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Verdict: Roaming the Old West with old hands like Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner is always worthwhile.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Kevin Costner has been trying to get his groove back since the mid-'90s. He's taken a crack at love stories (“Message in a Bottle”) and made a stab at baseball tales (“For Love of the Game”).

With “Open Range,” Costner returns to his favorite genre — the Western, which has been very good to him. “Silverado” provided his breakthrough role as a daredevil cowboy, and “Dances With Wolves,” which he also directed, won seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best director.

“Open Range,” which Costner directed and produced, is a darker movie, more in the vein of Clint Eastwood's “Unforgiven,” though not quite as good. Costner and co-star Robert Duvall play Charley Waite and Boss Spearman, seasoned cattle herders in the late-19th-century West, where the frontier is already vanishing. Charley and Boss are part of a dying breed: free-rangers who graze their herds on open land. This doesn't sit well with greedy cattle barons like Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon, the new Dumbledore) who doesn't want anybody else's cows near his, even if they're not on his land.

The situation worsens when Boss and Charley send the Hoss-like Mose (Abraham Benrubi) into nearby Harmonville for supplies. Diego Luna, the hottie from “Y Tu Mamá También,” plays a youngster learning the ropes from Boss and Charley, and Annette Bening, seen too rarely in movies these days, is a nurse living in Harmonville.

Costner's love for the American West permeates the picture. A herd of horses at full gallop takes on a mythic grandeur. Charley and Boss shot in huge close-up, their profiles silhouetted against the Rockies, could be faces carved on Mount Rushmore. A hard rain turns Harmonville into a giant mud hole, the less glamorous side of the Old West.

“Open Range” is a plain-spoken film that often aspires to the terse Old West poetry of Eastwood's movie. Much of the time, it succeeds. Costner's no-frills direction honors the verities of the genre: love, death, horses, gunfights. Plus, he cherishes the texture of the West. You can see it in the vast prairies, the sagebrush, the towering mountains, even the mud.

But at times, the movie suffers from the self-conscious stateliness that marred “Wyatt Earp.” It moves along, but usually in spurts that punctuate long periods of quiet. This is probably intended to reflect the true nature of the West, where, as Bening points out, not everyone dies from a bullet wound. Still, the film could use some goosing. And occasional bits of dialogue fall as flat as the endless plains. When one character says, “Let's rustle up some grub,” you half expect Adam, Pa and Little Joe to show up.

Charley is the straight-arrow Costner of Eliot Ness or the “Waterworld” guy, not the looser, more colorful Costner we saw in “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams.” It's a deliberate choice, but he's less interesting this way. Duvall, who loves the West as much as Costner, is authoritative and authentically grizzled. But you feel a slight touch of disappointment in his performance — as if he had hoped Boss would be a big-screen version of his favorite role, Gus in television's “Lonesome Dove.” But the writing just isn't there.

Luna, also in a not particularly complex role, demonstrates that his charisma and sex appeal have crossed the border intact. And Bening transforms herself from the silken siren we remember so well from “The Grifters” and “Bugsy” into a radiant but hardly glamorized frontier woman. At times, she looks as if she just dropped in from a John Ford movie.

Early in the film, Charley stops his old dog from going to town with Mose, saying, “He's got the heart, but not the legs.” “Open Range” has heart, too. Whether that will translate into legs at the box office is as hard to predict as a prairie thunderstorm.