Starring: Diane Lane, John Malkovic
Directed By: Randall Wallace
Written By: Mike Rich, suggested by the book by William Nack
Produced By: Mark Ciardi, Pete DeStefano, Gordon Gray
Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures
Rating: PG
Running Time: Approximately 116 minutes
Website: disney.go.com/disneypictures/secretariat
Budget: $35 Million
Genre: Drama/Famiy
Release Date: October 8, 2010
There’s something about a Disney movie that’s so very… Disney.
Secretariat was, of course, the famed race horse that captured the popular consciousness in 1973 as it attempted the rare Triple Crown. It’s a name virtually synonymous with the sport of horse racing and evocative of the sport’s best-loved age. Secretariat’s name is in the title, but this is really the story of Penny Tweedy (nee Chenery), played by Diane Lane in early-‘70s big hair and sensible shoes. Torn from her suburban Denver family to attend the affairs of her late mother and ailing father, Penny assumes the family business of raising horses on their Virginia ranch. Her put-upon brother (Dylan Baker) just wants to sell the ranch and be done with it, but Penny has other plans. Straining both her finances and her family’s patience back home, Penny aims to revive the Chenery Farm and restore to its former glory while her dementia-addled father is alive to see it. The lynchpin of her plan is raising a proper champion race horse, with whose earnings and notoriety she could salvage both the ranch and her unfulfilled suburban housewife existence. To that end, she hires eccentric Lucien Laurin (a surprisingly conventional John Malkovich), a demanding, curmudgeonly trainer who sees the same thing she does in the farm’s newest foal: potential. Initially called Big Red, the foal grows up to have a more regal name: Secretariat.
Opening with a Biblical passage from Job about endurance and horses, the movie smacks the viewer around with its own sense of inspiration. The movie is populated with tenacious underdogs too stubborn to quit, from Penny herself right down to the hellraising jockey she hires to ride the horse, itself tenaciously stubborn. Secretariat wants us to know it’s about how you should never quit, and then spends roughly two hours making sure we don’t forget. It suffers from an abundance of meaning. When Penny’s husband (Dylan Walsh) actually stops near the end of the film to catalogue all the things they’ve learned from her over the course of the movie, it’s far too late to expect subtlety.
Combining all the applicable clichés of the Disney feel-good movie and the underdog-sports movie into one, Secretariat, “suggested” by the book by sportswriter William Nack, is about as conventional as they come. Disney is known for its relentless optimism, and this movie is no exception: there’s nothing a lofty speech or montage to a ‘70s pop song can’t cure. Even in the face of adversity (death, bankruptcy, humiliation), Penny and her loyal crew face the onslaught with poise and aplomb. For a world as dirty (literally and figuratively) as horse racing, the Disney-fication process has reduced it to a series of motivational posters.
What’s galling about this is not that it’s manipulative or transparent, but that for the most part, it works. The sports-movie conventions get employed as often as they do in the same variation that they do because they work. Lane’s Penny, and the colorful cast of characters that foolishly follow her, handle their roles with such cheery resolve that it’s hard to fault either the characters or the actors. Director Randall Wallace is used to stirring up the blood of his viewers. This is the man who wrote Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, a couple of movies that know a thing or two about making audiences cheer for the good guys and boo the bad ones. The fact that it’s a horse doesn’t change that. You root for Secretariat, and by extension, Penny, here cast as an outsider to the billionaire boys’ club that is racing. Wallace makes the races exciting even if you know the outcome, and undeniably cheesy moments – watch Penny commune with the horse only through eye contact! – are rendered high drama. Penny even gets an Apollo Creed-like adversary in the form of a rival horse owner (Nestor Serrano), complete with a trash-talking press conference to set the stage.
It probably didn’t happen this way. The connections are too tidy, too neat – too Disney. It’s a narrative formed in retrospect, meanings assigned after the fact and given the connective tissue of a thousand similar movies. Like the writer’s credit implies, it “suggests” a true story. Secretariat doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny, but it does its best to dispel cynicism in the most pleasant, entertaining way possible. Disney movies tend to be pretty good at that, too.
Grade: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
