Ranch dressing

Thornton, Damon break All the Pretty Horses

Peter Keough

Directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Written by Ted Tally based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. With Matt Damon, Penélope Cruz, Henry Thomas, Lucas Black, Rubén Blades, Miriam Colon, Robert Patrick, Bruce Dern, and Sam Shepard. A Miramax Pictures release. At Framingham, the Hoyt Westborough, Marlboro, the Solomon Pond Hoyt, and the Worcester North Showcase.

Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses enjoys a reputation that eludes me; I find it a turgid, pretentious, self-indulgent imitation of Hemingway and Faulkner, an adolescent fantasy

about cowboys and courage and a man doing what a man's gotta do. Billy Bob Thornton is a different story. He co-wrote one of the last decade's great underrated movies, One False Move. He directed one of that decade's more overrated independent movies, Sling Blade. And he's always entertaining, if over the top, when on screen, sometimes approaching genius, as in 1998's A Simple Plan. Put the two together and I'd expect something operatic, perhaps embarrassing, maybe inventive. But not dull.

All the Pretty Horse is pretty dull indeed, with gorgeous cinematography from Barry Markovitz dressing up a litany of macho clichés. Were it not for the flashes of Thornton's inspiration, or at least idiosyncrasy, and the integrity of the cast, this would have been a movie Robert Redford could be proud of, a beautiful but empty canvas marked with gestures at great themes and towering emotions.

Adapted by Ted Tally, whose fortunes have ranged from an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs to ostracism for Mission to Mars, the story is simple -- pardon me, primeval. In postwar southern Texas, cowpoke John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) finds himself sold down the river by his mom, who stole the ranch from her ex-husband (Robert Patrick, who grimaces briefly) and now is selling it to the oil company so she can pursue her vain ambition as a stage actress (in the world of Cormac McCarthy, it seems, the world is divided into whores and horses).

Disinherited, Grady joins up with his buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) and heads to Mexico, the last frontier, in search of work (this is clearly pre-NAFTA) and adventure. Eventually they sign up at the ranch of Don Hector Rocha y Villareal (Rubén Blades), where Grady demonstrates his expertise in breaking horses (a brief but splendid montage) and falls in love (another brief montage, this one banal) with Alejandra (Penélope Cruz), Don Hector's haughty and highstrung daughter (we know this because she rides stallions bareback). It won't do to have the help fall in love with the boss's daughter, even superficially, and so with Alejandra's draconian aunt (Miriam Colon) pulling the strings, Grady and Lacey find themselves dragged out of the bunkhouse one morning by Federales on what looks like a one-way trip to the penitentiary.

Thornton's talent shines here, as it does in earlier scenes where the pair get entangled in the events that return to undo them. Back when they crossed the river into Mexico, they joined up briefly with Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black, the boy from Sling Blade, who puts in the film's best performance), a tough teenager escaping from an abusive home on a horse of dubious ownership. The contrived McCarthy-ite dialogue among the three sounds almost natural, the bonding is believable, and key moments, like Jimmy's sitting in the mud in terror at a passing thunderstorm, arrest the eye. At times these sequences evoke Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

Thornton gets even more daring in the prison scenes and in their aftermath, where he indulges in a little Mexican surrealism à la Alejandro Jodorowsky, including hallucinatory asides of sundrenched chats with the deceased about death ("It ain't like nothing at all") and a heavenly chorus of convicts. A penultimate episode in the desert with a police captain taken hostage, a gunshot wound, and a grateful old man is strangely moving, though in retrospect it seems gratuitous. It might call to mind The Wild Bunch, but not for long.

For in the end, despite Horses' pretense of primality and purity, self-congratulatory platitudes, delivered by no less than Bruce Dern as an honest country judge, prevail. The most compelling moment in the movie's love story comes when a complete stranger does a tap dance -- which suggests that though Thornton and McCarthy may be good judges of horseflesh, they are greenhorns when it comes to the stirrings of the heart or the substance of genuine drama.