the right thing: keeps to the trail while John and Lacey lose themselves among the sagebrush behind him as much to create confusion for anyone who might be following them all as because both honor among thieves and common sense dictate it’d be best for whoever took off first to lie low until further notice.

They separate. Butch Cassidy famously observed that when you find yourself face-down in the dust with boots around your neck there isn’t much future in arguing about whose fault it was or why; still more famously he observed, as he and the Sundance Kid prepared to jump off a cliff into a river far below them whose existence neither was aware of until now, that the future is all you’ve got left or, anyway, that’s what he said in the movie. John Grady Cole might not have heard him say it (although then again he might have; we don’t know), but sooner or later he comes to understand it.

Which is why there wouldn’t be much point in telling you what happens next. Anyway they end up on a ranch where every day at precisely 5 p.m., Ruben Blades takes off from his private airstrip for Houston or Dallas or someplace like that; and where he’d take his daughter Penelope Cruz instead is none of our business here.

There are wild horses on this ranch which would present themselves directly to John Grady Cole were it not for the circumstance that right around sundown every day they get struck by lightning, so it falls to him first to break these horses under saddle before proceeding with their training on more advanced techniques such as going forward and turning around. It occurs to me I ought maybe to mention Don Hector de la Rocha (Blades) has another daughter who lives with him full-time: Alejandra (Cruz), his niece.

He gives them a job. In fact it turns out Don Hector knows more about horses than any Mexican since Pancho Villa; only this doesn’t surprise John because somewhere along the way at “I’m sorry,” maybe, or “Can we talk?” Alejandra mentioned this little known factoid about her uncle. Which she didn’t need to do because (1) along with being pretty hot stuff herself in the sack she’s also bright enough for two of ’em even over long hauls generally considered favorable for rabbits; and (2) between those two things there isn’t much John can think of that Don Hector could tell him about horses that would surprise John.

Alejandra is engaged to a captain in the Mexican army, who is somewhere in the vicinity of 50 years old and therefore (in John’s view at least) too old for her; but this need not detain us further because Alejandra knows what she’s doing.

What Thornton cares about I think has something to do with a story, all right. But his movie is really about how it feels to be young on horseback in a foreign country and in trouble. Jeff Nichols’s “Shotgun Stories” reminds me some of “All the Pretty Horses.” They’re nothing alike except they both want very badly to put down an account of what it was like to be at that place, at that time: they use dialogue as if it were music, for purposes of establishing mood.

There is an interesting thing going on early in this film with the dialogue by Ted Tally. Listen closely during those first scenes. It’s being treated differently from other movies. It has more presence. Rather than being buried under ambience or overlapped by natural noise or music, it sits squarely atop the soundtrack mix from scene to scene indoors and out, as though sounding its own memory bells across time and space: This is happening now but I already remember it perfectly well; let me show you again how well I remember it.

Even when he finds himself in a love scene or fighting for his life behind bars, Damon is never the “hero” so much as a guy it’s happening to. Henry Thomas and Lucas Black (from Thornton’s earlier film “Sling Blade”) are also good at not being “characters” and just being there; Tally’s dialogue never gives them too much to say, they figure it out, we figure it out without a lot of words.

The same economy of language works in two lovely supporting performances, by Miriam Colon as Alfonsa, the eagle-eyed aunt of Alejandra, and Bruce Dern, as a judge on the Texas side. “I won’t have her unhappy or gossiped about,” the aunt warns John. She warns him away from her niece — and later warns him off again, when the stakes are higher.

She is not made into a standard old shrew but is wise and self-possessed and knows very well what trouble she is trying to avert. The Dern character has a key scene in a courtroom but the next scene may be more important because what John really wants to do is confess and have his sins forgiven, and the judge knows that.

You can see how this movie could have been jacked up into one level action picture; what makes it special is how Thornton modulates the material. Even the prison knife-fight scenes aren’t staged as action confrontations but as quicks desperate and strangely intimate.

This is best seen on a big screen where you can feels that size of sky and colors of land doing their work; it’s as if these events are bigger than people as if John Grady Cole will never again be such a reckless damn fool kid as he was this year and will always sort of regret that.

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