Open Range

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to forgo a couple of the History Channel's back-to-back-to-back documentaries about the World Trade Center and see the only Kevin Costner movie in recent history to receive a positive review. Overall, I enjoyed it, despite the presence of a few annoying cliches. (At one point, so help me, one character tells another to "Rustle up some grub.")

The basic scenario of the film is a blend of two common western themes: (1) free-ranging cowboys clash with greedy, evil town boss, and (2) man with mysterious past must face down both an external evil and his own dubious background.

It's a truism of frontier history that many early settlers were simply people who couldn't get along with their neighbors in civilized territory. Many of them were on the run from the law, from inconvenient family obligations, or from creditors. In the American west in the late nineteenth century, the situation was further complicated by the social and psychological aftermath of the Civil War, and especially of the ruthless bushwhacking and banditry that characterized the frontier border states. After the war, hundreds of men, desensitized to violence, socially rootless, economically destitute, well-armed and trained to kill, were loosed on the frontier. Some became lawmen, some became outlaws, and some tried to forget it all. One such man is Charlie (Kevin Costner), who has taken refuge in an isolated existence herding cattle on the unclaimed open range in the employ of "Boss" Spearman (Robert Duvall).

Unfortunately for Charlie, the open range of unclaimed land upon which freelance cattlemen could graze their herds is giving way to the development of towns and the inevitable attendant political and economic power grabs. The open range is becoming more and more constricted by the demands of civilization, and free-ranger herders like Charlie and Boss are doomed to clash with those who want to enclose the commons as private property.

There's a romantic subplot, too, although it develops slowly and somewhat unobtrusively.

The scenery and cinematography in Open Range are gorgeous. The movie was filmed in Montana and/or western Canada, and unlike the arid landscape of John Ford's classic Monument Valley westerns, this land looks lush enough to be capable of growing salable cattle. It's land productive enough to be worth fighting over.

As one might suspect, there's a substantial amount of violence in the film. It's not glamorous. It's chaotic and brutal and ugly. Open Range, like many historians, attributes the effectiveness of the most "successful" killers to their sociopathic desensitization to killing, their ability to unhesitatingly murder others in the blink of an eye, seizing the initiative and then taking advantage of the resulting disorientation to further decimate, intimidate, and disorganize the enemy. At one point in the film, as a threatened showdown looms, Charlie matter-of-factly analyzes the opposing side's "soldiers", identifying which ones are likely to freeze up or react slowly, who's likely to panic or fire wildly, and who poses the greatest threat and thus must be pre-emptively eliminated. Such men have difficulty fitting into the world of rose-patterned teacups.

Interestingly, the townspeople in Open Range are not mere props who stand around like bystanders and conveniently disappear once the bullets start to fly; depending on the situation, they flee the town, hide, or shoot back with rifles and shotguns. When necessary, they drag bodies off the street and tend to the wounded.

Some aspects of the romantic subplot seem forced. It's hard to imagine that an attractive woman with no apparent prejudice against men, such as Annette Bening's character, would have remained single for very long on the frontier, given the unbalanced ratio of men to women. But it is refreshing to, for once, see a 40-something year old male lead slowly and haltingly develop a relationship with a believably 40-something woman, rather than promptly tumbling some 19-year-old sexpot. Bening is both authentically windworn and powerfully attractive in her role as an independent-minded and educated woman who quietly chafes against the social customs that keep her from achieving her ambitions, but has to live with them nonetheless. Just why she would be attracted to a borderline sociopath is not explained, but there's a nice teacup motif that helps ease things along.

Blooper alert: Be on the lookout for a close-up shot of a character standing next to a broken-down barbed wire fence which is totally absent from the long-angle shots immediately before and after. I felt sure that someone, sometime in the movie, was going to refer to the conflict between those who wanted to enclose land with barbed wire and those who wanted to move herds freely across it, but only this short blooper and one or two store signs in town even acknowledge the stuff. If there was a subplot here, most of it got left on the cutting-room floor. Perhaps Costner decided that portraying "good guys" Charlie and Boss vandalizing fences would cost them audience sympathy.