Secretariat

Americans apparently revere their great racehorses, especially if they carry their weight in socio-political resonance - or its absence. Thus, the $58 million-grossing Secretariat, about the powerful red chestnut with the inordinately huge heart whose bid to win the 1973 US Triple Crown supposedly diverted attention from Watergate and Vietnam, arrived comparatively quickly after Seabiscuit, the 2003 Best Picture Oscar nominee and second film about the undersized knobbly-kneed bay who thrilled Americans during the Great Depression.

Australia, too, celebrated its equine hero of the Depression with 1984’s Phar Lap. So where is the movie about Bahram, winner of the British Triple Crown in 1935? And why, for that matter, has there never been a film about Sceptre, winner of four British classics in 1902 and therefore a post-Boer War fillip, or Red Rum, whose three Grand National wins in the 1970s solaced many of us during that decade of strikes, power cuts and riots?

The best the UK film industry has come up with is a 1970 documentary about Lester Piggott’s great mount Nijinsky, narrated by Orson Welles, and 1984’s melodramatic Champions, starring John Hurt as Bob Champion, who overcame cancer to win the 1981 National on Aldaniti, which crocked horse had glimpsed the knacker’s yard before his victory: I’m not convinced that we remember these throughbreds because they helped us survive Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher respectively.

Secretariat is predicated on the sub-feminist theme of a Denver housewife, Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane), who struggles against the reactionary scepticism of her tax-lawyer husband (miffed because CBS commentators called her by her maiden name, Chenery) and Harvard-professor brother, as well as that of the racing establishment, as she sought to fulfil the dream of “Big Red” winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes.

The mother of four, Penny is drawn into the fate of her parents’ financially imperilled horse-breeding and racing farm in Virginia when her mother dies because her blind, near-senile father (the ghoulishly made-up Scott Glenn) is no longer capable of running it. Losing a coin toss with the patrician owner (James Cromwell, a far cry from Babe’s Farmer Hoggett) of the stallion who bred with Penny’s mare, Penny takes the remaining foal of a pair, who happens to be the future Secretariat. Ms Chenery would syndicate his stud services to keep the farm alive (though, in fact, it was another horse, Riva Ridge, who saved the farm in 1971).

The movie, written by Mike Rich (Finding Forrester, The Nativity Story) and helmed by Randall Wallace (writer of Braveheart, director of We Were Soldiers), is good on the racing lore - the coin toss, with Penny desperate to lose, knowing she’ll get her foal of choice, has topsy-turvy tension. The races themselves are thrillingly filmed, with in-your-face close-ups of the hooves and blinkers of the horses as they wait at the starting gates, and often spine-tingling, particularly the climactic Belmont; cinematographer Dean Semler, whose past films include Dances With Wolves and the World War One cavalry epic The Lighthorsemen, has an eye not just for horseflesh, but also for darkly lit interiors and evocative human silhouettes.

Lane, deglamorised in matronly suits and dresses, is persuasively unflappable as Penny, though she gets to flash her eyes when firing the malign trainer she inherits; his eccentrically attired, volatile Québécois successor, played by John Malkovich, is a teddy bear in comparison. We don’t mind that she partially abandons her brood - including an impressionable daughter who has taken up anti-war protesting - because she’s a thoughtful superwoman on the farm, one who has a seemingly telepathic understanding with Secretariat, a natural at handling belligerent opponents in press conferences, and an excited girl at the track. She doesn’t break sweat through the entire picture. Even her husband and brother come around.

Sadly, Secretariat is otherwise an unpalatable stew of smug conservatism and feelgood Disneyana. Wallace and Rich are members of Hollywood’s Christian Right and they plant their movie with biblical quotes, gospel music - Secretariat’s entourage grooves to “Oh Happy Day” as it washes the nag - and the odd religiose image. Deliberately avoiding those political realities of 1973, it presents a bland, bland, bland, bland world, wherein even a savvy dame with a cast-iron perm can save the old family farm with the help of a talismanic brooch, her daddy’s horse sense, and the support of the old retainer - the horse’s Stepin Fetchit-like black groom (Nelsan Ellis). Except that it’s not sexy, Secretariat has a touch of Gone With the Wind about it. How weird that it sounds like a film about the body with which Stalin controlled the Communist Party.

• Secretariat is on general release
• Several books about Secretariat can be found on Amazon
  
• Find Seabiscuit the movie on Amazon