A Restrained Ride With ‘Pretty Horses’

While in general the key to value in real estate is location, location, location, the value in the specific West Texas real estate created by novelist Cormac McCarthy in “All The Pretty Horses” is a bit different: language, language, language.

McCarthy’s award-winning book is one of the most beautifully written of the last 10 years, an intoxicating example of words at play. Billy Bob Thornton’s respectful version of the novel stars Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz and tries, with some success, to do right by an author the director clearly admires. The film is handsomely mounted, with no end of heroic vistas shot by Barry Markowitz. But the demands of drama on the screen are different than that on the page. More simply, what makes for a great novel does not necessarily make for a great film.

The problem is that even with the benefit of a careful Ted Tally adaptation that leans heavily on the dialogue of the book, this film inevitably has to do without the glow the original language provides. With that gone, even though “Pretty Horses’ ” much-publicized two-hour running time plays exactly right, what’s left at any length is by definition stripped down, a reduction of the book to its acceptable but not necessarily thrilling core plot and themes.

Pared down this way, “Pretty Horses” turns out to be a tribute/mash note to the mythic West, to the time when horses were horses and men, given to cauterizing wounds with red-hot pistols, were very much men. Even though one of the points here is that this era is ending before our eyes, there is still enough guys-doing-what-guys-have-to-do material to make “Pretty Horses” play like a sacred journey through the venerated traditions of the Cowboy Way.

Aside from being insistently masculine, “Pretty Horses” is too deliberate and magisterial to fully involve us. Though its characters are in the habit of losing their heads to passion, the film itself is too restrained to follow their lead. In an odd way “Pretty Horses” has been too faithful to the spirit of this somber, fatalistic, melancholy romance, too much a stubborn ode to stoicism, to light any emotional fires.

It all begins in the West Texas town of San Angelo in 1949. Young John Grady Cole (Damon) has to face the reality that with his grandfather dead, his mother is determined to sell the ranch he’s grown up on, the place he considers heaven on earth, and there’s nothing he can do to stop her.

Both John Grady and his best friend Lacey Rawlins (a very steady Henry Thomas) decide to act on their impulsive dream of crossing the border and going to Mexico. There are ranches down there, or so they’ve been told, so big you can’t ride from end to end in a week. Surely, the Spanish-speaking John Grady figures, there would be situations down there for two top hands.

Before they get out of Texas, however, the boys find themselves followed by the even younger more-hat-than-cowboy Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black, the star of Thornton’s “Sling Blade”). Irascible and hot-tempered with a mysterious past, Blevins wants to join up with them. But though you’d have to be a fool not to agree with Lacey when he says he gets a “uneasy feeling” about Blevins, John Grady lets him tag along.

After some trouble inevitably involving Blevins, the two friends manage to get jobs at La Purisima, an enormous, 27,000-acre establishment that’s been in the family of owner Rocha (Ruben Blades) for 170 years. With his equine skill and knowledge, John Grady soon becomes a protege of Rocha’s and also finds himself desperately attracted to his young daughter Alejandra (Cruz).

How could he not be? Dark and capricious to John Grady’s even-tempered blondness, Alejandra is not only everything the boy is not but also a major flirt and powerfully attractive. An innocent (the book pegs him at 16) who knows more about horses than life, John Grady is fated to ignore Lacey’s sensible analysis (“I don’t see you holding no aces, bud”) and plunge headlong into the abyss.

Damon is well-cast and does solid work as the straight-arrow John Grady, and the same is true for the gorgeous Cruz. There is even measurable on-screen chemistry between them, but, true to the book and despite what the ads indicate, their relationship, however crucial, does not occupy a large amount of screen time. And when John Grady is alone or with male acquaintances, being brave, laconic, archetypal, whatever, his virtues may be heroic but our emotional involvement with him is not on a similarly epic scale.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for violence and some sexuality. Times guidelines: short but bloody gun battles and knife fights; intense scenes with horses.

‘All the Pretty Horses’

Matt Damon: John Grady Cole

Henry Thomas: Lacey Rawlins

Lucas Black: Jimmy Blevins

Penelope Cruz: Alejandra

Ruben Blades: Rocha

A Miramax Films and Columbia Pictures presentation, released by Miramax Films. Director Billy Bob Thornton. Producers Billy Bob Thornton, Robert Salerno. Executive producers Sally Menke, Jonathan Gordon. Screenplay Ted Tally, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Cinematographer Barry Markowitz. Editor Sally Menke. Costumes Doug Hall. Music Marty Stuart. Production design Clark Hunter. Art directors Richard Johnson, Max Biscoe. Set decorator Traci Kirshbaum. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

In general release.