Despite the acclaim it’s been receiving, there has never to my knowledge been any suggestion that the new movie ‘Jockey’, which opened to a limited release in New York and Los Angeles last week, could be used as a ‘Seabiscuit’-style promotional vehicle to enthuse the non-specialist public about the joys of horseracing.
Which is just as well.
It isn’t equipped for that sort of role. This has none of the pulsating, crowd-pleasing charisma of that big-budget 2003 Oscar-nominated adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s 1999 bestseller by director Gary Ross, and of course very little of its star power. Seabiscuit called on significant draw cards like Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Elizabeth Banks, Chris Cooper, William H Macy and Hall of Fame rider Gary Stevens, all of them bigger names, Hollywood-style, than anyone associated with this latest addition to racing movieland.
Nor does it possess the universal appeal of the 1983 Australian movie Phar Lap, rated ahead even of Seabiscuit in JA McGrath’s Five best horseracing movies, published on this site in November 2019, a view endorsed by countless others, including Nicholas Godfrey in his top ten published in Gallop magazine the following year.
Of course, Jockey does not tread the same turf as either of those renowned offerings, nor as such successful but slightly less heralded racing flicks of relatively recent times as Secretariat (Randall Wallace, 2010), starring John Malkovich and Diane Lane, and Ride Like A Girl (Rachel Griffiths, 2019), featuring Teresa Palmer as Melbourne Cup winner Michelle Payne.
Yet, in some ways, Jockey is a better film than any of them, and Rotten Tomatoes, widely accepted as the industry-standard aggregator of critics’ reviews, backs this up. These are its scores (percentage of positive reviews) for the five films in question:
Jockey - 88
Phar Lap - 88
Seabiscuit - 77
Ride Like A Girl - 68
Secretariat - 64
Jockey is no mainstream crowd-pleaser, but it will warm a few hearts and jerk the occasional tear, and it does something else, something you’ve probably never seen to this extent in a racing movie. It injects you deep into the sport’s underbelly, transported into a rugged, nurturing, uncompromising, caring, threadbare, unique way of life. You get to experience an environment way over on the other side of racing, disconnected from the cheers and the glamour and the money out on the racetracks we see on our TV screens at the Breeders’ Cup and the Kentucky Derby.
This is a transient tribe, lugging their stuff from one short season to another at various journeyman racetracks across parts of America. In Jockey, they are encamped at Turf Paradise in Arizona.
You are there with them on the backside, in the barns. You get to understand the riders, the backstretch workers, the trainers, the way they exist. You get to feel their hopes, their anxieties. You smell the straw, the horseflesh, the feed. You want to help with the mucking out.
Shoestring budget
Unlike those other movies, Jockey is a work of fiction. The story centres around aging rider Jackson Silva, still respected, still a man to beat, still hankering after one big day. His trainer, and close friend, Ruth Wilkes, may have the horse capable of providing it, but she’s worried about Jackson’s precipitous health. And then there’s the arrival of the rookie Gabriel Boullait, a promising young rider who claims to be Jackson’s son.
All three are played by actors - Clifton Collins Jr is Jackson, Molly Parker is Ruth and Moises Arias is Gabriel - yet much of the cast are Turf Paradise jockeys and staffers, including the since-retired Scott Stevens, elder brother of Gary.
A remarkable thing about all this is the way writer-director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have created such a fine film on such a shoestring budget.
As Scott Stevens told Byron King in The Blood-Horse last week, “We filmed some of it before [racing], like early in the morning, the scenes in the mornings. The way they did it — I mean, it was low budget, you know. These guys didn’t have no fancy equipment. And then they would do some of it after the races because they were really key on the lighting. The sunset had to be just right. And that’s basically when we did it. I think we did two days when it was an off day.”
Fancy equipment they may not have had, but they didn’t half do a good job. As Daniel Ross wrote on this site last week, “Filmed … in a palate of rich desert pastels, the film is a slow contemplative burn on racing as a high-stakes lottery, when chance and good fortune are strange bedfellows with failure and rejection.”
Yet the most remarkable thing about Jockey is the performance of Clifton Collins Jr.
They don’t hand out acting awards every year at the Sundance Film Festival, the world’s biggest showcase for independent films (the last time they did it for a U.S. drama was in 2018), but they made an exception with Collins in 2021, when he received a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize as Best Actor.
His portrayal is a fabulous insight into the gnarled, desperate world of a rider fighting to cling onto some relevance against the constraints of inevitable decline.
Collins has never had much experience of horses, but watching Jockey you’d swear this was a man who had spent his entire life on horseback.
As director Bentley says, “With our budget, we might worry about not having as many crew members or equipment [as] we would need. But Greg [Kwedar, co-writer] would always say, ‘You just put Clifton’s face in the fame and it’s all gonna be okay.’”
Jockey may not be the kind of glamorous fare racing’s PR machines can latch onto in the never-ending effort to hook a larger fanbase for the sport, but it’s a rare gem, enlightening and realistic, that you should make sure you watch - if only to admire the astonishing achievement of Clifton Collins.
Jockey, distributed by Sony Picture Classics, is slated for a widespread U.S. release soon and is likely to be shown in the UK later in 2022.