ON SWIFT HORSES (DanielMinahan 2024)

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DANIEL MINAHAN: ON SWIFT HORSES (2024)

A feast that leeaves one a little hungry

This glamorous, bold, and almost-wonderful novel adaptation blends dual romance with film noir. One of the most favorable reviews (Hollywood Reporter)) starts with saying they don't make movies like this any more. And this is one way of approaching the experience of watching it. You imagine entering a dark movie house, sitting through a couple of hours of drama, color, glamor, emotion. And then you walk out into the afternoon feeling hung-over, and vaguely let down.

The music, the photography, the scenery, the five main actors are enough to sweep you away. But something goes a little wrong. Not too much, because those rewards keep paying off. The trouble is these two storylines. This is a bold mainstream gay movie that takes place at a time when it wasn't safe to be gay. This is a movie you couldn't make till Brokeback Mountain came along twenty years ago. But On Swift Horses throws that possibility away. It catches the physicality of homosexuality but not the emotion.

Of course you can't really say they don't make them like this anymore, because they never made glamorous starry stories where beautiful main characters had secret, intense gay lives. That did not happen.

There are five main characters. There are two brothers and a woman. She marries one of the brothers, who is back from the Korean war. The other, a wild, mysterious type the woman is plainly attracted to, wanders off, teasing her and his brother with a promise of coming back to share their new life in California. She goes on to have a secret lesbian affair and the wayward brother acquires a male Latin lover. They have another secret: he gambles and she plays the horses. He just gets into a lot of danger, but she plays the game very, very well. She begins working at a lunchroom heavily pagtronized by racetrack insiders with big mouths, and she takes notes, which pay off, big time.

The two brothers are Lee, played by Will Poulter, and Julius, played by Jacob Elordi. The lady is Muriel: that's Daisy Edgar-Jones, who one critic claims is a ringer for Elizabeth Taylor. She doesn't have Liz's lush beauty, or her presence and acting skill, but she is very good and is done up to look nice. She looks in the mirror and likes what she sees. These are great roles for all three. Will Poulter has never looked so sexy, or so astonishingly elegant. When he is sitting on the floor, desolated by what he has learned about Muriel, his slacks and shirt are just so. His brown suede shoes and shining white socks make you long for a return to Fifties men's styles. (This is a great looking mnovie.). Did men have bleach-blushed hair back then? Never mind: Will was meant to wear that pompadour and to speak in that American accent. The long, tall, dark, ripply-chested Elordi always looks good, but here there is a mixture of risk and sadness that is truly touching. When Diego Calva told Variety that he and Jacob Elordi have some "pretty hot scenes" he wasn't exaggerating.

The trouble is that once Julius (I never quite bought into that name) goes off on his own, the movie splits (despite the literary device of their secret correspondence) into two plotlines, his and Muriel's. It's quite fun in the first third of the movie when he is gambling, then working in a casino, while she is sneaking off all dolled up to win at the racetrack. The race tracks themselves are filmed to look bright and stylish. In Vegas Julius meets Henry, played by Diego Calva (of Narcos: Mexico and Babylon). Henry goes for Julius in a big way and Julius responds completely. In fact he is the one who wants to stay and have Henry as his anchor, a surprise coming from this rakish actor. The note Henry eventually leaves when he runs off is "Couldn't wait."

Meanwhile Muriel is having a fun time of her own, namely Sandra (Sasha Calle). (I should have known about Sasha Calle but I just didn't remember her from The Flash.). It all starts with a jar of olives. If a girl teaches a girl how to eat an olive ("It has a pit."), well, the rest just follows, doesn't it? There is something feisty and self-contained in Sasha Calle that sets off Daisy Edgar-Jones' doe-eyed innocence-in-love look. (Tough at the racetrack, she's a softie at the girl-love.)

These two secret lovers, Calva and Calle, are fine. I'd like to try Sasha Calle's olives, and maybe her eggs too. It's good that Diego Calva has an authentically heavy Mexican accent, even if it's hard to understand at times. The trouble is that the filmmakers don't manage well the part in the end when Shannon Pufahl's 2019 source novel teasingly almost-reunites Julius and Muriel.

Even this soft failure is almost covered up by an unusually pleasing, lush, sonorous score so warm and comforting it makes you more than willing to sit through the credits to the end. The composer Mark Orton is a master at putting classical-quality music to cinematic use. This is not a film that drags. It keeps the attention by the eventually unsatisfying flips from Muriel-world to Julius-world, with the transitions sliding seamlessly from Daisy in bed with her lover to Jacob in bed with his, and back again, or so it seems.

On Swift Horses is a beautiful movie and one that really ought to be seen on a big screen. The sixth glamorous star is the director of photography, Luc Montpellier. This is a hell of a great looking film that's fun to watch, a treat for queer audiences, and a fine showpiece for its actors that isn't doing very well with the critics and with this timing hasn't got much chance at the Oscars, but see it anyway; there's not much out there to see as good as this.

On Swift Horses, 117 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2024, showing also at SXSW , Sonoma, Martha's Vineyard, Phoenix, Miami and a handful of other US festivals, and it opens theatrically in the US by Sony Pictures Classics on Apr. 25, 2025. Metacritic rating: ̶6̶6̶%̶. Now 64%.

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WILL AND DAISY IN ON SWIFT HORSES. BUT THIS CLIP CUTS OFF HIS SHOES AND SOCKS!