Sienna Miller Is the Reason to Watch Horizon

Kevin Costner has sunk a mint of his own money into his projected four-part western epic Horizon; the first installment, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, is now making its rounds in cinemas, as Costner has always intended; he believes wholeheartedly in the big-screen experience. This first Horizon entry is a bit snoozy, albeit handsome-looking. Costner, who also co-wrote the script (with Jon Baird and Mark Kasdan), may not have the best control of this sprawling story peopled with a giant and somewhat confusing roster of characters. But his judgment is sound in at least one area: Sienna Miller plays Frances Kittredge, a pioneer wife who survives an Apache attack on the homestead she’s set up with her husband and two children. And if this first chapter of Horizon too often drags its boot-heels in the dust, it crackles to life every minute Miller is onscreen.

Miller has been working in movies and TV for 25 years now; pretty much everyone knows her name. And still, she’s a secret weapon, an actor you can count on to give a terrific performance nearly every time—and proof, though it’s sad we need it, that women need to work twice as hard as men do to buck Hollywood’s pernicious double standard.

When Miller—who was born in New York but raised in London—was first making her mark in movies, giving lit-from-within supporting performances in pictures like the 2004 Alfie remake (appearing with Jude Law, who would become her boyfriend) and, from that same year, the rufty-tufty crime thriller Layer Cake (with Daniel Craig), she was lauded as the next It Girl, the blonde ingenue most likely to become a huge star. She got her chance in George Hickenlooper’s 2006 Factory Girl, an astute and sympathetic look at the life of socialite Edie Sedgwick, who captivated both Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, though she was betrayed by the former and, it seems, just too much of a firecracker for the latter. As Sedgwick, Miller is sensational, shifting through subtle gradations of fragility and effervescence; at times, she has the quivering leaf-blade vulnerability of the young Natalie Wood. It’s the kind of performance that could have, should have, won awards. At the least, it could have made her a a major star.

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But the movie stumbled. Before its release, there were reports of rewriting and reshoots; it was considered “troubled,” an adjective that’s always considered, often unfairly, synonymous with “bad.” The picture was picked up for distribution by the Weinstein Co., and now-disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein instigated the changes that were made to the film. (Miller has said that she’d never had to fend him off—it seemed that having Law as a boyfriend, an actor whom Weinstein saw as a valuable property, protected her from his predatory advances.) The movie was largely savaged by critics, and disappeared quickly from theaters.

The bigger problem for Miller was that, particularly in the British tabloids, she had already attracted the kind of attention, including undue scrutiny of her personal life, that had nothing to do with her gifts as a performer. In the years leading up to Factory Girl, she had, as the Guardian put it in 2005, “been traded like pork belly on the celebrity market.” Miller had by that time given acclaimed performances on the West End: when Helen McCrory fell ill during the 2005 run of As You Like It, Miller, who was playing Celia, is said to have slipped seamlessly into the role of Rosalind at the last minute. Also during that run, the news broke that Law had been cheating on Miller with his children’s nanny. It was a scandal that seemed to stick more to her than to the guy who had done the actual cheating. (Law publicly apologized to Miller, but the damage was done.)

Even worse, just a few weeks after Law's deceit had been exposed, the UK tabloid the Sun obtained information, via illicit means, that Miller was pregnant—she was 23 years old and just 12 weeks into the pregnancy at the time, and had barely discussed it even with family and friends. The Sun's manipulations, coupled with whatever personal trauma the cheating scandal had wrought, were devastating for Miller, and she sued the paper. In late 2021, she reached a settlement with the Sun—pursuing it to the end could have bankrupted her. She was paid an undisclosed sum, and one of the settlement's conditions was that there would be no admission of illegal activity or phone hacking on the Sun's part. Miller was, however, allowed to read a statement in court, during which she averred that the paper's actions "very nearly ruined my life. I have certainly seen how they have ruined the lives of others."

It's impossible to imagine a male public figure's life being rocked in exactly the same way; men don't become pregnant, and there's just no comparable violation of privacy. And while Miller has at times brought problems upon herself—for example, making a wisecrack to Rolling Stone about the dullness of the city of Pittsburgh, where she'd spent time filming 2008's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—a rejoinder published in the Pittsburgh City Paper came graced with the headline "Who the hell does this Sienna Miller skank think she is?" When it's time to put a woman in her place, why not use language that identifies her as sleazy, ugly, and/or sexually promiscuous?

Miller has been subjected to levels of scrutiny and judgment that no man would have to endure. But even if she hasn't, for whatever reason, had exactly the career she deserves, no one has to feel sorry for her. In terms of earning power, she may not be a Nicole Kidman, a Sandra Bullock, a Scarlett Johansson. But she has arguably built something just as valuable, and maybe more so: a resume of performances in smaller films—as well as small performances in big films—that blossom and expand before your eyes. Miller is never a look-at-me actor. She’s something even more rare: an actor you’re always happy to see. And how do you measure the worth of that?

Miller’s list of credits is so long that even those who think of themselves as fans aren’t likely to have seen everything. She makes the most of every on-screen minute. In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, she plays Taya, the wife of Bradley Cooper’s real-life Navy S.E.A.L. sharpshooter Chris Kyle, a woman who watches as her husband, having served four tours of duty in Iraq, drifts away from her. If the movie was largely a vehicle for Cooper, Miller, accepting the challenge of playing a woman—a widow—she’d met in real life, is the film’s quietly thrumming center. “I need you to be human again,” she implores her husband, who has returned from battle in body only. Miller’s Taya is plaintive, searching, but also resolute, willing to face the reality that life with a perpetual ghost is no life at all.

Miller is just as quietly brilliant in James Gray’s Lost City of Z, where she plays the wife a different sort of lost man, an explorer (played by Charlie Hunnam) who’s obsessed with finding a mythical city in the Amazon. Miller’s Nina Fawcett is an early-20th-century woman with a genteel steeliness, a woman who loves her husband with an almost mystical selflessness. The performance keys in to one of Miller's most elusive qualities. Early in her career, with her charming vintage-boho wardrobe and freewheeling openness in interviews, Miller gave the impression of being a “fun girl,” a rock-star girlfriend even if she wasn’t dating any literal rock stars. It’s ironic, then—or maybe it's just the reality of how young actresses’ careers are built or knocked down—that as a performer, Miller always seems to be drawing from vast, self-replenishing reserves of mystery. No matter how many interviews you read, she’s essentially unknowable, as if she were saving bits of a secret self, only to be revealed, in myriad ways, in her performances.

She has also been fantastic in movies that few people have bothered to see, like James Toback’s 2017 An Imperfect Murder (originally titled The Private Life of a Modern Woman). Miller plays Vera Lockman, an out-of-work actress who’s trying her hand at being a writer—and who, in addition to dealing with that career shift and assorted family troubles (her grandfather, played by Charles Grodin, is suffering from Alzheimer’s), must also dispose of a dead body. Miller’s performance is marvelous: Vera’s insecurities, her submerged hopes, become real to us—she captures the texture of what it’s like to have to think on your feet, only to feel the ground slipping out beneath you. In the early days of Hollywood’s #MeToo reckoning, Toback faced multiple accusations of inappropriate, manipulative behavior. But no matter how distasteful you may find him and his actions, it’s worth noting that when a male filmmaker goes down, we often inadvertently punish women, too. Once again, Miller’s thunder was stolen, through no fault of her own, by a man’s bad behavior.

Horizon may be a way of rectifying some of those cosmic wrongs. Even if Costner’s first installment has an uncontrolled ranginess, as Frances Kittredge, everything Miller does is compact, potent, affecting, yet at the same time infused with air and light. Her character may be positioned as the innocent white woman who must be protected at all costs from Native Americans—in future Horizon installments, Costner may introduce more nuance in terms of their side of the story, though in Chapter 1, those subtleties have not yet emerged. But that shortcoming has nothing to do with Miller. If she’s not the absolute star of Horizon—that would probably be Costner, who ambles in on horseback in the movie's last third—she’s far and away the best thing about it.

In an early scene, when Frances is called upon to protect her teenage daughter during the attack, she has to think fast and act even faster; Miller somehow turns Frances' brainwaves into a presence you can feel. Later in the film, Frances will enter a cautious romance with a U.S. Cavalry officer played by Sam Worthington. He’s slow to make the first move; she has to take charge. Miller has a great speaking voice, like vanilla laced with bourbon. But if it’s seductive, it’s also infinitely trustworthy. Frances, like so many pioneer wives, has suffered and endured great losses; she’s tough. But Miller doesn’t play her as a martyr, or as a figure pieced together from other movie portrayals of similar characters. Instead, Frances is a new invention, sailing in on the breeze from the past to the present. We’ve seen her type before. But we’ve never seen her. And every time she appears, in just about every project, that’s what Miller does: she challenges us to really see, which is a world apart from merely giving us something to look at.