Costner saddles up archetypal western

By Anthony Breznican
AP Entertainment Writer

"Open Range," a Touchstone Pictures release, is rated R for violence. Running time: 135 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

"Open Range," directed by and starring Kevin Costner, is a tip of the cowboy hat to the Western movies of yesteryear — a reverse homage to stories in which the heroes and villains had nothing in common but mutual loathing.

Although "Open Range" is easily the best of this genre to come along since "Tombstone" and the Oscar-winning "Unforgiven" in the mid-1990s, it's biggest shortfall is an oversimplified view of good and evil.

Town fathers: bad. Free range cowboys: good. That's as deep as it gets.

Costner plays Charley Waite, a veteran cowpoke who rides herd with the aging plainsman he calls only "Boss," played by Robert Duvall. In the film's leisurely opening in a vast green valley besieged by a thunderstorm, we meet their other two hands: Button, the sniveling youngster (Diego Luna) and burly brawler Mose (Abraham Benrubi).

Trouble starts when the storm ends and Mose moseys into the distant town of Harmonville, which is full of filth, cowards and the corrupt. Seems the local rancher, Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon, the future Dumbledore actor in the next "Harry Potter" movie), doesn't much like free grazers marching their cows on his grass. He decides that deadly violence is a good way to express his frustration.

Instead of the cowboys moving on and the rancher letting them go, both camps decide to make an example out of the other. A series of intimidations and counter-intimidations occur until one side does something that can't be resolved by anything except a bloodbath.

The cinematography by James Muro is spectacular, filling the screen with lush hillsides, sticky mud bogs, lazy sunsets and shadowy nighttime confrontations.

Along the way, the cowboys meet Sue Barlow, (Annette Bening), a woman who nurses their ailments and temporarily extinguishes the wanderlust in their hearts. Bening looks plain, a little weary and absolutely beautiful. She also gets to break loose and steal a scene or two from the male-dominated cast.

Costner should simultaneously curse Duvall's presence as Boss and thank God for it. The older actor gives the movie life, but he brings an authenticity to his character that contrasts sharply against Costner's serviceable-but-flat performance.

Duvall's glinting eyes, scratchy speech, ironic wisecracks and ailing health transforms him into a man who has spent too much time in the saddle and sun with too little company. Costner, however, just seems like he is trying hard to keep up.

"Open Range" also suffers from a lack of sympathy for its villain. It's easy to understand why Boss and Charley are willing to kill or be killed for their simple way of life, but what's behind Baxter? We see him only as a blackhearted, sputtering madman. What is it he loves enough to die for? We never see, and by the time someone gets around to asking him, it doesn't matter anymore.

I would rather have seen 20 minutes cut from the inexplicable ending — which seems to invalidate everything the cowboys said they stood for throughout the movie — to get five extra minutes with Baxter.