The Rider

2018 horse movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A budding rodeo star deals with a head injury that threatens to derail his promising career.

I'm not sure if it's best to know a little something about this movie and its characters and performers before you see it or not. I knew just enough, I think. There's an interesting mix of documentary and drama here--so I guess it's a docu-drama?--that could make this a more enriching experience if you go into it with some background.

You know how that last Clint Eastwood movie, The 15:17 to Paris, had the real-life heroes playing their cinematic equivalents? Director Chloe Zhao does the same thing here, only it's a lot more effective. Brady Jandreau, the titular character in this movie, really is a cowboy who was curb-stomped by a horse and is probably one more head injury away from dying. The difference between Jandreau and the enthusiastic but awful acting of the trio in Eastwood's movie is that Jandreau seems to have some acting chops. At the very least, you can say Zhao knows how to use Jandreau, when to have his character be completely still, how Jandreau's head will look great silhouetted against the Badlands' horizon. Jandreau brings a reflective quiet to this story that makes this character work perfectly and really brings out mostly unspoken emotions. You feel this young guy's torment, his dilemma of risking death doing what he's really good at and not risking death but living a life that doesn't excite him at all. Sure there are a few blemishes in the performance. It's not a perfect performance at all. But what it is is a really authentic performance. This is a guy who has lived through what a lot of this character is going through, and it really does help give it that documentary-life realness, that verite.

This is most evident in the scenes where Jandreau is shown training horses. There's a really great extended scene that--if the sky is any indication--seems to have been filmed all day long with a real undomesticated or antsy horse and a real guy who actually has a special gift in training these animals. There was just something so poetic about that scene, and although I'm sure Daniel Day-Lewis could live on a ranch for three years or so or just wander around the prairie and look for stallions to train in order to appear like he knows what he's doing, having the actual guy who knows how to do that added to the realism. If you would have told me before the movie started that there was this lengthy scene with the character trying to break a horse, I would have probably guessed that that would be the time I'd be checking my phone or something. After all, I've already seen that in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. However, I found it engrossing.

Really, I was impressed with all the amateur performances here. Brady's actual dad plays his fictional dad here. His sister plays his sister. I had problems with her character while watching the movie. She provides a bit of comic relief as his developmentally-challenged younger sibling, and at first, I thought it was a young actress playing a developmentally-challenged character. And I just didn't get that at all. Once I found out that Lilly was his actual sister, it made more sense. Brady's friends are played by, I'm assuming, actual friends or rodeo acquaintances. The best performance, although he's in a limited number of scenes, might have been Lane Scott, also playing himself. Scott was a rodeo superstar who you can check out on Youtube if you're interested. He was involved in an accident that has paralyzed him, and he can only communicate with sign language using one hand. I thought Scott was really great here, all three (as I recall) scenes being ones that had to be troubling for him physically and mentally. His last scene is a real stunner.

One thing that I should point out is that this narrative does not match these guys' realities. Scott, for example, was not involved in a bull-riding incident that paralyzed him; instead, it was a car accident. Jandreau's story doesn't quite match up with the story of the real Jandreau. This is where Zhao is blending dramatic fiction and reality. She's not pretending to make a documentary or give us the actual events as they happened. She's using real people in these real situations in this real place--a really beautifully-filmed place, it should be noted--to tell a creative story. That story is one that works as a thematic foil to Aronofsky's The Wrestler or maybe Whiplash in the way it looks at risking it all to follow dreams.

Speaking of that, here's a question for you: Does this movie have a happy or sad ending? I think it's certainly debatable.