Billy Bob Thornton’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel defied convention to capture a fading era of filmmaking, where atmosphere and restraint spoke louder than words.
When the late, great Roger Ebert reviewed All the Pretty Horses in December 2000, he noted how much director Billy Bob Thornton wanted “to fix in the memory the way it was to be at that place, at that time.”
In much the same way the late author Cormac McCarthy crafted a sparse, elegiac novel for Thornton to adapt, Thornton himself devoted great care to bypassing traditional movie trappings, focusing instead on capturing a mood, a time, and a place.
And, in many ways, he succeeded like no other director before or since. Let’s revisit All the Pretty Horses on its 25th anniversary.
The film has a straightforward plot: Two young cowboys (Matt Damon and Henry Thomas as John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins) ride south on horseback in 1949 in search of the mythical Old West. They’re joined by a brash young drifter (Lucas Black as Jimmy Blevins) with more horse than he can honestly afford.
Seeking work and the romance of the cowboy life, the young men soon find trouble instead in Mexico over stolen horses, forcing them to ride out of town and into the sagebrush. By what feels like fate, they arrive at the ranch of Don Hector de la Rocha (played by Rubén Blades) and his captivating daughter, Alejandra (a young Penélope Cruz).
John earns Don Hector’s respect by breaking wild mustangs and secures a job on the ranch. But it’s clear from the start that John and Alejandra are drawn to each other, setting the story of desire and danger into motion.
Despite its simple plot, All the Pretty Horses stands out for Thornton’s masterful use of economical yet deeply resonant dialogue to propel it.
From its poignant opening monologue to the eerie stillness of South Texas landscapes, Thornton creates a film where dialogue evokes the visuals, not the other way around.
The natural sounds of the landscape — whether indoors or out — dominate the score. And while the dialogue moves the story forward, it never strives to define the characters. Even Damon and Cruz, early in their rise to stardom, remain grounded in roles that feel authentic, their performances shaped by the sparseness of their lines.
“They use dialogue as if it were music, to establish a mood,” Ebert wrote in 2000. This approach would later echo in the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.
No Country surpassed Pretty Horses at the box office and on the award circuit, and its iconic images — Javier Bardem’s bowl cut or Tommy Lee Jones in yet another lawman role — linger as archetypes. But All the Pretty Horses achieves something deeper.
And that is the beauty of All the Pretty Horses. Thornton’s vision was not to create archetypes but to preserve the memory of a place and time. The film itself becomes a tribute to a fading style of filmmaking — one driven by evocative cinematography, a sparse score, and actors who fully inhabit their roles.
Celebrate the 25th anniversary of All the Pretty Horses by revisiting it — and, if you were there, remembering what it felt like to be in that place and time.
PHOTOGRAPHY: (All images) Courtesy Miramax.