Horizon Will Be a Monumental Achievement — If Kevin Costner Can Finish It

As a place, the town of Horizon doesn’t really exist yet — and neither does the movie, when you really think about it. The first chapter of Kevin Costner’s planned four-part western epic Horizon: An American Saga, which follows a cross-section of characters headed for the much-advertised Arizona Territory settlement of the title, premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and opened in theaters later in the summer. Its soft box office (and other behind-the-scenes studio shenanigans, one suspects) prompted its distributor Warner Bros. to drop plans to release the second chapter. That second part premiered on the last day of the Venice Film Festival and promptly disappeared. It still doesn’t have a release date or a distributor as of this writing, but it did just have its U.S. premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Horizon — the whole thing — is an enormous undertaking, and once completed, it will feel like a monumental achievement. But right now, there’s also a fair chance that it will all wind up as … nothing. Costner has not yet shot the ensuing two chapters, and he’s already sunk a galactic amount of his own money into this dream project, so he probably needs another financier or two. And unlike some other movies that have been split into multiple sections, Horizon does indeed feel like it needs to be whole before we’ll be able to appreciate its full scope and shape. Most of our current multipart extravaganzas give us the standard three acts before dropping in a cliffhanger ending to keep us hooked. Horizon is different. It’s not driven by cliffhangers. Rather, it’s like sitting in a cross-country train whose tracks haven’t been built yet and watching the railroad ties get hammered into place one by one (to borrow another classic western image). It’s all quite fascinating, but there’s a real fear that the work will be abandoned at some point and we’ll be left in the middle of nowhere.

This feeling becomes especially pronounced with the second installment. Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter Two is a terrific film, but like the previous chapter, it’s also an incomplete one. In some weird way, it feels even less complete than the first: It expands the story emotionally while continuing to deny us any real closure or resolution, which in turn makes the anticipation for the rest that much greater. The earlier installment began and ended with two massacres, to highlight the endless cycles of retribution that marked western expansion. This new one is punctuated by a series of senseless and brutal killings, as if to suggest that the poison has always been within us. It drives us deeper into the muck, and then it leaves us there.

If the second part could be said to have a central protagonist, that would be the genteel Juliette Proctor (Ella Hunt), who in the first part found herself and her husband Hugh (Tom Payne) out of step with the rough ways of the wagon train they had joined. Now, as the convoy forges on, Mrs. Proctor finds herself imprisoned in an unspeakable nightmare of abuse and humiliation. The silence of those around her, in particular the wagon train’s unprepared and overmatched leader Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), adds another dimension to her ordeal. We watch as seemingly ordinary and allegedly moral people do nothing. It’s harrowing, and Costner’s matter-of-fact depiction of this story line adds both to the heartbreak and to the sense that his vision of Horizon is a lot grimmer than the rousing old-timey cowboy epic many thought they were getting.

Among the other central players in the saga, Costner’s own character Hayes Ellison is trapped in a different way, as he winds up stuck in a job as an enforcer at a small settlement, attempting to keep the peace while trying to deal with unhinged individuals on both sides of a nonexistent law. Meanwhile, Sienna Miller’s Frances Kittredge, who had lost her husband and son in brutal fashion in the early scenes of part one, continues trying to build a life for herself and her daughter (Georgia MacPhail) in what will become the settlement of Horizon, but is nothing much yet. As for Sam Worthington’s First Lt. Trent Gephardt, one of the first film’s more consequential leads, he departs this one early, to go shoot another Avatar sequel fight in the Civil War.

Those who felt that part one would have been better suited to a television series will find little to disabuse them of that notion in this installment, which intercuts among its disparate characters and story strands even more rapidly. But in cinema, intimacy is as much suited to spectacle as grand vistas and massive crowd scenes — maybe even more so. And with the whole thing slowly taking shape before us, an awareness of how these parts fit together arguably becomes even more crucial. It helps to watch this movie closely: Costner and editor Miklos Wright cut on ideas and image associations rather than natural narrative pauses. This might add to some viewers’ sense that the story is stagnating. But the director is unmooring us on purpose, building toward a gnawing sense that something awful is about to happen at all times, which is probably a lot closer to what the Old West was really like.

While the primary shortcoming of the first chapter was that we didn’t really get to know its characters too well, now we spend a lot more time with them. This second chapter is a long, dark night of the soul, homing in on people who have become trapped and deserted in their quests for a better life. It also reveals that Costner is interested less in mounting a grand, old-fashioned western (a genre that has been good to him) and more in trying to embody America in all its contradictions, with its shattered and patchwork families, its heroes, its psychos, its drifters and charlatans and hapless leaders. Horizon, it turns out, is a tapestry, not a fresco. Whether we’ll ever get to see it completed, however, remains as distant and vaporous a dream as America itself.