This has a few good moments that feel true—some flashes of good acting and a few good lines of dialogue—but mostly what happens in this movie is just a whole bunch of stuff that you already thought about the period. And the people in the movie behave just the way you'd expect them to behave. And no one surprises anyone, so nothing will surprise a viewer. I was quite bored, despite the purported sensitivity with which the filmmakers approached the material.
Jacob Elordi is good in this only fleetingly. One gets the sense once or twice in the film's two hours of a boyishness, a need to be loved. But mostly he plays it wrong. Diego Calva is a different story. He approaches his character with a wildness that seems at odd with the director's vision but worked for me. Daisy Edgar-Jones... I'm afraid I just didn't believe her for a second.
One of the things that frustrates me about these twenty-first century retellings of the mid-twentieth century is that they aren't interested in the feel of prejudice, of hiding, of rejection, of a disinterest in the family. So it's oh-so-sad that "people like us" can't xyz, can't hold hands in public, aren't free to love who we want, or whatever, but films like On Swift Horses approach that idea as a fact rather than an experience of the world. I find this approach vaguely condescending. It's just all so facile. None of the people is a real person with real thoughts or desires or fears. Everyone is an idea of a person who might have lived back there in the bad old days of the past. Part of the problem is that the whole thing is a kind of chamber piece; all of the scenes are with one or two people, and no one ever really interacts with contemporary society. No one in the movie interacts with a cop or a sergeant or a bartender or a coworker or even a homophobe, really. There are two or three hustlers with lines in the movie—and these characters work to portray the "gay world" as a dangerous milieu of betrayal and violence. In On Swift Horses it isn't mainstream society that is treacherous and violent, it's the underground world of nightclubs, bars, seedy casinos, and the closet. No one in this movie ever meets anyone in the real world: no employers, no realtors, no local paperboys, no nosy neighbors. In this way the movie is never about people who live in the real world. It's always just about people and their interpersonal dramas. The characters in On Swift Horses aren't fighting the world; they are fighting only themselves.
