In recent weeks there's been much made of the fact that Disney, the studio behind Secretariat, has aggressively marketed the movie to faith-based groups, the same way Warner Bros. targeted similar groups with last year's The Blind Side. As icky as that marketing strategy might be, the sins of the marketing department shouldn't necessarily become visited on the filmmaker. Because while Secretariat -- a sort of dual biopic of the great racehorse and his no-nonsense, eminently likable owner, Penny Tweedy (née Chenery) -- is certainly a slick, deeply conventional and highly fictionalized piece of work, it's hardly the anti-Satan in disguise. In fact, for all its big-studio glossiness, the movie gets one thing -- a very slippery thing -- right: It captures the greatness of this audacious, guileless beast without anthropomorphizing him, cutesifying him or in any way trimming him down to an explicable phenomenon. In other words, Secretariat allows the horse otherwise known as Big Red to own his mystery.
That's not to say that Wallace (writer of Braveheart and director of We Were Soldiers) doesn't take some significant liberties with the story, or that he doesn't make some lousy choices. Working from a script by Mike Rich (writer of other inspirational but not-terrible movies like The Rookie and Finding Forrester), Wallace outlines in bodaciously broad terms the story of the horse who won the Triple Crown in 1973, the first in 25 years to do. In this semi-factual version of the story -- inspired by William Nack's book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion -- Lane plays Penny Chenery, a Denver housewife who, circa 1969, takes over her ailing father's Virginia horse farm. She knows something about horses, but nothing about horse racing. Honoring a deal made earlier by her father, she meets the wealthy financier Ogden Phipps (James Cromwell) for a coin toss: The winner will get his or her pick of two of the farm's choice foals. Phipps wins the toss and takes what he believes is the finer animal; Penny is thrilled because she gets the horse she really wanted, the one she suspects is destined for greatness.
Penny stands by that horse -- the one she calls Big Red -- even when the people around her (mostly ultra-traditional men, including her brother, played by Dylan Baker, and her husband, played by Dylan Walsh) try to persuade her to sell him. She defiantly assembles a team of people to work with Big Red, among them the flamboyant (in the movie, at least) trainer Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), a groom who's also something of a horse whisperer, Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis) and one scrappy jockey, Ron Turcotte (played, with an enjoyable degree of subliminal swagger, by real-life jockey Otto Thorwarth).
Together, this team of determined horse lovers turn a loser horse into a champion -- well, actually, no. In real life, Secretariat was never an underdog, and he isn't one in the movie's terms, either. Even so, Wallace and Rich manage to disguise his story as a "little horse that could" saga, partly by setting Chenery up as a woman who defied the odds by raising a champion in a racing world dominated by men. That's not the worst approach you could take, particularly when you've got Lane in the leading role: Dressed in a selection of old-school pleated skirts, cashmere sweaters and, later, proper-but-zingy shift dresses (costume designer Julie Weiss gets the details of Chenery's wardrobe just right), Lane plays Penny Chenery as a no-nonsense woman who sees respecting her horse as the greater part of her job. Lane is convincing every moment, even when she's called upon to do ridiculous things like look an ailing Secretariat in the eyes and will him, silently, to eat. That's perhaps one of the movie's more fanciful visions of what racehorse owners actually do (or, at least, what the real-life Chenery might have done). But Lane plays the moment perfectly: Instead of giving it the floatiness of a warm fuzzy, she goes for the texture of hardcore worsted wool.
And damned if the horse doesn't eat. Wallace hits beat after predictable beat with the precision of a tennis pro hitting a ball against the wall, and there are certainly things in Secretariat that are either pure fabrication or simply folly: Pancho Martin (played by Nestor Serrano), the trainer of Secretariat's chief rival, Sham, is painted as a rude, clueless goon, though he wasn't that way in real life. The script gives Eddie Sweat a few too many unfortunate Magic Negro lines (although Ellis still navigates the material with class and grace). And Randall really lunges for the heartstrings in the moment when -- huzzah! -- the infant Big Red triumphantly stands on his spindly legs mere seconds after emerging from the birth canal.
Your tolerance for these highly moviefied moments will depend on your tolerance for movies. Secretariat is an entertainment shaped loosely around facts, and even though the world of movies is filled with such things, we still get hung up on the idea that, say, Marie Antoinette couldn't possibly have owned Converse sneakers. Of course, Secretariat is guilty of giving us a Disneyish version of late-'60s, early-'70s America, and to enjoy it on any level, you'll have to approach it accordingly. Hoping for a treatise on the frustration and hopelessness of the Watergate era? You won't find it here. Looking for a pointed statement about how wrong the Vietnam war was? Look elsewhere. (Although the movie does suggest that the proper, well-heeled Penny Chenery supported her teenage daughter's burgeoning liberal values, while her husband just writes the poor girl off as a "commie.")
What you do get with Secretariat is a picture that, unlike its bland predecessor Seabiscuit, actually captures some of the thrill of racing. Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler film each race of the Triple Crown distinctively and cleverly: We see the Preakness Stakes -- the second of the Triple Crown races -- on television, as viewed by Chenery's family at home, a way of connecting the bit of real life with the way most people experienced it. Wallace fixates on some wonderful details: The way, for instance, Thorwarth's Turcotte grasps Big Red's mane along with the reins, a tactile gesture that says not "I'm riding you" but "I'm with you."
At its best Secretariat suggests the mysterious outline of an unknowable creature without trying to draw it outright. Secretariat won the final race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes (on a track that's a mile and a half long, the longest dirt track in thoroughbred racing), by an astonishing 31 lengths, and to see him sail across the finish line -- either in the movie's re-creation of the event, or by watching the actual race via YouTube -- is to see a wondrous animal athlete having left his peers far behind. He's alone in his greatness, and from his body language there's every indication that he likes it that way.
Beyond that, Secretariat doesn't pretend to know the mind of its subject -- it's beyond human explanation, end of story. But I'm still trying to divine what message, exactly, Disney thought it might be hand-feeding to those religious groups: "Be lucky enough to have been born into a family of horse breeders and then win an 'undesirable' horse in a coin toss?" I think that one's a tough sell. How about "With determination, good genes, and the four legs God gave you, you can do anything!"? That is an aggressively religious message, but unfortunately, it doesn't apply to those of God's creatures who are actually able to buy tickets. Maybe the message of Secretariat is simply "Believe in greatness," which I agree can be twisted to fit any number of nefarious political meanings, though I don't see evidence that Wallace (who's a Christian) or even Disney is aggressively doing that here. The pity is that some critics may be more likely to react to the unrealized danger of the so-called message than they are to the actual movie in front of them.
At the risk of sharing what, in the Internet Age, we euphemistically call TMI, I will tell you -- if you haven't guessed already -- that I'm a left-leaning agnostic, and the closest I can ever get to believing in the existence of God is in the presence of animals. (I find human beings to be highly flawed inventions, but maybe that's just me.) In those opening minutes of Secretariat, I blanched at the Bible-quoting voice-over. But I quickly realized I needed to trust the horse, not the words superimposed on his image, and Wallace -- for all his missteps and aggressive calculations -- allows space for that trust to flourish. The biggest sin Wallace has committed is that of making a feel-good story about a truly amazing horse. For those looking to, or through, Secretariat for a deeper, more sinister meaning, all I can say is, there are worse places to look for God than in the nostril of a great horse.