Open Range (2003) Review
8/10
Official trailer
Four men graze cattle across public land, moving constantly, camping where the grass is. A rancher outside a small town in Montana doesn’t recognize free grazing and has the marshal on his payroll. One of the four is beaten nearly to death and another is killed.
This is the kind of western I keep wishing somebody would still make. It spends real time with men I end up caring about, then pays that patience off with violence that hurts to watch. I think Costner understood this genre in his bones.
The 8 is for the combination of two things that usually don’t sit together. The first hour and a half is slow, concerned with weather, food, a dog and a horse, and the last twenty minutes is the most physically convincing gun battle anybody has filmed in the genre since the 1970s. What holds it back is a romance that takes up too much of the back half and a running time that could lose fifteen minutes without anybody noticing.
The Gunfight Is the Achievement
It runs about twenty minutes, takes place across a single street and several buildings, and almost nobody in it hits what they’re aiming at.
The opening shot is the statement. Charley walks up to a man, says nothing, and shoots him in the head without warning or ceremony, and the noise of it makes everybody else in the street run instead of draw.
That’s the film’s whole thesis about violence. The professionals kill immediately and without announcement, the amateurs panic, and the quick-draw convention that the genre ran on for sixty years never appears. The sound design is doing most of the work. The shots are enormous, ears ring, men are deafened, and the film keeps cutting to people who can’t hear what’s being shouted at them. That’s what really happens in an enclosed street. The sound is what sold me on the whole sequence. Every shot hits like a slammed door, men stagger around deaf and shouting, and I flinched more than once. Westerns almost never do that to me.
The rain is the other technical decision. It’s been raining for a day, the street is mud, and men fall, slip and can’t run properly. That removes the last of the genre’s choreography and replaces it with people struggling to stay upright while being shot at.
Competence and panic in the same sequence makes an action scene believable. Show the two professionals doing something efficient and terrible, then show everybody else failing at basic tasks under the same pressure. The contrast does what choreography can’t.
Missing is more convincing than hitting. If every shot in your action scene finds its target, you’ve written a demonstration instead of a fight.
Use the physical aftermath. Ringing ears, shaking hands and the inability to hear an order are free and nobody writes them, and they convert a set piece into an experience.
The Slowness Is Deliberate
The first ninety minutes contain a long sequence about a storm, a longer one about retrieving a wagon from mud, a dog, a conversation about chocolate, and a great deal of coffee. Costner shoots all of it patiently in wide compositions, and the intention is that the audience should understand what these men have before it’s taken from them. That’s why the killing lands. Mose isn’t a plot function, he’s a large cheerful man the film has spent an hour letting you know, and his death in the middle of the picture is the hinge everything turns on. Mose’s death hurts, and it hurts because of that patient first hour. I’d spent all that time with a big, cheerful man and his coffee, and when he’s gone the film feels emptier. Nobody has to give a speech to tell me why the two older men stay and fight.
Button, the youngest of the four, is the other half of that calculation. He’s beaten nearly to death and survives. That means the film has one body and one boy in a bed, and the boy is the reason the two older men can’t simply ride away.
The pace is also the film’s biggest risk. A viewer who’s not settled by the first hour will find the film interminable, and the film makes no concession to that at any point.
Free grazing is the other thing the slowness explains. The film takes its time establishing that these men own nothing except cattle, a wagon and a dog, and move continuously because the law hasn’t yet decided the land belongs to anybody. That’s a real historical moment and the picture is one of very few to dramatize it.
It also gives the conflict its shape. Baxter isn’t stealing from them, he’s enforcing a claim that will eventually be recognized everywhere, and the four men are defending a way of working that’s going to end whatever happens in that street.
Duvall and Costner
Robert Duvall plays Boss Spearman, who has been doing this for decades, and it’s a late-career performance of enormous economy.
He’s the one who makes the decision. Boss isn’t a hothead, he thinks about it for a long stretch, and then states plainly that they’re going to kill the men who did this and that there will be no negotiation.
Duvall is also delivering the film’s one piece of open sentiment and getting away with it. Boss talks about the dog, about Mose, and about being too old for this, and every line that would be maudlin from anybody else is delivered as a plain practical observation about the situation the two of them have now managed to get themselves well and into.
Costner’s Charley is the harder part and the one the film is finally about. He was a killer during the war, is good at it in a way that frightens him, and has spent ten years working cattle to avoid finding out whether it’s still there.
The scene where he tells Boss what he did is the best writing in the picture. He describes killing prisoners, flatly, without any request for understanding, and Boss listens and says almost nothing, and the friendship survives it.
What Boss does say is the only comment the film makes about any of it. He observes that a man can change and that Charley already did, years ago, and then the conversation is over and neither of them mentions it again.
A protagonist who’s frightened of his own capability is more interesting than one who’s frightened of the enemy. Charley’s problem is that he knows exactly how good he’s at this. Put the confession before the climax instead of after. The reader then watches the violence knowing what it costs him.
Give the decision to the older character and the capacity to the younger one. Boss decides and Charley executes. That means neither of them can proceed alone.
Let the listener say nothing. Boss offers no absolution and no judgment, and the silence is why the confession reads as true.
What Does Not Work
Annette Bening plays Sue, a doctor’s sister, and the romance between her and Charley occupies a considerable portion of the last hour.
Bening is good and the material is thin. Two people who have met three times exchange a cup of tea, a conversation about a chair, and a proposal, and the film treats it as the reason Charley now has something to live for.
The romance is the part I’d trim first. I like Bening, and I still found myself wanting to skip ahead to the street. Three meetings, a cup of tea and a chair aren’t enough to convince me Charley’s whole future hangs on her.
The problem is proportional. Every minute spent on the romance is a minute not spent on the thing the film is really about. That’s two men deciding to commit a killing and then committing it.
The ending also runs long after the gunfight is over. There’s a scene about a marriage, a scene about a bar, and a final conversation that the film could have reached fifteen minutes earlier. None of that is fatal and some of it is charming. The two of them buying supplies afterward, arguing about chocolate again, is a good last beat and it arrives about three scenes after the film first offers it.
The Town Watches
The best structural idea in the film is what the townspeople do, which is nothing, until very late. They know what the rancher is, they know what happened to the two cattlemen, and every one of them has decided that it’s not worth a confrontation. The film doesn’t condemn them for it and doesn’t let them off.
Then, during the gunfight, they begin to help. A shopkeeper hands over a weapon, somebody opens a door, and the film shows the shift happening in pieces instead of as a moment of collective courage. The townspeople are my favorite quiet surprise in the film. A shopkeeper handing over a gun and somebody opening a door don’t sound like much, and they moved me more than any rousing speech about standing together could have. That’s a considerably more honest account than High Noon‘s, in which the town refuses to the end, or Rio Bravo‘s, in which help is declined. Here the town is simply slow, and slow is what most people really are.
Collective courage should arrive in pieces from individuals, at different moments, for different reasons. A crowd that decides something all at once is a device. Nobody in that street makes a speech, and the help arrives from people the film hadn’t marked as important.
Refuse to judge the bystanders. The film neither condemns the town nor forgives it. That leaves the reader to decide, and readers who decide something stay decided.
Note the position between two famous predecessors. If your story sits between two established treatments of the same situation, the useful move is the middle they both skipped.
Should you watch Open Range?
Yes, and be patient with the first hour, because everything I love about this film grows out of it.
The 8 is for Charley’s confession, Duvall’s quiet authority and twenty minutes of the loudest, least heroic gunfight anybody has staged in the genre in forty years. It loses points to a thin romance and an ending that keeps going for three scenes after it should’ve stopped. I’d still take it over most westerns I can name.
