All the Pretty Horses (2000) Review

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(More customer reviews)"It's the most fun I've ever had working on a film," Matt Damon gushed in one of numerous interviews for director Billy Bob Thornton's western epic, an adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy that originally hit bookstore shelves back in 1992. Sad to say, Mr. Damon, it wasn't so fun to WATCH Thornton's finished product. "All The Pretty Horses" is like trying to interpret someone's bad dream, all scattered images and unintelligible action thrown together in a two-hour video. It is obvious in the first 30 minutes of "ATPH" that integral parts of the film were cut to fill a specific time frame. Enormous amounts of footage that would've made the film more understandable and perhaps even more enjoyable ended up on the cutting room floor due to squabbles between Thornton and studio execs. From what would've been a potentially long film (almost four hours, to be exact) it was severely sliced down to a mere 116 minutes by the hacksaw editors at Miramax and the film suffers greatly because of it.
The story is as follows: John Grady Cole (Damon) is a young man in late 1940's Texas who dreams of living the life of a prosperous rancher. He is determined to see and experience the old frontier before it disappears for good and makes a plan to travel to Mexico on horse with his good friend Lacy Rawlins (Thomas). On route, they meet tough-talking teen Jimmy Blevins, a young fugitive traversing the desert landscape on a stolen horse. He leaves the entourage only days later, dodging authorities for a second-theft of the same nature. Sans Blevins, John and Lacy cross the border and find work taming wild steeds for a man named Rocha, the most prestigious rancher in the area. Trouble brews when good ol' John falls for Rocha's beautiful daughter Alejandra (Cruz). Despite the tumult that their interracial relationship will cause, they begin seeing each other in secret and fall madly in love. About fifteen minutes after John and Alejandra are officially an item (it occurs so quickly - it's almost implausible), he and Lacy are detained by the local captain for murder and meet up with Blevins again when they are thrown into a filthy cell with him after their arrest. John and Lacy do time in a Mexican penitentiary (don't know how long; hard to tell) and Alejandra is completely out of the picture for the next hour.
It's at about this point in the movie that people who have not read McCarthy's novel will be thinking, "What's the hell's going on here?" They have good reason to ask this question, for nothing makes sense because of Thornton's massive amount of missing footage (probably about an hour and a half's worth, if I carefully judge). What will really boggle people is the relationship between John and Alejandra. The dialogue between them is too insubstantial and vague; their wordless exchanges aren't nearly enough to justify their instantaneous love affair. In a matter of minutes, John and Alejandra go from perfect strangers to voracious paramours, a tangle of limbs beneath the sheets. You don't see any emotional growth to their relationship. Instead, it's...BAM - they're in love! Cruz's Alejandra is reticent one moment and in the next moment knocking on Damon's bedroom door every night for a romantic rendezvous. Even their love scenes are shown in jump cuts, each shot of them kissing and embracing only seconds long. Fade in, fade out - and that's the way it goes. There is no insight to gain for their sudden chemistry and their heartrending romance. Of course, this is due to the faulty editing that is so apparent throughout the whole movie.
Many other defects stand out to the ardent observer. For example, Henry Thomas and Matt Damon look not the least bit rugged in their travails across the border. There is not a millimeter of stubble visible on their baby faces, even after several days in the rough and unforgiving terrain of Texas and Mexico with no hygiene whatsoever, not to mention an arduous stint in a filthy and fearsome penitentiary. They remain clean-shaven through it all. Not very realistic, if you ask me.
It is hard for me to critique most of the performances in this film because of all the missing pieces, but I will say this: Lucas Black RULED the screen. Black was the high of the lows and a welcome spark to the extensive and languorous shots of the Mexican range. Cocksure and completely resolved to keep both his horse and gun to his minute list of possessions, Black's strong-headed Blevins is a spunky refresher when someone becomes bored with John and Lacy's dreamy trek across the border.
Despite its greatest flaw, "All The Pretty Horses" still manages to come off as a striking and meaningful piece of work from a progressive director. I sincerely hope that within the next year, Thornton releases a director's cut version on DVD so that audiences predisposed to shunning this insufferable edition will get a chance to see Thornton's original and complete vision before the production axe came down with a loud and deadly crack.

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