Of amazing horses and plucky ladies, bad clothes and conventional movies

Secretariat is the story of the horse that won the Triple Crown in 1973, the first time it had been done in 25 years, with winning times in two of the races that have not been beaten since. It's also the story of the risk-taking and pluck of Penny Chenery, co-inheritor of a stable that she saved, with this horse, from having to be sold. There are three characters: Secretariat, or "Red," his original name, played by five horses; Penny, played by the sterling Diane Lane; and the somewhat-colorful almost-retired trainer Penny hires, the French Canadian Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), whose hats and bright outfits and occasional sputtering in French are regarded as eccentric. (The really bad dresser is the groom, but that is never mentioned.)

There are other characters -- the dying father (Scott Glenn); the annoying brother (Dylan Baker); the father's loyal and lovable secretary (Margo Martindale); faithful groom Eddie Sweat (Nelson Ellis); jockeys, of course (Grant Whitacre, Otto Thorwarth); an annoying rival horse owner (Nestor Serrano); a rich competitor turned supporter, Ogden Phipps (James Cromwell); and so on. But these are mere accessories. Apart from Penny's true-blue earnestness, Lucien Laurin's judgment, and the horse's mysterious fire, not much is really needed. This is a push-button movie, whose victories, moral and equine, give sure-fire satisfaction. It is not, unfortunately, an interesting movie. It pales even by comparison with another quite conventional but dramatically and historically richer race horse film, the 2003 Seabiscuit.

Penny grew up with horses. She has married a successful lawyer and lives with him and their foure kids in Colorado. But when her mother dies she goes back to Virginia and finds out she has work to do. Her father drifts in and out of lucidity, the stable is in trouble, and a crooked trainer is trying to sell off the best horses to get a kickback from other horse owners he also serves. Penny fires him and hires Laurin. She winds up with this great horse, whose merits the stable's rich rival Ogden Phipps doesn't see. When her dad dies, the inheritance taxes are $7 million, which the family hasn't got the money to pay. She manages to raise the money and avoid selling the stable by selling advance breeding rights to the horse, an unusual gesture.

The writers deserve credit for making this financial juggling fairly suspenseful, but not much credit for saddling Diane Lane with corny declarations of what one critic has called "leaden lifre lessons." Lane projects the determination well enough without the corny speeches. I'll bet the real Penny (who's still around) was more tight-lipped. But this is a Disney film.

It takes place in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and the period is conveyed through Malkovich's inconsistently hideous hats and matching or contrasting outfits -- some are ugly, others rather natty -- and through Penny's daughters' political activism, which is nothing but window dressing.

Contrast Seabiscuit. On the face of it, it's one more horsey underdog tale. But it transpires in the Depression and the New Deal, an ideally underdog-friendly period the film describes in good detail. The story further acquires iconic period associations through its three powerful main characters, played by three fine actors, Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, and Tobey McGuire, whose back stories are thoroughly depicted before the story of the triumphant underdog horse unfolds. There are other vivid characters too. It also helps that there are a number of races. Winning the Triple Crown is a thrilling sequence of events, but there's not much variety in filming them. Indeed the poor Preakness, the middle race, is depicted in Secretariat entirely by showing Penny's kids reacting to it in Colorado in front of the family TV.

Secretariat does one thing that seems new. In the race sequences it shoots the horses and riders up so close it's scary, with the horse's heavy breathing and the intense percussion of the hooves loud in our ears. Is this to convey the jockey's or the horse's point of view -- or both? Or is it just a camera trick that hasn't been thought out? Whether this device adds anything to the traditional shots of the field of horses rounding a bend and the reactions in the stands I don't know. To me it just seemed jarring. Perhaps it's a reminder that this is really all about the horse, and that the horse -- all snorting and beautiful rippling muscles --is ultimately a mystery (which even Lucien Laurin declares), so that getting up so close only rubs the mystery in. If so, the point is too little emphasized.

It's in the nature of push-button movies that they work, while leaving one little to say about them. But what works may not last, and apart from Diane Lane's noble determination and the horse's amazing performances all one may finally remember of Secretriat are Malkovich's bright-colored hats and his game if not always convincing stabs at French.

If only you could make a movie just about the horse. Forget the threatened stable, the noble daughter, the sartorially excessive trainer. Secretariat was the kind of horse made not only for extraordinary finishes, but the most hair-raising races, because it was his custom to start out in the back of the pack and then come up slowly from behind, always with an element of surprise. In the final Triple Crown race, the Belmont, he reversed this and came up with his arch-rival, Pancho Martin's fast starting Sham, very early, which looked like a terrible mistake. His lineage suggested he might be fast but lazy and therefore not up for a mile-and-a-half race, not able to keep up Sham's pace all the way in the Belmont. But he does, his huge margin terrifying his supporters with the fear that his heart will burst or he'll fall. He had also been beaten by Sham in his third race, coming in third in the Wood Memorial after two impressive previous races, thus giving Sham's owner hope that he didn't have the stuff to win even one of the Triple Crown races, let alone all three. All the elements were there for drama and surprise.

That's enough of a story in itself. And to tell it two of the film's other accessory characters, a pair of racing writers, could move into the foreground. But that's not the way these things work. Ultimately every racing story has also got to be a "human interest" story. But here the"human" part can't compete with the soaring tale of the winning thoroughbred.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.