Review: Secretariat

They shoot horse pictures, don’t they? These days, not so much. Hollywood’s last major film about a racehorse, Seabiscuit, came down the track seven years ago. It was a fine, well-acted drama that did much to improve on the formula for this particular sub-genre. You’ll want to go back and re-appreciate it after watching Disney’s new Secretariat.

This movie about the legendary 1973 Triple Crown champion kicks up old clichés faster than Secretariat himself kicked up turf.

This movie about the legendary 1973 Triple Crown champion kicks up old clichés faster than Secretariat himself kicked up turf. It’s set in the 1970s, but it’s such a corny, cardboard inspirational tale that it feels like it was made in the 1970s — scratch that, it feels like it was made for TV in the ’70s. It is retro Disney in a huge way. There were times when I swore that, if I squinted, actors Diane Lane and Dylan Walsh looked just like Sandy Duncan and Dean Jones.

In the manner of Seabiscuit, Secretariat concerns itself less with its eponymous stallion and more with the humans who owned, trained and rode him. Only, the movie has a problem. The Secretariat saga may be a great sports story, but it doesn’t offer much fodder for a compelling human narrative. So screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie, Finding Forrester) has decided to remake the horse’s owner, Penny Chenery (played by Lane), into a kind of WASP feminist heroine.

When we first see Chenery, she’s a prim but harried housewife in suburban Colorado, overseeing a Brady Bunch-type brood and obeying the orders dictated by her husband (Walsh). But after her mother dies, she finds herself back at her parents’ horse-breeding farm in Virginia, where she takes the reins from her senescent father (Scott Glenn) and discovers her true calling.

Lane’s plucky Chenery brazens her way into the male-dominated world of horse racing — beginning by crashing a men-only club to meet with fellow breeder Bull Hancock (Fred Dalton Thompson). Looking like Pat Nixon, but with the cool poise of Grace Kelly, she later endures public belittling by a sexist rival and stands up to her disapproving hubby and her lily-livered Harvard-professor brother (Dylan Baker). Her sib wants her to sell the family’s horses, but Chenery is out to live her equine dream. And she’s set her sights on a chestnut foal she calls Big Red, but that her dad’s faithful secretary, Miss Ham (an ever-ingratiating Margo Martindale), officially dubs Secretariat.

Enter the other two parts of the triumvirate, both of them Canadians: Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), an irascible but gifted trainer from Quebec whom Penny lures out of retirement, and Ron Turcotte (Otto Thorwarth), the scrappy New Brunswick jockey who would ride Secretariat to his Triple Crown glory.

Thorwarth, a real-life jockey, acquits himself fairly well in his small role. There’s no excuse, however, for Malkovich, who is silly, eccentric and never for a moment convincing. He acts partly as the movie’s comic relief, mainly by wearing outlandish attire — lots of pink and plaid, massive bowties and goofy fedoras — that has Hancock referring to him jocularly as "Superfly." (That a middle-aged Virginia horse breeder would be familiar with the urban blaxploitation flicks of the era seems dubious, but writer Rich probably couldn’t resist such a topical wisecrack.) Most unforgivably, though, Malkovich doesn’t even take a stab at Laurin’s Canadian accent and speaks his occasional French phrases in a stilted style that recalls his hilariously pretentious CIA agent in Burn After Reading.

Actually, there’s a fourth member of the Secretariat team, his groom Eddie Sweat, portrayed by Nelsan Ellis as — and I’m not joking — a humble black man who dispenses folksy pearls of wisdom. (I believe Superfly would have called this character an "Uncle Tom.")

Just as the underdog Seabiscuit was an inspiration to Americans in the Depression, Secretariat was a welcome diversion during troubled times. As the U.S. was losing the war in Vietnam and the Watergate fiasco was exposing the corrupt Nixon administration, Secretariat was a symbol of excellence that everyone could cheer for — a fabulous winner, untainted by scandal.

Rich and director Randall Wallace acknowledge this historical backdrop but only in the most timid, Disneyfied way. Chenery’s oldest daughter, the blond, earnest Kate (A.J. Michalka), spends her time putting on cute antiwar plays and organizing protest marches with other well-scrubbed kids. And early on, Chenery fires a dishonest trainer who is shifty and crooked in the Nixon mould.

Then again, the filmmakers have a hard enough time just whipping up some dramatic tension in a story where Secretariat, apart from one early setback, has an incredible winning streak. Their cheapest ploy is to build up the rivalry between him and his main competitor, Sham, and Sham’s trainer, Pancho Martin, played by Nestor Serrano as an obnoxious braggart just begging to be cut down to size.

Even the race scenes are disappointing. The jockey’s-eye-view shots look artificial and Wallace (who previously directed the Mel Gibson war drama We Were Soldiers) indulges in slow motion sequences and sappy hallelujah choirs to drive home the victories. Missing is the simple but undeniable thrill that comes from watching the actual footage of Secretariat. You don’t have to be a horse-racing fan to be blown away by his awesome performance in the Belmont Stakes, even when seen on a blurry YouTube video.

It’s said that after Secretariat died, an autopsy revealed his heart to be twice the size of a normal horse’s. Cut open this movie and you’ll find no lack of heart, but it could do with a bit more in the brains department.

Secretariat opens Oct. 8.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.