There are few genuinely pleasurable elements in Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. Adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel of the same name, the film’s story of mid-century queer life is a crushingly timid homage to the sweeping Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s: thematically didactic, straight-faced, and visually conventional. If Minahan, known for directing television series (Fellow Travellers, Halston, Hollywood) that also mine the cultural underside of mid-century America, is passionate about this period in history, he possesses very few of the tools necessary to express it.
Minahan positions Horses within a lineage of legendary mid-century Hollywood cinema. We’re introduced to the wayward Julius (Jacob Elordi) on his way to his brother’s house in Kansas, sauntering, bag-in-hand, along the side of the road, his thumb stretched vertically for the next car to pick him up. The sequence immediately invokes Montgomery Clift’s star-making turn in A Place in the Sun, another film, though decidedly darker and more critical than this one, about the oppressive demands of post-war progress.
But despite references to cinema history, Minahan’s own vision is blandly televisual, though that isn’t exactly surprising. He and cinematographer Luc Montpellier render the film’s disparate locations, from suburban San Diego, to rural Kansas, and bustling Las Vegas, in studied detail and expensive scope. But no place ever quite sings with the kind of overwhelming feeling this story of burgeoning love and personal sacrifice requires. The result is a clash of melodramatic expressiveness and measured realism in which both feel woefully compromised.
The same can be said for the actors. Elordi, for all his Cliftian angst, only ever suggests the inner turmoil Julius’ brother, Lee (Will Poulter), says lives within him. On the surface, his Julius is quick to brood and slow to smile. His withholding demeanor might suggest some kind of mystery — and indeed, there is plenty still to learn about his character — if only Elordi didn’t feel like just another of the film’s highly manicured images. For all of Clift’s thoughtful technique and exquisite beauty, no one could ever fully conceal the emotional core of truth — namely, the inner conflict around his queerness — that fueled his best performances. Elordi’s exceptional looks hide nothing close to that. And despite having a keen psychological insight into, and seeming romantic spark with, Lee’s soon-to-be wife, Muriel (Daisy Edgar Jones), there’s no spark to suggest a soul.
Jones, for her part, fares slightly better. Though she’s not yet a housewife, and is reluctant to be one, she behaves as if she’s mastered the subtle art of coping with domestic dullery; sneaking cigarettes behind her husband’s back, and playing cards when he’s asleep. She plays the innocent housewife, reminiscent of a young Anne Hathaway in her early scenes — in look and affectation, if not emotional depth. She’s immaculately composed when she needs to be, frayed when she doesn’t. Later, as her own queerness begins to emerge alongside her horse betting, her means of funding an unspoken escape plan, she resembles Sarah Paulson. It’s difficult to describe these subtle differences in affectation and comportment between social contexts as deliberate, but they are fairly plain to see; the lucky instance of an actor’s indecision translating perfectly to her characters’ fluidity.
Jones’ best moments in the film come when her character is not required, or even can’t, speak. After Lee catches Muriel leaving the home of their neighbor Sandra (Sashe Calle), she knows that he suspects her of cheating. Their silent drive home, captured in one unbroken take, allows Muriel’s shame and frustration, her lingering fear of destabilizing her ordered life, to flicker across her face. It’s in a short scene like this where something vital scratches beneath the film’s fastidiously manicured surfaces, and suggests the kind of film Horses could have been.
In the world of On Swift Horses, being gay is a gamble, and the film repeatedly calls upon gambling to represent queerness in action, often in the form of a shared secret. The man whose horse-betting instincts Muriel follows to great rewards is a gay man, teasingly nicknamed Rosie, and at the races, she meets a beautiful, closeted housewife who bets on the same horse as her. “Aren’t we both brave,” she jokes after they’ve won. Julius also makes his money by gambling, first by hustling small-time card players in small, dark rooms, and later, after a particularly sore loser corners him following a game, propositions him for sex, and takes his winnings right when he gives himself over, under the glimmering lights of Las Vegas. There, Julius meets and falls in love with Henry (Diego Calva), another small-time gambler with big, perhaps dangerous, ambitions.
The film’s unifying gambling metaphor runs out of steam when Henry suggests he and Julius partner up behind the poker table. Julius doesn’t want to gamble on the good thing they’ve got going: a relatively stable partnership and, ironically, for the generally convention-averse Julius, the closest thing to domestic bliss a gay man in 1950s America could ask for. Henry, impatient and stubborn, argues this is the one way they can actually be seen together in public, a logic which doesn’t hold up to sustained scrutiny, but serves its point well enough: that everyone, eventually, has to decide whether the risk is worth the reward.
But perhaps the unceremonious fizzling out of this metaphorical premise is what the film deserves. Julius and Henry’s relationship, like the film as a whole, is passionate in name only. After a bizarre first date where Henry shows Julius the “real America” by watching a nuclear test explosion, their courtship is depicted across unimaginatively staged, erotically stale (and one consensually dubious) sex scenes; Minahan doesn’t even have the grace to let them face each other while they do it. Muriel enjoys a bit more pleasure (and consent) in her few rendezvous with Sandra, but even in the raunchiest of cases, like a session of backyard cunnilingus at Sandra’s house, the film is allergic to depicting anyone in the throes of fully-realized, uninhibited, clarifying sexual pleasure.
And perhaps that’s because the film’s only meaningful bond is between Julius and Muriel, a troubled mixture of queer kinship and implicit romance which Julius takes advantage of late in the film when he returns to San Diego to ask her for more money. Muriel’s constant ignorance to Julius’ queerness — in spite of him all but directly confessing it on the night of his return — as well as her sexual desire for him, represents the film’s only real embrace of ambiguity. Here, sitting inside the skeleton of an unfinished suburban home, the promise of the American dream writ large is in progress, while their own are in tatters, waiting to be remade.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Minahan; CAST: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva, Sasha Calle; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: April 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 57 min.
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