Often the movies treat love and desire as if they’re easy to define: romantic, platonic, familial, sexual. Either you want him or you don’t; either you love her or you don’t. But the messy places in between those poles are where real life lies, and that’s where “On Swift Horses” dwells. Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, the story is set in the 1950s, in a world in which characters might act on desire but do not really speak of it directly. The air around them is thus charged with something that crackles and explodes, and the movie, when it works, is electric.
It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at. The story centers on Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is engaged to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier who’s on leave from his tour of duty in Korea. We meet them in bed at the Kansas house she inherited from her mother, whose voracious hunger for life and experience set an example that Muriel yearns to follow.
Within the first few moments of the film, Muriel repairs to the bathroom in a filmy nightgown for a postcoital cigarette and, leaning out her bathroom’s second-story window, discovers the long body and smiling face of Julius (Jacob Elordi) sprawled across the hood of his car below, brazenly shirtless, soaking in the sun. If you thought this was going to be a buttoned-up and modest film, think again: The director Daniel Minahan has no compunction about the fact we’re here to admire these people. The two spark, exchanging cigarettes and repartee, with the ease of strangers who nonetheless know each other. Julius is Lee’s brother, already discharged from his own tour in Korea, and Muriel has been expecting him.
Julius soon comes inside and spends the evening with Lee and Muriel, and that’s the genesis of everything that follows. It’s a tangled kind of story: Lee worships Muriel and longs for a house, a family, a life. Muriel loves Lee back, but maybe in a different way, something that starts to become evident when they move to California and she meets their neighbor, Sandra (Sasha Calle).
Yet she also senses an instant connection with Julius, who soon takes off for Las Vegas and a job in a casino. Julius is a gambler, both the literal and metaphorical kind; he inspires Muriel to try betting on horses soon after she and Lee move to California. He falls into a relationship with another casino employee, Henry (Diego Calva), but they dare not let that fact outside the room they share.
There is a lot of plot packed into this movie — this description is just a slice of it — and it can be hard to catch your breath. Minahan tries to make space by giving us plenty of saturated and gorgeous shots of the light falling across Edgar-Jones and Elordi, who rarely share a screen but between whom there’s a kind of intoxicating thread that beams across all the miles and, occasionally, the telephone line. Both embody a certain languid old-school movie star quality, the kind that makes you want to get up close and just look at them as they look at someone else.
Elordi in particular moves his body like he dropped into our time from an earlier era, which might be why, despite his rise to fame having originated from roles in the very contemporary “Kissing Booth” movies and the HBO show “Euphoria,” he keeps showing up in movies set in the past. He’s Elvis Presley in “Priscilla,” for instance; in “Oh, Canada” he plays the young version of Richard Gere’s character, in an uncanny imitation of Gere’s energy roughly circa 1970. That quality is hard to describe, exactly, but you know it when you see it, and here you certainly see it. Poulter, Calle and Calva are excellent as well, but they’re more animated, more engaged in the world around them. They tend to throw the otherworldliness of the leads into relief.
But the sheer quantity of narrative in which these characters engage hamstrings the story, which feels sweeping in the manner of certain films from the era — it’s not a perfect comparison, but I kept thinking of George Stevens’s 1956 epic “Giant” — but the film lacks a running time that allows the shifts of emotion to fully ripen. Jumping between Muriel and Julius, it’s easy to lose track of what either of them are really feeling in the moment, which means we just have to believe characters when they say how they feel, whether or not it feels merited.
That’s frustrating, though it’s hard to imagine anyone greenlighting a film of this type at double length these days, even one boasting rising stars. But that’s a gamble worth taking, which incidentally is kind of the point of the film. Julius’s inclination to make bets and take risks far past the point of wisdom furnishes the overarching metaphor for the story, including its title. The crux of both love and desire is putting something of yourself on the line and hoping it comes back rewarded, not crushed. But if we’ve learned one thing from the movies, it’s this: There are no guarantees in life, and what you want may never work out the way you dreamed.
On Swift Horses
Rated R for a lot of sex scenes, some bad language, and a general sense of longing. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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