“A believable story, believable characters, and a massive, classic shootout—I can finally say I like a Western movie that isn’t Back to the Future III.”
Open Range was a Western film released in 2003, directed by Kevin Costner, written by Craig Storper, and starring Costner as Charley, Robert Duvall as Boss, Annette Bening as Sue, Michael Gambon as Baxter, and Diego Luna as Button. It’s basically about a tight-knit crew of old-school cowboys who are just trying to herd their cattle across the beautiful, open country. Things go completely sideways when they drift near a small town run by a ruthless, crooked land baron who hates anyone using his land... even though it’s public. After the baron’s thugs brutally kill one of their guys and critically injure another to threaten the rest to get out of the territory, these peaceful herders are forced to stop running, strap on their guns, and stand their ground to protect their way of life in a massive, classic shootout.
I chose this film for the next part of my 52-Week Movie Challenge under the prompt for Week 11: A Western Starring Kevin Costner. Up to this point, I haven’t really loved Westerns, so to say I was apprehensive about this film in particular is putting it lightly. But what’s a challenge without, you know, challenges? Kevin Costner is often found in this genre, just like Clint Eastwood is, but he plays a character who is arguably more human than Eastwood’s rough and rugged tough-guy exterior... which can be a good thing or a bad thing.
When thinking about Costner and Westerns, I think a lot of people probably think of Dances with Wolves as his golden standard, but I wasn’t about to watch that three-hour film. I’m pretty sure I saw it when I was in school, and I also remember hating it. 25 years later, I’ll admit I might love it at this point, but I’m not ready to take that dive just yet. Instead, I chose Open Range, which was more traditional in terms of Western films than Dances with Wolves. We got the cowboys herding their animals across the land, and you know what? That works for me.
You know what else, though? I really liked the movie. As a complete shock to the system... I didn’t hate the movie, nor was I ever bored by it. I can finally say I like a Western movie that isn’t Back to the Future Part III.
From the very start, you get some beautiful, wide-sweeping cinematography of the open country, and we get a good idea of what Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall, and their group are doing. They are free-grazing, which was a term I personally was never really familiar with before watching this movie. I know... gotta brush up on American history! But it was essentially where, before the whole world was split up by fences and property lines, a mass majority of the country was government-owned and public. So instead of keeping animals secluded in one area, they would literally live on the road, herding their cattle across these wide-open spaces, allowing them to eat and drink naturally from the land.
Eventually, though, this was a practice that ended with the help of things like barbed wire and property lines. But before that happened, there were people who hated free grazers and thought of them as stealing from their land... even though it’s public. That’s what this movie is essentially about. You have a land baron whose hatred is so extreme he is willing to kill, and then you have this war that breaks out between two different ways of living. It’s not even that farfetched to think about. The greedy elite who often think only about themselves, try to control everything, and don’t care who they hurt along the way? Sound familiar?
So, we have a believable story, believable characters, and some really great practical set designs. They literally built this town from the ground up for this movie. We’re not talking front-facing facades... we are talking about actual structures you can walk into for the movie to feel that much more authentic. Before shooting, they also allowed the town to get weathered and dirty, again to authentically feel like the Old West. There are also foundational structural fallacies in the town that are destroyed by bad weather, which, as I understand it, was accurate as well. All of this movie, or a big chunk of it, was budgeted out of Costner’s own wallet. Yeah, he used his own money to make this thing. That’s how much he believed in it.
You also have characters that, for the most part, you love. They feel like family. In a big way, they are family, even though they don’t know that much about each other other than that they work together really well and care about each other. That is why, when their kind is murdered by these terrible townsfolk, they don’t just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next place. They believe in getting justice for their family... and it’s an important distinction between justice and vengeance, because that’s a thin, fragile line that is often almost crossed in this film.
However, I’ll admit, there were elements I don’t think fully work all of the time in the movie. The biggest negative for me was probably the chemistry between Kevin Costner’s character and the doctor’s sister, Sue. This was a storyline introduced in the film that I don’t think really worked that well, and the chemistry, for the most part... felt forced. Even a kiss toward the end felt like Annette Bening, who played Sue, didn’t fully want to kiss Costner, but it was in the script, so she just went along with it. It was weird. It was a small moment, though... after all of the rest of the film worked as well as it did, so I’m not going to complain too much about it, other than to say the movie probably would have worked a whole lot better without that substory.
Unbiased/Technical Score: 42/50 (84%)
Biased/Entertainment Score: 41/50 (82%)
Total Combined Score: 83/100 (83% or 4/5 on Letterboxd)