Our movie correspondent’s monthly trawl through horse racing’s regular visits to Hollywood continues with some feelgood family fun
Racing Stripes (2005)
directed by Frederik Du Chau; starring Bruce Greenwood, Hayden Panettiere
Racing Stripes is about a baby zebra who grows up to race against Thoroughbreds. It’s also about a hundred minutes long, most of it trained on barnyard creatures cracking wise with CGI animated mouths.
The movie was released in 2005. So were Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Hotel Rwanda, Syriana and Capote. The fact that Racing Stripes did more business than Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Hotel Rwanda, Syriana or Capote should not be a reflection on those fine, deadly serious pictures. They did not have the advantage of animated, trash-talking horseflies. Nor Bruce Greenwood.
It is Greenwood who lifts Racing Stripes from its modest ambitions. It is Greenwood who plays it straight in the face of a preposterous plot line that asks the viewer to believe a zebra can run as fast as a Thoroughbred (even though they can hit 40mph for short bursts).
It is Greenwood who portrays the stubborn persistence of a racehorse trainer just as effectively as Chris Cooper in Seabiscuit, Sam Shepard in Ruffian, or Kurt Russell in Dreamer, also released in 2005.
Whether he is cinching a girth or gate-schooling the stumpy-legged zebra, Greenwood’s Nolan Walsh treats the little beast of the African plains with the same solicitous care that Charlie Whittingham gave Sunday Silence.
When he carves out a training track from a cornfield, I had a flashback to my visit in 2001 with the Hall of Fame trainer Jimmy Jones in Parnell, Missouri, where his father, the legendary Ben Jones, shaped a similar track among the cornstalks at their farm. The footprint was still there.
Lofty reputation
Walsh supposedly enjoyed a lofty reputation as a trainer of champions before tragedy struck. Viewers can enter the story with a bingo card that includes squares labeled “farm going broke,” “plucky, headstrong daughter,” and “dead wife.” Extra points for predicting mom died in a riding accident.
Also, in a nod to Bambi by way of Dumbo, the baby zebra is accidentally abandoned by a traveling circus on a dark and stormy night. If it ain’t broke …
But then there is Greenwood, who earned a lifetime pass from this movie fan for his collaborations with director Atom Egoyan in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, films that will rip out your heart and wring it dry. Picking up on Greenwood’s verisimilitude, Dana Stevens in the New York Times was particularly impressed.
“Among the human actors, Mr. Greenwood seems to have parachuted in from another movie,” Stevens wrote. “He plays the wary, resigned Walsh with a nuanced elegance that’s likely to be lost on four-foot-tall audience members giggling at pony poop.”
During a promotional session with the Canadian entertainment website Tribute.ca, Greenwood grinned at the interviewer’s observation that, “You looked like you really knew what you were doing with those horses. Did you prepare at all in terms of working with a horse trainer?”
“Well, I petted them a lot,” Greenwood said. “I learned how to dig the stuff out of their hooves, watched them shoe them. I learned how to put bridles on and all that business.
“But mostly for me it was sensing the vibe of the animal and trying to pitch my voice in a way that would make the animal relax. If you let that kind of pour out, the animal will pick it up. If you don’t, the animal will go” – he snarled – “and bite you. I got bitten by the baby zebra and kicked by the baby zebra. But so did everybody else.”
Another day at the office
In a career dating to the late 1970s, getting nipped by a baby zebra probably was just another day at the office for Greenwood. His first big break was a recurring role in TV’s St. Elsewhere. Thirty years later, he finds himself playing another doctor on The Resident, now in its sixth season on Fox.
Along the way, Greenwood had a brief, memorable run on Mad Men and played such historic characters as John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, LA district attorney Gil Garcetti in American Crime Story, and Jack Dunphy in Capote, as the title character’s longtime companion.
The farm animals in Racing Stripes are voiced by actors so familiar their names hardly need to appear in the credits – Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, and Joe Pantoliano among them.
Frankie Muniz, known at the time for Malcolm in the Middle, is the voice of Stripes himself, played with pouty adolescence. M. Emmet Walsh turns up as a track tout, a long way removed from Blade Runner and Blood Simple. Wendie Malick does a Cruella DeVille routine as the heavy, and the daughter is played by Hayden Panettiere, who by now has been on one screen or another for almost 30 of her 34 years.
Aside from Greenwood’s heartfelt work, finding small pleasures in Racing Stripes requires fervent belief in Johnny Carson’s dictum that “if you buy the premise you buy the bit.”
As for the critics, they would be out of business if they could not hold up the quality of one movie against another.
Snappy banter
In that regard, Racing Stripes suffered from the success of Babe, the talking, sheep-herding pig, as well as The Adventures of Milo and Otis, which, if people would be honest, was the inspiration for Midnight Run. Even so, Hoffman’s Shetland pony and Goldberg’s goat do share some snappy banter.
It comes as no surprise that Frederik du Chau (pictured right), the director and co-writer of Racing Stripes, is better known in the business as an animator for several studios, as well as the creator of graphic novels.
He prepared for the assignment with some racetrack immersion at Santa Anita Park courtesy of trainer Matt Chew and his wife, Candace, a track executive. The Chews provided dozens of film and commercial productions through the years with r
eal racehorses and the know-how in handling them.
“I spent a lot of time at Matt’s barn, riding the pony, hanging out, helping out,” Du Chau said. “I didn’t know anything about that world. When it came time to storyboard, I drew on that experience for a lot of details.”
Then it was off to South Africa for the production, which included a movie stable of about 70 Thoroughbreds in addition to the barnyard ensemble. Nearly two decades later, Du Chau remains amazed at how his squad of trainers wrangled the real live horses into their complicated scenes.
The zebras, though, were another story. Genetically, they have more in common with the wild ass than the horse, possessing a heightened instinct for fight or flight.
“In their environment, they are at the absolute bottom of the food chain,” Du Chau said. “If somebody places a foot on a rock or a pebble and makes the wrong sound, that zebra will kick out six feet high. We had to be aware of that all the time. Putting a saddle on a zebra can be a dangerous thing.”
‘I’m gonna do nothing’
Which brought the conversation to Greenwood. “I know actors try different things to see what works,” Du Chau said. “On Racing Stripes, Bruce kept telling me, ‘I’m gonna do nothing. The audience will know what I feel by watching me.’
“I wasn’t the most experienced director back then, so I wasn’t going to be telling Bruce Greenwood what to do. But it did look like he was doing nothing. Then looking at the dailies, it was all there, just like he said it would be.”
Each selection in this series holds a special place in my movie-going history, and Racing Stripes is no exception. I saw the film shortly after its release, one dull February afternoon.
My wife, the retired jockey Julie Krone, was in Hawaii at the time on a surfing trip with girlfriends. One of those friends belonged to a mother who had been killed on horseback, years before, just like the girl in the movie.
Just like the girl in the movie, Julie had plastered pictures of horses all over the walls and ceiling of her childhood home. Then, while on the trip, Julie called to tell me it had been confirmed, by two separate tests, that she was pregnant. Of course, it would be a girl.
So there it is. When they advertised Racing Stripes as a family film, they didn’t know it would be for my family.
• The movie is available on several streaming services
• View all Jay Hovdey’s features in his Favorite Racehorses series
Horse racing at the movies: The Killing is a polished gem in a poisonous setting
Horse racing at the movies: Calvin Borel’s reaction to winning on Mine That Bird was movie magic
View the latest TRC Global Rankings for horses / jockeys / trainers / sires