Kevin Costner has always been like his characters: courageous. Whether it’s a baseball field or a remote village in the Old West, he still goes straight for it. As he did for Horizon, the Western saga for which, like another dreamer and visionary like Francis Ford Coppola, he put a considerable personal sum at risk for the production. But for a man who won seven Oscars with his directorial debut film, Dances with Wolves, money is just a tool. It would be interesting sooner or later to do a parallel analysis of the careers of Costner and Robert Redford, another actor who won the Academy in his directing debut, who rode for a long time in westerns (Butch Cassidy, Jeremiah Johnson, but also the then contemporary The Electric Knight) and stole bases on a diamond. The film was The Natural, and the character played by Redford was turned into an almost Messiah compared to the execrable man in Malamud’s novel.
On the other hand, Costner likes his talented but flawed and scarred-by-life antiheroes. It has always been his great strength, from Fandango onwards, through Bull Durham, Revenge, until the patriarch of Yellowstone, a resounding television success that he sacrificed on the altar of Horizon – An American Saga. The first part was in Cannes. The second is here at Venice 81. The story of Hayes Allison and all the characters that revolve around him in the San Pedro Valley continues, despite the box office’s yet-to-reward the first chapter and this second one being postponed for the moment by Warner Discovery until 2024.
On the other hand, the film’s first streaming figures on the Max platform, where Horizon 1 is available from August 23, prove that Western is cinema and, therefore, will never wane. In fact, the shooting of the third part of this epic has already begun, at Costner’s expense. After all, what do you do with two hectares of corn on the cob if you can’t build the field of your dreams?
