Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1

“Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” is the first of director Kevin Costner’s planned four-part western series. Given the project’s enormity, and expected enormous overall length, there was apparently talk along the way of making it a television miniseries instead only for Costner to insist it remain a big screen experience. And that is where “Chapter 1” debuted back in June, as did “Chapter 2” just recently at the Venice International Film Festival, on the big screen. As a proponent of the big screen experience myself, I admire his commitment, as I do him plunking millions of his own money into the endeavor. And while it feels a little harsh to judge this massive tetralogy after but one movie, like adjudicating a ginormous puzzle based on nothing but its border, he’s asking for quite a down payment on an ultimately uninvolving and unimaginative three hours. As it happens, this winter I watched all 15 hours of Rainer Werner Fassbender’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) not just for the first time but in a movie theater. Based on a book, it was divided into 12 chapters rather than four, but it was remarkable how each chapter worked unto itself even as they gradually added up to something bigger. What’s more, despite premiering on television, it felt cinematic, utilizing technique and tone, which as much as anything, is what’s missing from “Horizon,” the ultimate irony. “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was shown on TV, but feels like a movie, whereas “Horizon” was shown in movie theaters, but feels like TV.

“Horizon” is set against the backdrop of the Civil War but given that events take place in and around the Arizona and Montana territories, the conflict feels distant. That can sometimes come across like an oversight, if not a cop-out, a movie set during the most fraught period of American history eschewing politics, even if just as often it evokes “Horizon’s” most pointed realization. Though calvary and infantry Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston) never delves into specifics of the “important” work he and his men are doing on the far-flung frontier, Huston carries it in his air, nevertheless, that whenever the war between the states resolves itself, Manifest Destiny will continue apace, one original sin giving way to the other. That sense of Manifest Destiny is explored through its various storylines, brotherly vengeance that entangles a grizzled cowboy and a woman, the eponymous settlement at odds with the indigenous, and a wagon train on the Santa Fe Trail. The latter stood out to me, if only because of Luke Wilson as the wagon train leader, his unique kind of amiability suggesting both someone you might want to lead you into the great unknown but also someone who might well be in over his head. Seeing how it all works for him is just about the only thing that might get me back for “Chapter 2.”

The two qualities I cite, however, also speaks to “Horizon’s” problem, relying on Huston and Wilson to imbue character and meaning where there is none. No doubt Costner intends “Horizon” as something akin to Larry McMurtry’s celebrated 1985 novel “Lonesome Dove” but whereas “Lonesome Dove” lingered in the presence of its characters, took interest in what they had to say, drew its complications and situations with color and eccentricity, “Horizon” does nothing of the sort. That also speaks to just how little Costner uses his expressly chosen medium to his advantage. The locations are frequently grand, but just as frequently Costner fails to render the scenes involving these locations, or any others, with any sense of grandeur. His image-making is purely functional, not using them to tell his story, or even enhance or underline it, but merely recount it, a full three hours of advancing a labyrinthine plot, little else. It all ends with scenes that have been clearly culled from the next movie, the most evocative visuals by far if only in so much as they are manifestation of how “Chapter 1” has been in service of nothing more than getting us to “Chapter 2.” Close your eyes and you can virtually hear Costner saying: “Next week, on ‘Horizon.’”

McFarland USA

As the coach of an all-Latino cross country team in a predominantly Latino California town, Jim White is a name not so much too good to be true as scarily indicative of an old screenwriting go-to – that is, the White Savior. The White Savior is named White? So the characters can nickname him Blanco? That sounds like something only a terribly conservative and just plain terrible sports movie could conjure. Yet Jim White was a real person and that his young Latino charges apparently really did nickname him Blanco and Blanco really did coach these kids to a state title in 1987 (and eight more after). It’s a fine story all on its own, one hardly in need of embellishment or increased “conflict” to heighten the “stakes.” And yet “McFarland USA” goes searching for ways to ramp up the drama anyway, which it makes for a befuddling film, one that is actually quite good when it’s not getting in its own damn way.

 Kevin Costner’s Jim White is introduced as a sort of volatile football coach, dismissed because of that sort of volatility, volatility that they can’t make too volatile because it’s still Disney. So he throws a cleat that cuts a player’s chin. That’s enough to get him disgraced and dismissed. But Costner seems less than dedicated to this idea of volatility just as he seems less than dedicated to the idea of his character being a national emblem for his own last name. When he moves his family to McFarland, taking a last ditch job as PE teacher and assistant football coach, he takes his family out to dinner and seems genuinely confused by the word “tacos”. “Do you have burgers?” he asks incredulously, like if he’s not ordering at Chili’s he’s essentially trying to conduct impossible chemistry experiments. Not long after, a fleet of cars appear, made in the film’s cinematic language to look like gangbangers, and as Costner hustles his family to the car, Costner looks like a man less frightened than embarrassed by the scene he’s in. “Can’t we do better than this?” you imagine him asking director Niki Caro just after she’s yelled cut.
 
And that’s the thing, Caro can, and does. Her movie settles in as White and his family settle into the community. Once the clichés needed to set the tone for his emotional turnaround are dispensed with, she provides a clear-eyed view of this story. She presents the conception of the cross country team idea not with the traditional “A Ha!” Moment but with a moment that’s more just like “Oh, Hey.” Eating a sandwich in the bleachers, White recognizes how fast some of the kids in his class run and seems like a pretty decent idea to have them run competitively. Costner plays the moment so perfectly, so matter of fact, that he doesn’t even stop eating his sandwich.
 
Each of his young charges is given at least a little time in his own world, so we see them for them, who they really are, and what this cross country team might mean to each one. They are so fast, we learn, because they are made to run everywhere, from home to picking in the fields in the morning to school and then back to the fields. For the most part, they don’t lash out at this life, they accept it with equal parts admirable grace and understandable frustration. This is how they live, and the real drama in the film is simply in watching the effortless empathy that develops between the coach and his athletes. When White takes them to the beach for the first time, apparently a moment that really did happen, it should by all rights be Disneyfied bombast. But it’s not. It’s a moving evocation of the world outside McFarland, an evocation of where they can go
 
The concluding sequences get mucked up a bit in false conflict of whether or not White will accept a job at a more prestigious school coaching their track team, yet the catharsis when the inevitable victory happens is never blunted and very real. It’s imbued with a selflessness, the way a team teaches you to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and how that team allows White to become part of a bigger community, and how a welcoming community can allow individuals the space to be themselves. Occasionally the film also gets a bit too pointed in painting its competitors This isn’t about Us vs. Them; it’s just Us. And they are more than good enough.

Wistfully '95: Waterworld

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa. 

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“Waterworld” has always been discussed in terms of hugeness. It was, after all, as the title suggests, a film set predominantly on the water. That’s a mammoth undertaking since water is often less cooperative than lowly crew members at whom directors can holler through a bullhorn. The movie’s budget, which excessively exceeded estimates, was $175 million, probably the cost of a hammer and a few nails on a modern day Marvel production but the largest ever in 1995. Its shooting schedule ran over by 54 days. Its shoot primarily took place in a vast artificial seawater enclosure. Colloquially it’s still known as a floppiest of flops even if stats prove that unfounded. Its production was so extreme that director Kevin Reynolds either walked off the set before shooting completed or was fired by star Kevin Costner who took up the auteur chair, whichever you want to believe, though either one works fine for the purposes of our thesis. This is because for all its immensity, “Waterworld” itself is really quite small, the story of one man – make that manfish – who is played by Costner and just seems to wish everyone around him would go the hell away.

At one time, of course, Costner was a box office magnet. He was something of an American Everyman, so much so that even when he played England’s seminal mythic son, Robin Hood, he did so with an American Everyman accent. Yet if you look at his roles from this Costner Era just a bit closer, you’ll see emergent dabs of peculiarities. Ray Kinsella of “Field of Dreams” was a wholesome Midwesterner but he also heard voices. His Jim Garrison of “JFK” was portrayed as a hero, yet the real life man was also often termed eccentric, and Costner isn’t afraid to let that seep out of the performance too, like in the shot when he literally bounds from the staircase after kissing his wife goodnight to his study. Even his Eliot Ness, an eternal emblem of truth & justice, could, in the right light, come across less like a white-hatted winner than an odd duck teetotaler. Eventually the Costner we all know now, the seemingly apathetic introverted Costner, the one who showed up to the Emmy’s as if he would have rather been anywhere else, the daffy and disinterested Costner who spent much of “The Upside of Anger” just chilling on the couch, would have to emerge. He did, and it just happened to coincide with a $175 million behemoth.

“Waterworld’s” story turns on the polar ice caps having melted, flooding the entirety of earth and rendering the planet as one singular ocean. Yet its most memorable – er, rememberable – liquid-based image stands apart from this colossal sea. The film opens with Costner’s character, the Mariner, drinking his own urine. Well, not exactly; it’s his urine run through a rudimentary filtration system, but still. A character’s introduction is crucial and the Mariner’s introduction works less as an invitation than a repellent. And his character does repel. “It could have made me care about the characters,” the late great Roger Ebert wrote of the film, and that’s true, it could have. But it doesn’t want to. Costner, it seems, doesn’t want to. When the whole world’s a sea, you’re out to it pretty much all the time, and when you’re out to it pretty much all the time, you’re gonna be a little standoffish. You don’t get eager at the sight of people, you get suspicious, and so it’s like the instant the movie-watching audience gets settled in its seats, the Mariner’s suspicions of us arise and he pushes us away with his pee.

Not long after, the Mariner winds up at an atoll, a kind of floating city, where the local lawman solemnly explains this lone visitor has “two hours” to get what he needs and hit the watery road. “I’ll only need one,” the Mariner replies. Here’s a guy so untaken with people that when he finally encounters a whole mess of ‘em he actively wants less time around them. And as quick as the Mariner wants off the atoll, you sense the movie wants the same. From this point forward, it never feels comfortable. In the lead-up, a sequence in which the Mariner encounters a few shady characters and fends them off, the film is content to unspool its action exposition-free, letting us glean the world and the way it works by just watching it happen. And the Mariner’s almost balletic movements about his 60 foot trimaran are visually intoxicating, quite likely the film’s strongest element, to the point that when others are on his boat they just seem to be in the way, to him and to us.

If it’s a movie called “Waterworld”, though, then there has to be a Dryland, and if there’s a Dryland there has to be a map to find it, and if there’s map to find it then, hey, why not make it a tattoo on a little girl’s back because then the Mariner can encounter the little girl (Tina Majorino) who can help cheer him up (because he needs to be cheered up) and the little girl can have a mom (Jeanne Tripplehorn) with whom the Mariner can fall in love (because the Mariner needs to fall in love).

None of this especially noteworthy, just a series of passable to decently entertaining action sequences also involving a villain played by Dennis Hopper who might be partially amusing but feels like he’s still running on “Speed” fumes. For such extravagant expense, “Waterworld” never feels awe-inspiring, perhaps because deep down in the places it didn’t talk about at budget meetings it wanted to primarily be a movie about a solo sailor that couldn’t be because you can’t spend that much money on a movie that’s just about an introverted mutant manfish. And so what we’re left with feels un-involving and as glum as the costumes.

Even when the Mariner is meant to be smitten with the mother and charmed by the daughter, Costner never makes it feel convincing, like he’s play-acting, like this is what the script calls for, nothing else. It’s not accurate to say that this is when Costner stopped wanting to be a movie star because he never really wanted to stop being a movie star (see: the messianic complex of “The Postman” two years later). But maybe it’s when he stopped caring if he was Everybody’s Everyman and decided to start being a prickly ass who would demonstrate empathy only at his time and place of choosing. I can’t quite decide if that’s commendable or reckless.

3 Days To Kill

The first ten minutes of McG’s “3 Days to Kill” is your standard hodgepodge of action movie what-have-ya. Gunfire and explosions and mysterious briefcases and purposeful striding through hotel hallways and a man – Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner), CIA cleaner – who has to call his daughter for her birthday in the midst of all this action movie what-have-ya because, well, I think it increases “the stakes”. Then Ethan has a coughing fit and starts seeing blurry and collapses and the bad guy gets away and he finds out he has brain cancer with a diagnosis of three months to live, and all that action movie what-have-ya ends up seeming pretty pointless. So he decides to re-win the affection of the daughter, Zooey (Hallee Steinfeld), whom he never sees. But then a Vixenish CIA handler with the aromatic moniker Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) approaches with government-approved proposal – she can keep him alive with an experimental drug (that requires swigs of vodka to maintain balance) so long as he rubs a few bad dudes out.

What follows is high-octane trash, director McG garnering a crucial assist from his screenwriter, French auteur Luc Besson (co-writer: Adi Hasak), a man who as evinced by the phenomenal “Lucy” knows how to blend the ludicrous with the sublime. And in spite of a third-act wrap-up that unfortunately just doesn’t bounce as aggressively off the wall as the rest of the film, it is subtle high comedy. It’s particularly inspired when mixing parallel ideas of schmaltzy domestic drama and hardenered thriller, such as a devilishly awkward moment when Ethan forces the Italian man he is torturing to give his daughter a pasta recipe over the phone. Family first. It is less successful in its more traditional sequences of ferreting out bad men walled off behind reams of bodyguards and in-broad-daylight car chases, all which feel worn to the nub. Not for nothing is the most invigorating transportation sequence not a car chase but a saddened Ethan riding the purple bicycle his daughter has rejected as a gift because, like, seriously, it’s purple and she’s way too old for a purple bike, man.

Even better are the scenes of Vivi squiring Ethan to and fro in her no doubt Langley-approved hot rod, specifically because she’s not trying to outrun anybody, she’s turning and burning just because she can, which is pretty much the movie’s entire modus operandi. Plot-wise, I’d struggle to tell you all that was happening. The primary objective, as I hazily recall, was something along the lines of nabbing some uber-bad dude called The Wolf or The Albino or The Butcher or The Baker or The Candlestick Maker. That’s irrelevant.

Late in the film when Vivi orders Ethan to wear a “disguise”, he simply removes his scarf and jacket and jeans and slips into a suit. That’s it. That’s his whole cover. A suit. He’s recognized in about four seconds. Because it’s not about being in “disguise”, you see, it’s about being en vogue. Which is what Vivi grasps and which is why Vivi is the one who orders him to wear it. She spends her majority of screen time donning an assortment of wigs for no real reason other than to don an assortment of wigs. On “Alias” Jennifer Garner’s Sidney Bristow was always donning wigs to ostensibly aid in her various spying shenanigans when the real motivation was to have Jennifer Garner don an assortment of wigs. “3 Days to Kill” is just entirely up front about it, portraying the Spy Game as an International Parlor Game.

In a way, this whole story seems to be for the amusement of Vivi. Costner, with a few extra rocks of gravel in his voice, plays the part with a decided bedraggledness that feels less like brain cancer than a lifer employee desperately eyeing retirement. And Heard, who is all wickedly tickled smiles, feels less like a CIA handler than a femme fatale as puppetmaster, which, hey, for all we know is exactly the job description of actual CIA handlers. Consider the theoretically dramatic conclusion in which Ethan comes face to face with The Wolf or The Albino or The Butcher or The Baker or The Candlestick Maker. Suddenly, Vivi is just there, as if she had been hiding in the shadows, orchestrating the entire ordeal via chic headset, and exhorts Ethan to kill the bad dude. He defers out of ethical obligation and so she puts a slug in the bad dude’s brain. (Spoiler alert!) It’s like she had him to do all the leg work so she could disappear for large swaths of time to hit up Parisian dance clubs.

The closing shot involves Vivi standing atop a windswept hill, looking down on the beachfront property where Ethan and his family have gone for R & R, and while it is intended as something of a happy ending, and is, the subtext is both slightly voyeuristic – the CIA also keeps watch – and subtly satirical. The funniest concept in the entire film is, in fact, the one from which it springs - that is, the new-fangly medication that keeps Ethan alive, and that Vivi has chosen to give her charge even after his service is up. I mean, if the government does has a cure for cancer, you don't really think they'd tell us, do you?

Draft Day

When a film literally opens with the notoriously halting, bombastic voice of ESPN anchorman Chris Berman intoning about the “National Football League” as if its importance rivals a United Nations Peace Summit, as “Draft Day” does, well, the film could go one of two ways. It could be exactly what everyone expects, a conservative, brand beating bit of NFL agitprop. Or it could be a prickly satire, using the Berman voice to underscore the NFL’s bloated sense of self-importance, and, in turn, to show how the NFL draft itself is really nothing much more than a stock board on Wall Street, buying, selling and trading commodities. Alas, if Roger Goodell, the actual NFL commissioner, is featured in the film, and he is, the second option goes out the window.

“Draft Day” is directed by Ivan Reitman at his most middle-of-the-road, aside from bouts of split-screen emitting whiffs of a desperate uncle conversing with his nephew about phone apps, and no doubt to elicit the league’s cooperation and gain access to archival footage, he was forced to pull every possible punch. Admittedly, the screenplay, not so much hammy (which would have been refreshing) as conspicuously colorless, and perhaps a bit too much of inside baseball for those who don't know football, does him few favors, lacking in entertaining byplay and riveting drama. If the players in the draft are mere chess pieces, and despite their beating hearts and outrageous salaries, they are, so too are the characters of “Draft Day." What could have been caustically relevant is instead a narrative yawn. Its biggest plot development has to do with a quarterback’s birthday party and its attendees. To quote Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler......really?

Sonny Weaver Jr. (Kevin Costner) is General Manager of the Cleveland Browns. His team’s down the dumper, fans want him fired, his Dad – the one-time Browns coach – died six days earlier, he just learned his co-worker lady friend (Jennifer Garner, comporting herself with ten-tons of grace amidst this ode to masculinity even if she and Costner have virtually no chemistry) is pregnant, it’s Draft Day, and the ticking clock on screen shows it is but 12 hours until he makes his all-or-nothing pick. (“Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time,” says Robert McKee.) Ordered by team owner (Frank Langella) to make a “splash”, as opposed to merely choosing the player that best fits the team’s needs, Sonny makes a spectacularly ill-advised trade for the exalted number one pick. Now they can enlist the services of vaunted quarterback Bo Callahan. Unless Bo isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. Or unless wily Sonny has another trick up his dress shirt sleeve.

The pregnancy, of course, is meant to underscore the fresh start this precious draft pick can provide, a metaphor which feels both like an afterthought and an insult, though I don’t doubt most GM’s in the National Football League genuinely believe draft picks are more vital than newborn babies. Which would have been a bold idea for “Draft Day” to explore but then “Draft Day” believes in truth, justice and the Goodell Way. The Father’s death is meant to highlight Sonny Jr.’s come-to-Jesus moment, making him ask “who am I really?” and “for what do I really stand?” The Father’s death also, however, negates the obvious opportunity to have him stand stoically on the football field against the backdrop of a gray spring sky. So instead it serves that shot with the Mother right after she has spread the Father’s ashes. It’s NFL Films with Ellen Burstyn. Linda Blair is unaccounted for and, dammit, we really needed her in this one, vomiting all over the gridiron piety.

Costner is solid in the lead role, nicely playing against the archetype of a hard-charging, over-stressed workaholic, and instead evincing a restrained world-weariness, a man who maybe does not have the temperament for such a position. Naturally when the draft itself arrives, he begins making moves; and while the moves are overtly calculated in screenwriting terms, Costner is believable, acting not on foregone knowledge but out of wildcard desperation. He’s also ultimately acting out of the goodness of his heart, sort of, and this is where “Draft Day” truly runs aground. Not unlike the NFL’s Crunch Course and Concussion Problem, the film wants it both ways. It wants the draft pick to double as an ethical stand, but instantly undercuts it with power-hungry finagling. It’s terribly ironic, but (Berman voice!) the National Football League doesn’t do irony.

Early in the film, on the TV, over the shoulder of a character, we hear the real-life Jon Gruden make mention of a potential draftee who has been arrested for assault and battery. These sorts of real-world problems plague the NFL at every turn. Of course, in the film, the character merely made a mistake. “That's not who he is,” says Gruden in a moment of scarily accurate inadvertent hilarity, and which points to the overall problem of “Draft Day”. Everyone is either good or misunderstood (which, of course, means they’re still good). All the real-world issues are covered up. The Draft Room is just another Potemkin Village.