The Wayward Conservative Fantasies of Kevin Costner

The contradiction of Kevin Costner is that he’s a congenitally laid-back actor who’s at his most compelling when portraying characters in the throes of some deep, soul-shaking compulsion. Think of JFK’s crusading district attorney, Jim Garrison, who goes so far through the looking glass he can barely recognize himself. Or the cash-poor farmer Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, heedlessly risking his own bumper crop—and his family-man status—to construct a baseball diamond at the behest of the voices in his head.

The latter may still be Costner’s signature role, a countercultural refugee turned Midwestern Don Quixote whose impossible dream is nothing less than the reclamation of a lost national innocence: making America great again, one lazy pop fly at a time. “It reminds us of all that was once good and it could be again,” explains one of Ray’s fellow dreamers in a monologue about the enduring beauty of baseball that doubles as a testimonial to the hypnotic thrall of nostalgia. “People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

As the most cozily reactionary blockbuster of the 1980s—a gentle fable of generational detente bathed in the same sunshine glow as Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign and strewn with mythic kitsch (of course Ray is a corn farmer)—Field of Dreams earned its star creative carte blanche, which he subsequently used to repackage himself in the trendy actor-director-mogul mold of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford. Costner’s multihyphenate phase peaked early, with his Oscar-winning directorial debut Dances With Wolves (1990), a period piece peddling its own grandiloquent metaphysics of reconciliation through the story of a Union Army lieutenant (Costner) who forges a deep and redemptive spiritual connection with a group of Sioux Indians. The film’s combination of epic sweep and even more epic vanity garnered a few skeptics (like Pauline Kael, who scoffed that Costner had “feathers in his hair and feathers in his head”) but mostly emboldened its maker to take even bigger swings in front of and behind the camera. The logic was sound: If he built them, people would come. Cue the soggy debacle of Waterworld, an aquatic riff on Mad Max that earned Costner a raft of bad publicity, and whose historical ratio of hubris to humiliation was cinched by the trade press nicknaming it, variously, Fishtar and Kevin’s Gate.

In retrospect, most of Costner’s late-1990s to early-2000s output resembles a kind of white-elephant graveyard, including a couple of failed attempts to channel the dusty enchantment of Dances With Wolves, such as The Postman, which fused vintage Western aesthetics with sci-fi dystopian tropes, and Open Range, which served them straight up. Ultimately, it took a prestige television series to put Costner back on top in the twenty-first century: the ensemble heartland drama Yellowstone, which parlayed its leading man’s gravitas to big ratings and pop-cultural resonance as what The New York Times called “a conservative fantasy liberals should watch.” When Costner strode onstage at the Oscars in the aftermath of the Will Smith–Chris Rock fiasco to wax rhapsodic about the Cinerama dome and the magic of the movies, he seemed to be auditioning for symbolic national-leading-man status once again—which of course meant it was just a matter of time before he risked it all tilting at the windmills of the industry.

Which brings us to Horizon, a proposed four-part cinematic series—subtitled An American Saga—set in the late nineteenth century and featuring multiple, intersecting storylines about the growing pains of a fledgling nation. The 181-minute Chapter One opens wide this month, with an already-wrapped second installment waiting on a revised release date (plans for an August release were unexpectedly scuttled); parts three and four are in various stages of development and largely contingent on the success of their predecessors, as well as on whether Costner is willing to mortgage another one of his homes in order to pay the overhead.

When the $100 million curtain-raiser premiered at Cannes, journalists seized on the connection between its go-for-broke backstory and that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, another self-financed production perched on the fault line between ambition and folly. The difference was that where Coppola was celebrated for seeking to stylistically reinvent his chosen art form, Costner’s vision was described as being staunchly old-fashioned—a genre exercise indebted to John Ford, Howard Hawks, and other masters who didn’t so much recreate history as remake it in their own mythic image. “So this is where God put the West,” said John Wayne when he first traveled to Arizona’s spectacularly photogenic Monument Valley; although it was filmed in Utah, Horizon means to exalt its lunar landscape and the iron will of those who would try to traverse and tame it. The title evokes something elusive and ultimately unattainable, a mirage that’s also a vanishing point, forever looming and yet eternally out of reach.

It’s also the name of a town—an upstart settlement along a winding riverbank in Arizona whose founding members are selling land and ideology as part of a package deal. While none of Horizon’s inhabitants necessarily expect to get rich quick, they’re certainly enamored of the idea that the meek—or at least the pious—will inherit the earth, the problem being that, in actuality, these settlers have staked a false claim. The San Pedro Valley is an Apache hunting ground, and Chapter One begins with an extended set piece in which the Indigenous inhabitants attack and decimate the makeshift community under cover of night, burning their homes and taking no prisoners. It’s a nightmarish sequence, leveraging uncommonly matter-of-fact brutality against a few genuinely striking and troubling images: Punctured by an Apache arrow, a dying musician clings stubbornly to his fiddle while fire rages around him; forced into the cellar of their collapsing home a mother and her teenage daughter desperately draw oxygen through the barrel of a rifle jammed upward through the soil.

That second one is vivid enough to serve as a potential dissertation on the life-or-death-dialectics of American gun culture, but for the most part, Costner eschews such heady intellectualizations. His brand of big-tent multiplex populism has little use for metaphor or allegory; in lieu of revisionism—the dominant mode in movie Westerns since the late 1960s, when Hollywood’s subversive new ruling class saw fit to question their own cinematic creation myths—Horizon offers the pleasures of revanchism. It’s a theme that’s deeply imbricated in the material. Nearly every one of Horizon’s storylines deals with the idea—and lived reality—of America as contested territory, selectively mapped out and then opportunistically subdivided by different factions who, despite the abundance of wide open spaces, simply can’t keep out of each other’s way.

The opening siege sequence dares to evoke a strain of retrograde representation, similar to a passage in the Coens’ 2018 Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs but without that film’s conceptual safety net. There, the arrival of a murderous, unknowable Native American Other was contextualized by the script’s framing device of a vintage dime-store adventure story. Costner offers no such escape hatch and, for nearly 30 harrowing minutes, runs roughshod over the politically correct legacy of Dances With Wolves. In the next scene, we see the Apache’s war chief condemning the attack on both moral and tactical grounds, warning his community of the bloody retribution to come. The inexorability of vengeance is a thesis: Arriving in the aftermath of the massacre to herd the survivors to safety at a nearby U.S. Army base, a general played by Danny Huston explicates the nature of manifest destiny, effectively paraphrasing another Coens modern-dress gunslinger riff, No Country for Old Men, that you can’t stop what’s coming. Idealism is dangerous, and reality is dirty: Trudging over a muddy mountain stream in another frontier outpost (this one in snowy Wyoming), a cynical visitor likens the town below to a urinal, a nascent (and) literal example of trickle-down economics.

Such rhetoric is prelude to a (figurative) pissing contest—one that turns fatal for the instigator, who’s gunned down with good cause by a decent man played, inevitably and necessarily, by Costner himself. Given the mostly B-list status of Horizon’s other cast members, Costner’s innate magnetism transcends the relative marginality of his role as a horse trader who ends up protecting a wayward prostitute (Abbey Lee) from a pair of fraternal bounty hunters, although he’s been sure (with co-writer Jon Baird) to make his character both a dead-eyed crack shot and an aw-shucks lady-killer. The issue with Costner’s acting here isn’t (simply) an aging A-lister’s narcissism, however; it’s that his character is lost somewhere in the zone between archetype and cliché—a conceptual crevasse that keeps threatening to swallow the film’s sprawling ensemble of homesteaders, soldiers, scalp hunters, entrepreneurs, religious zealots, and racialized outcasts whole. It’s one thing to style your movie as a maximalist throwback teeming with tactile details, and another to stretch that collection of tropes and textures so thin that they start tearing at the seams. The flip side to Costner having such a steady directorial hand is that it’s also heavy: Where a movie like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (whose oil-derrick-size shadow falls over the proceedings) is willfully elliptical, Horizon is simply frenetic, cross-cutting between locations and character arcs in an attempt to generate a galloping sense of convergence.

To give Costner a bit of a break in exchange for his reported 10-figure investment, the unevenness of Horizon’s first chapter may be a by-product of its larger conception as a jumbo-size serial; what seems like simple goldbricking at three hours may look more purposeful after 12. (Or not). The putative climax is an attack by bloodthirsty white mercenaries on an Apache outpost whose intended counterpoint with the earlier destruction of Horizon is undermined by its comparative (and dubious) brevity; the real ending, though, is a wordless, turbocharged montage of scenes (and spoilers) from the upcoming sequel, a surreal flourish that doubles as a Marvel-style hard sell.

There’s surely something ironic, and also tragic, about a movie that earnestly attempts to dramatize the inherent cruelty of capitalism being DOA at the box office. Still, in a contemporary film culture that has fetishized striving as much as success, there’s a form of honor (and currency) in achieving commercial failure. Thirty years after Waterworld, flops barely have to wait a weekend to be reclaimed as misunderstood masterpieces; in this climate, chances are good that Horizon will attract its share of aggressive critical champions, and that the phrase Kevin’s Gate will seem less like a term of opprobrium than a badge of honor for a filmmaker who (like Michael Cimino before him) stuck his neck out as far as it could go. (That Costner’s film appears to be out of step with the zeitgeist may be another magic-hour illusion; what better time to examine the American experiment than as it’s winding down?) Whether or not Horizon is finally actually rousing, it proceeds as if it is—a movie fallen comfortably under its own bombastic, crowd-pleasing spell. Another line from Field of Dreams comes to mind: “I wish I had your passion, Ray.… Misdirected though it might be, it is still a passion.”