All the Pretty Horses was always going to be an ambitious project, given it was an attempt to adapt what ought to be remembered next century as a classic of American literature, Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. At the same time, though, the source material is very amenable to filmic adaptation. This fact makes the film’s failure to capture pretty well any of the books greatness all the more bitter.  

I’ll admit from the outset that I’ve read the book several times, so I resent the film. I don’t apologise at all for that. It should just be said.

Book and film follow a classic plot following a well-trod narrative arc, the constituent elements being: two (later three) cowboys go on an adventure from Texas to dangerous Mexico; they come across adversity by chance; they find work; there is a doomed love affair; tragedy ensues.

I’ve read all of McCarthy’s novels, and All the Pretty Horses is a specific point of departure from the five novels that preceded it. It directly follows what I don’t care about labeling his magnum opus, the sublime Blood Meridian. But Blood Meridian is a different beast, less accessible in style and theme. All the Pretty Horses, the novel, is a stark contrast. Its style is still beautiful and inventive, but it’s a lot easier to get into; and it also lacks the thematic depravity of Blood Meridian, which is not gratutitous but truly shocking.  

Reading All the Pretty Horses, you could infer that McCarthy’s publisher put their foot down and said, ‘You might be the most talented writer of your generation, so write a bloody book that more people will want to read’. I don’t think this ever happened, because the disdain he showed for the expectations of the literary establishment in almost every way strongly suggest he just wouldn’t have cared.

More likely, I think, is that he set himself the challenge of taking the simplest and most timeless of plots—I’m sure he read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (a work of comparative mythology that is known to have influenced scores of writers and filmmakers)—and writing it better than anyone else. I don’t say this in praise. Many features of both his life and work suggest an unpretty arrogance in him. But that’s my theory about how All the Pretty Horses came to be.

So I ought to talk a bit more about the film. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is played by Matt Damon. This is lamentable. Damon is an actor of limited range and, hypothetically, he might have actually been able to get close to the surly simplicity of the character McCarthy created. But if he read the book, he misunderstood Cole’s journey to Mexico as the daring voyage of a flash American hero, rather than the more complex thing it was for McCarthy: a nostalgic yearning for a vanquished Old West, shadowed doggedly by the pain of a hidden grief and driven grimly by some desire for self-destruction.

It’s really nothing new as a character. It’s a stock figure to be found everywhere in the history of film and literature. It’s more or less the Byronic hero. If you accuse me of making this kind of human sound uniquely complex, I respond by saying the humans, as a kind, are universally complex.

Blame for the misunderstanding falls also on director Billy Bob Thornton who clearly had no problem with the film as a whole playing out as a flash heroic drama. The book is beautiful in its langorous appreciation of the landscape and, most particularly, the beauty (prettiness) of horses. But all of that gets lost in directorial eagerness to give the story some fizz.

I’ll finish with something of a reiteration, which is that the movie is a funny old thing, beset by a bit of a paradox. Its story and thematic substance were so simple and timeless that it had the makings of a classic, but also the makings of something so common and cheap. It should be clear by now how tragic is the tragedy.