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The Rider is an excellent movie if you don’t mind having your heart crushed into powder. The main character, Brady Blackburn, is based closely on the man who plays him, a horse trainer and erstwhile rodeo rider named Brady Jandreau. Indeed, most of the actors in the film are amateurs, with Brady’s family played by his real-life father and sister; there are a couple of bit characters who seem wooden, but on the whole this gives the film a powerful sense of realism.
Chloe Zhao, the director, met Jandreau while filming her last film. She came up with the idea for a film about him when she visited later, and learned that he had received a severe head injury while riding at the rodeo. The doctors warned him never to ride again - not just in the rodeo but at all, full stop - but he was already back on the horse when Zhao visited. Brady Blackburn shares that back story.
This is not a movie about Overcoming Adversity through the Triumph of the Human Spirit. Brady is courting disaster, and there’s an example of the possible consequences staring him in the face in the form of Brady’s friend Lane Scott, who was so badly injured in a rodeo accident that he can no longer speak, can barely move, and communicates by signing with his one working hand.
There’s a particularly wrenching scene where Brady visits Lane in the hospital and helps out with his physical therapy - they’re having him do exercises that mimic pulling on the reins, because he knows the motion so well - and afterward, Brady wipes his eyes as he drives away, and it’s not clear if he’s crying for Lane or for his own possible future.
But still he can’t stay off a horse, and when you watch the horse-training scenes you see why. This is not an actor pretending to train a horse, but a professional horse trainer actually training a horse, with skill and gentleness and a real sense of back-and-forth between the man and the animal. Riding and horse-training is not just his profession: it’s his passion and purpose in life.
Is that worth the risk of a terrible brain injury or death? How do you make an abstract moral judgment about a thing like that? Neither answer is really satisfying, which is what makes the movie so sad - but it's also the reason it's stuck in my head like it has. It's worth seeing.
The landscapes are pretty, too.
Chloe Zhao, the director, met Jandreau while filming her last film. She came up with the idea for a film about him when she visited later, and learned that he had received a severe head injury while riding at the rodeo. The doctors warned him never to ride again - not just in the rodeo but at all, full stop - but he was already back on the horse when Zhao visited. Brady Blackburn shares that back story.
This is not a movie about Overcoming Adversity through the Triumph of the Human Spirit. Brady is courting disaster, and there’s an example of the possible consequences staring him in the face in the form of Brady’s friend Lane Scott, who was so badly injured in a rodeo accident that he can no longer speak, can barely move, and communicates by signing with his one working hand.
There’s a particularly wrenching scene where Brady visits Lane in the hospital and helps out with his physical therapy - they’re having him do exercises that mimic pulling on the reins, because he knows the motion so well - and afterward, Brady wipes his eyes as he drives away, and it’s not clear if he’s crying for Lane or for his own possible future.
But still he can’t stay off a horse, and when you watch the horse-training scenes you see why. This is not an actor pretending to train a horse, but a professional horse trainer actually training a horse, with skill and gentleness and a real sense of back-and-forth between the man and the animal. Riding and horse-training is not just his profession: it’s his passion and purpose in life.
Is that worth the risk of a terrible brain injury or death? How do you make an abstract moral judgment about a thing like that? Neither answer is really satisfying, which is what makes the movie so sad - but it's also the reason it's stuck in my head like it has. It's worth seeing.
The landscapes are pretty, too.
