'On Swift Horses' is a slowpoke drama
Pretty surfaces and good-looking actors can't disguise tired tropes
Get yourself somebody who looks at you the way the characters in “On Swift Horses” look at a matchbook. In Daniel Minahan’s 1950s-set drama, every time a character encounters a book of matches advertising a hotel or a bar, the cardboard sleeve serves as a tiny reminder of a world they desperately wish to enter, filling them with longing.
The matchbook is a classic trope in noir movies, and “On Swift Horses” attempts to mimic a widescreen Technicolor melodrama from the era when it’s set while telling a more contemporary story of hidden desires. But maybe a film can be too handsome. “Horses” is filled with gorgeous actors, and every shot is elegantly, sumptuously composed. But the beauty ends up flattening the emotions rather than deepening them.
Jacob Elordi (“Priscilla”) makes quite an entrance in the film, first seen hitchhiking along a two-track road in a vast snowy field, playing with a deck of cards. When he arrives at the Kansas home of his brother Lee (Will Poulter) and his wife Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), we sense the smoldering bad-boy Julius is going to be trouble for the marriage.
Not exactly. It’s true that Lee has bought fully into the American Dream, planning to buy a house in a new suburban development in San Diego now that the brothers are home from the Korean War. But when Julius sets his eyes on Muriel, it’s not with lust, or a desire to sabotage Lee’s post-war suburban dreams. Instead, he sees a kindred spirit.
Julius is gay, and senses Muriel is bisexual, both hiding their true nature from oppressive Eisenhower-era American society. And both subsume their desires into taking another risk – gambling. Julius is a card sharp who plans to go to Vegas to cheat the casinos, while Muriel has been winning at the race track and building up a tiny, secret nest egg in case she decides to flee Lee.
Edgar-Jones and Elordi have an undeniable chemistry together, especially in a kitchen-table scene where Julius shows her how poker is a metaphor for life. (“These right here are pieces of time,” Julius says, pointing at the deck of cards.)
Unfortunately, screenwriter Bryce Kass follows the lead of Shannon Pufahl and separates the two most interesting characters for most of the film. Julius heads to Vegas, but his luck doesn’t go as planned, and ends up working for a casino trying to spot cheaters. He falls for another employee, Henry (Diego Calva of “Babylon”), and ends up torn between staying with him or continuing his vagabond ways.
Back in California, Muriel’s suburban housewife facade continues to crumble, as she flirts with a neighbor (Sasha Calle) and tries to hide both her winnings and her desires from Lee. The film kind of pokes along these two parallel tracks, until a sudden turn into straight-up melodrama in the last few minutes that feels unconvincing.
The film is lovely to look at, and great care is obviously taken to recreate its 1950s settings, from the bright new suburban homes to the shadowy bars where characters can reveal their true selves. But all those pretty surfaces can’t conceal the fact that there’s not enough going on underneath.
“On Swift Horses” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg 18 and Marcus Point.
A friend of mine said something along the lines of "at last, queer folks can have their own boring romance movie." Progress??? 😂