On Swift Horses (USA | 2024 | 117m | Daniel Minahan)
I suppose it’s kinda cool that the Hollywood’s hottest young stars now establish their acting cred by the rite of passage of playing gay on the big screen. At least Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar Jones avoid tragic weepy stereotypes in Daniel Minahan’s handsome literary take (an adaptation Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel) on queer identities in the 1950s American West.
Muriel (Jones) is an independent-minded Kansas woman; we meet her in bed with her boyfriend Lee (a strait-laced Will Poulter). His brother Julius (Elordi), having hitchhiked and trekked through the wintry weather, arrives on Christmas morning. He immediately identifying himself as a free-spirited chaos agent by sunning himself in the snowy lawn rather than interrupt his brother’s morning delights.
By evening, they all get a little drunk together around the tree telling old war stories and playing cards. Although they plan to follow Lee’s big dreams of making a go at the new American Dream out west together in San Diego, Julius indulges his wanderlust before they can even get out the door. While his brother and soon-to-be wife chart a course to stable domestic prosperity, Julius instead finds himself detoured by the draw of Las Vegas’s freedoms. Under the neon lights, amid the bustling casino scene, he makes a connection with a fellow gambler (Diego Calva) that quickly becomes much more than business. There’s a sense of romance as they fall for each other, but also the conflict of how far they can build a relationships and the degree of risk each is willing to take in grasping at opportunities.
Muriel’s horizons similarly expand beyond her waitressing job in the city and her constrained life in a cramped apartment. First, a few overheard tips across the counter give her a taste for the racetrack, where she steals off to play the ponies from time to time. Later, in the newly developing San Diego suburbs, she joins a “ladies book club” hosted by her alluring new neighbor (Sasha Calle). With Julius forging ahead on the straight and narrow, she juggles dueling existences of a bifurcated identity as long as she can, but eventually the growing deception (to herself and her husband) take their toll.
The challenge of adapting a novel for the screen is that Muriel and Julius are on mirrored paths. While the two share an unspoken kinship through their dual identities and yearning for freedom, the structure of the film is such that they rarely share scenes. Instead, their connection is left to be established by intense meetings, knowing looks, one-sided letters, and occasional phone calls.
As they explore their own journeys on parallel tracks, cinematographer Luc Montpellier shoots the film’s warm wood interiors, vast open spaces of new suburbs, the glow of the Vegas strip, and the shelter of clandestine nightclubs like a period romance rather than a sad tawdry series of clandestine affairs. There’s a sense of promise in the middle of the century and a sense of freedom on the country’s frontiers. The quality of the western sunlight, the wide open spaces, the depiction of ways that these modern pioneers carve out new spaces for themselves, grants what could have been a weepy story a lightness and sense of optimism rare for the era.
An earlier version of this review ran when On Swift Horses had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It opens theatrically on April 25th.