Randall Wallace’s ‘SECRETARIAT’ [3/10]

Published on: December 9th, 2010

In racing parlance, Secretariat - a highly fanciful retelling of the champion racehorse’s career, focussing on owner Penny Chenery Tweedy (Diane Lane) – is something of a “ringer”, i.e. “a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies.” Except here it’s not the bookies who are the patsies, but the moviegoing public. Because while it’s being pitched, pushed and marketed as an uplifting nag-centric tale in the mould of 2003′s surprise hit (and, in case we forget, Best Picture nominee) Seabiscuit, any similarity between the two pictures is about as fleeting and significant as the similarities between the real Secretariat/Chenery story and the compendium of absurdities which comprises Mike Rich’s screenplay.
   The facts are a long way from the rags-to-riches template long favoured by all Hollywood sports movies – though if Rich (whose most notable previous credit was 2000′s Gus Van Sant dud Finding Forrester) had wanted to go down that route, he could have concentrated on Secretariat’s black groom Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis in the movie). Instead, we follow the travails of the decidedly well-heeled Penny, a Colorado housewife who effectively inherits a thoroughbred breeding/training business on the death of her mother and the incapacitation of her Alzheimer’s-suffering dad (John Glenn in little more than an extended cameo). Rich takes various liberties to inject a bit of drama into what is, by sports-pic standards, a near-unalloyed catalogue of triumphs – which means airbrushing from history Secretariat’s illustrious stablemate Riva Ridge (a champion in the season before Secretariat’s superb Triple Crown performance of 1973), and providing Chenery Tweedy with a string of nefarious/chauvinistic men to challenge and defeat.
   Anyone standing in Chenery Tweedy’s way is reduced to a caricature of villainy – most notably Frank Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Secretariat’s great rival Sham, whose ludicrous presentation can be compared with the celluloid slander suffered by Max Baer in Ron Howard’s shameful sweet-science travesty Cinderella Man (2005). The film’s defenders point out that Rich and his director Randall Wallace aren’t crafting a documentary, rather an accessible family-oriented movie chiefly aimed at those for whom Secretariat is, at best, a distant memory. Fair enough – no-one is expecting Disney to come up with a 21st-century equivalent of Frederick Wiseman’s cinema-verité cine-essay Racetrack (1985).
   But Wallace and Rich’s efforts to present Secretariat as a nation-unifying champ in a period when Vietnam and Watergate were fomenting major intergenerational and intercultural unrest are absurdly heavy-handed, likewise their opportunistic touches of religiose sentimentality – at times, our four-legged hero seems endowed with mystical, even semi-divine qualities, and the climax of his jaw-dropping 1973 Belmont Stakes success (in what remains a worldwise record time for 12 furlongs – a remarkable fact which the movie doesn’t bother to impart – and by a record margin of 31 lengths) is ruined by being accompanied by raucous, incongruous gospel music. That said, the direction of the action during the races themselves - including footage taken from miniature cameras attached to jockeys’ helmets – is often rousing, capturing the rough-and-tumble of race-riding and jockeys’ split-second tactical abilities to engaging effect. 
   Overall, however, Secretariat - which has struggled to match Seabiscuit‘s box-office in the States (and which performed dismally in the UK) – represents a missed opportunity of frustratingly large proportions. Even John Malkovich, as the horse’s colourful French-Canadian trainer, Lucien Laurin, is on oddly becalmed form – upstaged by his own character’s garishly o.t.t. wardrobe. It doesn’t help that the actor, often so attuned to precise modulations of speech, makes no attempt at a French-Canadian accent – either when speaking French or English – though he does provide one inadvertent moment of amusement when, present at Secretariat’s foaling, he looks on with an expression so idiotically goofy it beggars belief that editor John Wright actually left it in. Whatever wonderment we’re supposed to experience at this blessed arrival is, as they say at Newmarket, thoroughly “nobbled.”

Nicholas Arcane
9th December, 2010

SECRETARIAT
[3/10] : USA 2010 : Randall WALLACE : 118m
seen 7/Dec/10 at Empire, Sunderland (£5.25) : {8/28}