SECRETARIAT 2.5/4
Walt Disney Pictures, Rated PG
Not a movie about sex but certainly about studs, Randall Wallace’s Secretariat doesn’t horse around when inferring mares matter most, whether of steed or human variety. A biopic that revisits the unlikely historic triumph of racehorse Secretariat in grabbing the rare 1973 Triple Crown, the movie also factors in the parallel story of his owner, an otherwise unassuming housewife who dared to infiltrate the macho world of horse racing and triumph in her own right.
Diane Lane takes the metaphorical reins by default as Penny Chenery Tweedy, a conventional middle-aged mother of four (in reality she was a brainy elite Smith College grad) who reluctantly assumes an additional burden of managing her parents’ Virginia horse breeding stable following her mother’s death. Penny develops a protective, maternal instinct towards the horses when she suspects competing breeders are taking advantage of her increasingly physically incapacitated father. At the same time, she hits on the notion that maternal DNA is key to breeding champion racehorses.
Eventually joining Penny as an eccentric team mocked by the contemptuous males-only racing culture is cranky Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), a French Canadian temperamental trainer and provocative-in-pastels clothes horse—no pun—along with her father’s fretting sidelines secretary Miss Ham (Margo Martindale). And the rest, of course, is history.
A retro-venture with storytelling more suited to the small screen, Secretariat excels at capturing some intimate emotional moments, with credit going to primarily its performers, including the attention-grabbing—uncredited—racehorse. But the movie lacks a greater epic scope, stagnating when it comes to any vigorous sense of the stereotypical when not generic surrounding culture and historical moment, its anti-war, emerging women’s movement, anti-establishment thrust, trivialized as rebel youth. Meanwhile, gambling and its troubling social repercussions, and the destroyed lives which are central to horse racing, are invisible here.
Diane Lane and John Malkovich star in Secretariat.
And along with The Social Network, Secretariat seems to be a far-from-humble case of capitalism coming out of the closet, as triumph translates into the unabashed glorification of money as the ultimate award.
