Arriving in the middle of the art smorgasbord that’s the Cannes Film Festival , a three-hour Western directed by Kevin Costner sounded like it might be just the ticket for a perfect night of counterprogramming: a grandly scaled slice of neo-classical Hollywood. That, after all, describes the other two Westerns Costner has directed (“Dances with Wolves” and “Open Range”), as well as his quirky sci-fi pseudo-Western “The Postman.” There’s no question that “ Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 ,” Costner’s fourth outing as a director, gives off some of that traditional flavor.
The movie, set in 1859 in territories that sprawl from Wyoming to Kansas, has stately mesa backdrops that look like they’d fit right into Monument Valley. It’s got a rousing 1950s-syle musical score (by John Debney) that lays on the Old West sentimentality even when dire things are happening. And a good portion of the movie is built around the violence that erupts between settlers and Indigenous tribes — a theme that takes it back to the age when American Westerns were flagrantly racist (which isn’t true of “Horizon,” though when it comes to dealing with Native issues the film is not without its problems).
Vintage horse-opera trappings aside, one of the most cherished aspects of the classic Western is its pleasingly mythic, rounded storytelling. On that score, though, “Horizon” is not the movie a lot of people may be expecting. Instead of unfurling a Western saga i.