Secretariat

I had been vacillating about seeing Secretariat, shying away because of some of the reviews. But it has gotten some good notices, and after seeing the Breeder's Cup race on Saturday, which was one of the most thrilling horse races I've ever seen, I was in the right mood for Secretariat. I should have listened to my instincts.

Secretariat, of course, was the horse that won the Triple Crown in 1973. I have vivid memories of his 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes, one of greatest "holy fuck" moments in sports history. He is arguably the greatest thoroughbred in history, and also one of the best known. If you ask a person to name one race horse, chances are it would be Secretariat.

So his story, on its face, doesn't have much suspense. Instead, director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich have made the story about his owner, and this makes sense, because you can't have a horse as a central character, because we don't know what it thinks (unless it's Mr. Ed).

Penny Tweedy, played with steel-eyed bravado by Diane Lane, complete with a period hairdo that seems to be sculpted out of neoprene, inherited her parents' horse breeding operation, which had been in decline. She carries out a deal her father struck with a fabulously rich breeder (James Cromwell), in which the result of a coin toss determines who gets what foal sired by Cromwell's horse by Tweedy's mares. He wins, and takes his pick. Tweedy loses, but gets Secretariat.

He turns out to be a super-horse, but there are all sorts of economic issues that I won't get into here. Suffice it to say that the script tells us that the entire farm's future rests on Secretariat (known to his handlers as "Big Red") winning the Triple Crown.

Not a bad story, but Rich deserves a night in movie jail for crafting some of the worst dialogue I've heard in recent years. All of the characters speak in either hoary platitudes or clumsy exposition, and much of it is in italics. My favorite was when Lane and Cromwell are conversing, and Cromwell reminds her that the Triple Crown consists of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes--three races in five weeks, and no horse has done it in twenty-five years. Gee, I'll bet she didn't know that.

Throw into that some weak characters. Lane fares best, but the "girl power" stuff shoveled on from nearly forty years of hindsight doesn't fit (nor does the attempt to parallel it with her teenage daughter's political activism, which comes and goes from the film without warning). John Malkovich is the horse's trainer, and he is almost entirely defined by his gaudy wardrobe. Nelsan Ellis, who is so amazingly electric as Lafayette in True Blood, goes to the other end of the scale as a dull groomsman who may be the son of Bagger Vance. And Margo Martindale is the trusted assistant who seems to have no other purpose but to look sorrowful and help Lane.

The film, surprisingly, really doesn't look that good. Dean Semler is the cinematographer, and there are the requisite layers of ochres and umbers for this kind of story, including a shot of Secretariat emerging from a storm cloud. But it doesn't have the snap of a feature film; it looks more like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, which I guess is appropriate considering it's written and directed like one, too.

There are a few things in the film I liked. The editing of the Kentucky Derby sequence is quite good (although it lasts a lot longer than Secretariat's record one-minute-fifty-nine second dash), and a shot at the turn of the Belmont, to show just how far he was ahead, is clever. That race also included my favorite line of the film, when Malkovich, seeing that his horse can't possibly lose, yells out to jockey Ron Turcotte, "Don't fall off, Ron!"

My grade for Secretariat: C-