Just a few months after the first three-hour installment of Kevin Costner‘s legacy project had its lackluster premiere at Cannes, his second slab of Western fudge has launched in Venice. There are more snow-topped mountains in Montana, more bars bathed in golden gaslight, more shoot-outs, more lines of wagons moving ever westward ho. Costner obviously loves classic Westerns, including his own — he allows himself a callback to Wyatt Earp — and these are all treasurable, time-honored motifs of the genre. Piling them high over hours and hours does not, however, mean that the result will be all the more classically magnificent. It just means there will be a lot of it, whatever it is.
What it is, unfortunately, is a collection of anecdotes lying side by side, never cohering — so far, anyway — into the comprehensive panorama of the turbulent making of America that Costner and his co-writer, John Baird, must have envisaged. Like the mesas of Monument Valley, these narrative strands are also immediately recognizable. Sienna Miller’s Frances Kettredge, who lost her husband, son and home during an Apache raid in Chapter 1, is now a plucky homesteader rebuilding her life with her daughter