Laws are imposed and maintained through force, and once formulated, they are used to control those who challenge their legal and political origins.
In the nineteenth century, this legislative process took place throughout the American West, particularly in the mapping of its geography.
Costner delivers one of the greatest gunfight scenes in the history of Westerns — loud, sloppy, frenzied, brutal, gory — so good it earned an R rating for a PG-rated movie.
The unsettled territory offered a unique opportunity for anyone cunning enough, regardless of social status, to claim themselves as the new American aristocracy: all they had to do was conquer a wilderness filled with enemies of all kinds and species.
Traveling in the wilderness meant both total freedom and the possibility of total power. The vast lands were a world without borders, with endless hills and lush pastures. But slowly, these wildernesses welcomed the wanderers, then settlements, then towns. Just as borders appeared after wars, regulation of the vast lands appeared in the form of barbed wire.
Open Range screenwriter Craig Storper said he aimed to make a film that explored “the evolution of violence in the Western world.”
Our two heroes, rancher Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and his deputy Charlie Waite, are depicted at a pivotal moment in that evolution, the moment when a small number of men used violence to stake their claim to vast swathes of land.
“These characters aren't seeking violence,” Storper said, but in the end it turns out to be the only path to resolution.
Grazing animals
“Open Range” begins with Spearman and Waite wandering the fringes of heaven.
They've been raising cattle in the West for the past decade, and now the endless pastures are being turned into domesticated pastures, with multiple layers of razor fences set up over the vast pastures.
They may be rough around the edges, but they take the hierarchy seriously, especially when it comes to Button and Moes, the subservient ranch hands with a childlike spark and playfulness.
As the credits roll, the Edenic day falls into darkness, the four cowboys are trapped on the plains by a torrential rain, and the storm forces them to waste their supplies, play cards, and chat while they wait for the rain to stop.
Moses goes shopping in the nearby town of Harmonville, played by “ER” regular Abraham Benrubi, who, at 6-foot-7 and weighing 300 pounds, is the epitome of honest-to-goodness strength, a sort of Andre the Giant who's too intimidating for most thugs to mess with.
When Moses fails to return, Spearman and Waite ride into town only to find evil and corruption waiting for them: Moses finds himself ambushed, beaten to the point of breaking his ribs, and thrown into solitary confinement.
The two rangeland heroes are rejected by Irish-born rancher Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon): “The people on the Fort Hermon land don’t like grazing or pasture. dislike They hated them more than they hated the Indians.”
(There are no Indians in the film, a deliberate choice by Costner to emphasize the hostility of the town gatekeepers.)
In 1882, free grazing was still legal, but the gatekeepers of Harmonville are intent on ending the practice by any means necessary, legal or not.
On one side of this crisis is the liberal impulse for total openness, for wanting to be left alone; on the other is total confinement and demarcation, inherently authoritarian.
Baxter is a ruthless, bloodthirsty madman with a passion for Machiavellian schemes, and he serves the Devil well.
“Cows are a different story.”
This naturally puts the mysterious legal outsiders at odds with the high-ranking criminal bosses in charge of local justice, and the politics of that dynamic quickly begin to boil over, as if the military were surrounding a group of random rebels.
This is exactly the situation that will call the gunslingers back into action. And in the heat of this battle, dormant heroes will rise above their past failures and shame. But first, they must prepare for total violence.
What began as a desire to be left alone has now turned into a more direct mission to eradicate Denton Baxter and his band of unshaven thugs.
“Open Range” captures this contest with the pause and dignity of true openness, minimizing any conflict with the landscape.
As tensions rise, Baxter's goons wear bloody masks and look down on the ranchers' camp.
Standing shoulder to shoulder with Spearman and facing death in the middle of the prairie, Waite asked, “Do you think it's worth being killed for the cows?”
“Cows are one thing,” Spearman replied, “but it's another thing for people to tell other people where they can go in this country.”
The oldest genre
The audacity of the villains infuriates Spearman, and there's no doubt now that peace first requires war, a sparse and startling realization, stalked by Michael Kamen's orchestral score (Kaymen also composed the soundtracks for Die Hard, Robin Hood and Lethal Weapon).
In the midst of all this, local physician assistant Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) has beautiful eyelashes and the courage to stand up for justice. She, along with the townsfolk, are rooting for an outsider to overthrow the local corrupt ruling class.
Costner clearly loved making Open Range, calling it “a privilege and a thrill.” He said, “If I never make any more movies, I'll always be glad that this was my last one.”
Costner launched his directing career with Dances with Wolves (1990), a film that ushered in a new era of Westerns, for which he received 12 Academy Award nominations and won seven. Open Range is Costner's third directorial effort, following the quirky post-apocalyptic drama The Postman in 1997. It also marked a return to home. Costner is at his strongest in Westerns, which he calls “the oldest genre.”
Selling tickets is good enough: Open Range justified its $22 million budget by grossing $68 million. It didn't receive any Motion Picture Association recognition, but it did win a Bronze Wrangler Award at the 2004 Western Heritage Awards.
“Open Range” brings to the big screen the literary approach that is repeated throughout Wednesday's Western series. It is based on the 1990 novel “Open Range Men” by Laurent Payne, whose 900 books include the Westerns that Costner loved, and which shaped his own down-home approach to storytelling.
Robert Duvall, starring in his first Western since Lonesome Dove nearly 15 years ago, affirmed this sentiment: “England had Dickens, Russia had Tolstoy, and we have the Western.”
Authenticity Above All Else
“Authenticity” is a word that appears repeatedly in analyses of “Open Range,” in part to describe Costner's obsession with accuracy, from the atomic to the widescreen.
Costner's process was intensely personal and meticulous, down to the fine-tuning of every detail of the film, down to the lighting and sound. He extended this highly choreographed approach to the entire movie. He demanded from the start that nothing, no matter how small or mundane, should be superficial.
Even the most inconspicuous props – cookware, tools, candy – were custom made to be historically accurate. Particular attention was paid to the quality of the saddles, and even more so to the weapons; the guns had to look, sound, feel and even smell like 1880s firearms. Costner kept all of the revolvers even after filming the movie.
Secondly, the authenticity of the costumes. He was pleased with how simple and accurate the costumes were. The crew took pains to make sure the actors' costumes were not dirty or crumpled.
To complement these visual effects, Costner had his cast attend a full-scale cowboy boot camp, and he and Duvall even spent time with the tough sherpas of the forgotten West.
Robert Duvall, who has decades of Hollywood experience as well as a ranch hand, brings Boss Spearman to life wearing Texas-made leather boots.
Similarly, Bening spent about two months of filming in a corset. The American Beauty actress plays Sue, whom Bening describes as “an honest, down-to-earth woman,” so confidently that you almost forget she's married to Warren Beatty.
Costner handpicked Bening for the role and worked closely with her in developing the character, calling her performance “timeless”, adding, “That's how I've always seen her.”
Powerful and quiet type
Plus, there's a believable bond between Spearman, who longs for the days when he had a family, and Waithe, whom Costner describes as “a good guy who thinks he's bad.”
To solidify this dynamic, Costner cast Duvall in the lead role — his casting was a prerequisite for the film to be made — and throughout Open Range, the two actors improvise lines that are intimately ingrained in Western legend, and it's in these moments that you can see the influence of Gary Cooper on Kevin Costner's performance.
Costner uses long takes to let the drama unfold naturally, but the scenes had to be perfect — and they often were — with most scenes so well-choreographed that they were often shot in a single take.
To create the setting around his protagonists, Costner enlisted 225 cows; many others were digitized or mechanized to sprinkle the animals into the landscape.
Then, zooming out even further, to Costner's vision of the entire world they live in. Open Range feels wide and open, designed to envelop the viewer.
Costner scouted the vast landscape of the opening scene by helicopter, and from that first glimpse, “Open Range” is a classy, gorgeous whirlwind of cinema, the visual power of which transports the audience to a bygone paradise, captured by cinematographer James Muro, who also worked with Costner on “Dances with Wolves.”
Construction of the Harmon Building
When it came to the town of Harmonville and the surrounding area, Costner was content with anything less than complete isolation; he turned down several offers to build a full-scale recreation of the town.
Then one day, while riding his horse, Cisco, in the quiet fringes of Calgary's hills, he came across a block of marble gently nestled in the Rocky Mountains.
The construction of the Harmon Building cost the studio more than $1 million, including a $40,000 project to build a road to the site.
And as Costner created his perfect world, the laws of nature took their toll: much of the film's reality was the result of the extreme weather conditions that Costner and his crew endured.
The set was hit by heavy rains on multiple occasions, but these disruptions only added to the film's texture and unpredictability. It's hard to tell which scenes are real and which are fake. The flooding on Main Street was faked by the technical staff, at a cost to the studio of $300,000.
Zoom out even further: Costner's vision is even broader than this, and beneath the flow of action and dialogue lurks thematic and historical complexities. In the tumult of existence, what does it mean? What does it reveal, what does it liberate?
and, Drift The film's tone, tempo and pacing changed; in the editing room, Costner added back scenes that he had intended to cut, bringing the film's runtime to approximately two and a half hours.
He later said that the lingering, slow feeling was deliberate: “I wanted the audience to settle into this film, this place, to absorb our rhythms, the rhythms of our times.”
On the film's audio commentary, as his heroes prepare for battle, Costner says, “We're now heading to where every Western should head, which is a shootout. It would be a mistake not to end a Western with a shootout. That's the tradition.”
He directed one of the greatest gunfight scenes in the history of Westerns – loud, messy, frenetic, brutal and gory, a shootout so good it earned an R rating for a PG-rated movie.
Meticulously choreographed with multiple digital renderings, the scene lacks the superhero grace and fluidity of set-top shootouts; Costner (mostly) eschewed slow motion, making the slowness feel natural and the rushing motions utterly dangerous and realistic. Costner later referred to the scene as a “ballet.”
The aftermath of the murders leaves our heroes divided. As bodies pile up in the mud, Waite loads his gun and prepares to execute one of Baxter's men. The man is badly wounded and defenseless. Spearman stands between Waite and the man.
“We came for justice, not vengeance. Now those two things are separate,” Spearman said.
Without a moment's hesitation he said, “Not today.”
“Open Range” is available to watch on all the usual streaming sites: Tubiyou can watch it for free.
