The bestselling success of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses was somewhat surprising – his work is bleak and bloody and his writing has the kind of knotty grandiosity not often smiled upon in the videogame-Internet age.
McCarthy’s prose has something of Hemingway and something of the Old Testament in it, with a bit of Faulkner, though the Faulknerian loquacity is held in check like a freshly broken horse that can’t be allowed to get too skittish. And McCarthy is not interested, as Faulkner was, in streams of consciousness – the internal life of his characters goes largely unnoticed. Too much rumination would doubtless spoil the taciturn machismo.
McCarthy performs the neat trick of combining ornate descriptions of landscape with laconic dialogue. One critic noted that “he leaned and spat” is a phrase McCarthy never tires of writing. His characters say “caint” instead of “can’t”, and, no, they don’t get apostrophes, even when they’re just “settin” around. They don’t even get inverted commas.
What McCarthy does, essentially, is to reinvent the western in the 20th century, with all the backward-looking that that entails. All the Pretty Horses (the first volume of his Border Trilogy) is set in the Forties and it is propelled by a nostalgia for the real age of the western – that is, the 1800s of wide open spaces, one- on-one gunfights and Indian-massacring.
Billy Bob Thornton’s film of the book kicks off with the yearning of young Texan John Grady Cole to find horizons as broad as those explored by his forebears. He is 16 in the book (emphasising its coming-of-age themes) and thus a bit young to be played by Matt Damon, though Damon is convincingly bandy-legged. Cole and his friend Lacey (Henry Thomas) want to be “real cowboys” in a time when the rough rural idyll of the West (actually the South, in this case) has been compromised by modernity – the family ranch has been sold off. So they cross the border into still-wild Mexico to find their own private West. And, boy, do they find it.
Cole’s heroism is located in his sense of honour, which seems coextensive with an innate decency – though we know he’s a real western hero because he can break in 20 horses in a few days. He also cauterises a bullet wound in his own leg with a hot gun, so he is a real cowboy. But his basic decency is also one of the causes of the tribulations visited upon him and Lacey. He refuses to abandon their travelling companion, Blevins (Lucas Black – the best thing in the movie, perhaps because he’s the most interesting character), even though he’s clearly trouble.
The other cause is Cole’s love affair with the daughter of a Mexican rancher (Penélope Cruz). He compromises her maidenly honour, which lands him and Lacey in an awful Mexican jail, though one is not sure of the moral here: is Cole punished because he fails to maintain his own standards of honour, or because he’s trapped by a code of conduct older and stricter than his own?
At any rate, he suffers for it, as does faithful sidekick Lacey. They really get put through the wringer by McCarthy, though Thornton’s movie truncates the anguish. In fact, Thornton had to cut his film from four hours to two, and one is left wondering whether that harmed it or improved it.
Few movies can justify a four-hour running-time, but, even at two hours, All the Pretty Horses is rather thin on the ground. The romance, for instance, is briskly montaged, which makes it hard to take seriously as the pivot of Cole and Lacey’s degradation. And the final homely endorsement for Cole’s upstandingness seems weak. It comes straight from the novel, but after several hundred pages of suffering it seems more earned.
The question with which one went into the film was whether it would survive without McCarthy’s prose. The novel’s writing is so dazzling that it is hard to tell if the tale itself has any real substance. But then, in a novel, the words are the substance. Anthony Burgess divided novels into “Type A”, those that are hard to adapt to film because the narrative is inseperable from the prose, and “Type B” novels, from which a storyline is easily extracted without much loss (probably because they really want to be movies in the first place). Which kind is All the Pretty Horses?
There’s one sign in the fact that Thornton gives Cole a first-person voice-over, removing McCarthy’s God’s-eye view of events – his
characters are as dwarfed by fate as they are by the landscape. Those stony vistas translate well into film, but the characters emerge as little more than thumbnail sketches of ideas such as honour or the countervailing corruption of the Mexican authorities. Consequently, what happens to them leaves us unmoved. I don’t know if that makes All the Pretty Horses a “Type A” novel, but it sure ain’t a “Type A” movie.