Seductive visuals

Beautiful but strangely static, On Swift Horses is a queer melodrama that looks back to Eisenhower-era America, following the closeted lives of several intersecting characters.

Awash in atmosphere and packed with minty mid-century detail, this is a self-consciously stylish film. Unfortunately, by emphasizing gorgeous surface over dramatic substance, director Daniel Minahan risks turning a tragedy of silence, isolation and repressed desire into an oddly airless period piece.

Adapted by Bryce Kass (Lizzie) from the 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl, the story begins in rural Kansas, where Muriel (Twisters’ Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter from Death of a Unicorn) are welcoming home Lee’s wayward brother Julius (Priscilla’s Jacob Elordi).

Muriel has just given a somewhat subdued acceptance to Lee’s latest marriage proposal, but she’s obviously drawn to Julius. Even after Julius lights out for Las Vegas and the newlywed couple pack up for California, Muriel and Julius continue to share an indefinable bond.

This might have something to do with Julius’s restless resistance to what he calls society’s “supposed-tos.” There’s also Lee’s oblique warning to Muriel that Julius is “not like us.”

On the Vegas Strip, Julius ends up making some risky gambits as a crooked card player, petty thief and occasional hustler — at least until he starts up a passionate affair with Henry (Diego Calva of Narcos), which starts with them watching a nearby atomic bomb test and then gets even more explosive. (There have been recent reports that Hollywood sex scenes have declined by 40 per cent. Minahan seems to be doing his level-best to get those numbers back up.)

In the other storyline, solid, decent Lee just wants a house and a family, which dovetails nicely with postwar California’s promise of the American Dream. But Muriel is quietly kicking against the safety and security of this life, first with a tentative flirtation with neighbour Sandra (Sasha Calle of The Flash) and then with a secretive obsession with racetrack betting.

The film clearly uses gambling as a metaphor for queer life in the 1950s. As one character suggests, whether you can keep dodging arrest, exposure and disaster is really just the luck of the draw. This is, after all, a world where a darkened gay bar has an alarm that goes off when the cops come by; where surreptitious encounters are arranged through sultry cigarette lighting and coded messages on matchbook covers; where gay women gathering at a friend’s house pretend to be a book club when someone unfamiliar comes to the door.

Minahan, who’s worked mostly on such prestige TV series as House of Cards and Fellow Travelers, evokes the characters’ paralleled lives with seductive visuals, aided by Canadian cinematographer Luc Montpellier (Women Talking).

Julius and Henry’s world of Vegas casinos, down-market motels and dingy back-alleys at first seems to contrast starkly with Muriel and Lee’s brand-new ranch-house in the just-built suburban tracts of San Diego, but these two worlds will eventually collide and there will be plenty of pain to go around.

Unfortunately, On Swift Horses struggles to convey this emotional fallout. There are fine individual scenes here and some good performances. Elordi’s indolent handsomeness plays well with Calva’s electric energy in Julius and Henry’s sequences. Edgar-Jones has her moments as a woman who is struggling to name her own desires and Poulter, playing the story’s (literal) straight man, gets one lovely, indelible monologue.

But with its stalled-out pacing and disconnected narrative, the film can’t bring these parts together. And the final sequence, in which the “horse” part of the title suddenly gets weirdly literal, doesn’t help.

fparts@winnipegfreepress.com