All The Pretty Horses Details

Fans of Cormac McCarthy's great modern western novel may not be too enamoured by the overly schematic treatment it has received here under Billy Bob Thornton's measured direction. Despite its many flaws (one being Matt Damon's inability to carry the central emotional load), All the Pretty Horses retains much of its source novel's power and romantic nostalgia, thanks to a remarkably faithful script by Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally. Finding himself without a home or future when his beloved ranch is sold out from under him by his estranged mother, John Grady Cole (Damon) and his best buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) head to Mexico to become the cowboys they'd always dreamt of being. But in 1949 the cowboy life turns out not to be so much a career option as a difficult rite of passage encompassing chance encounters (with outlaw teen Jimmy Blevins, played by Lucas Black in the film's best performance), forbidden love (with the aristocratic Alejandra as played by Penélope Cruz still failing to find her feet in a non-Spanish film), a spell in prison (where Damon fights for his life in the picture's most riveting sequence), a shocking execution and a final personal reckoning. Although epic in visual presentation and sweeping style, Thornton's often too remote drama is very much a sum of its episodic parts. Nor is there much chemistry between Damon and Cruz, and that greatly undercuts one of the story's key themes. Yet for every fudged moment there's one of extraordinary power and beauty and that makes Thornton's fitfully striking revisionist western very much a mixed blessing.

A uneven attempt at an elegiac Western, combining nostalgia for a vanishing way of life with a coming-of-age narrative; but the central romance has no life to it, and it ends up as just another love story between two men and their horses.