Jockey follows Collins as Jackson Silva, a veteran horse jockey working in Phoenix, Arizona whose battered body is starting to show the symptoms of motor neuron damage. Pure denial would be enough to keep Jackson in the saddle. Though he's grown complacent and pudgy, living a subsistence life split between the tracks and his travel trailer, he's wedded to the contentment of his simple career. He eats, sleeps, and breathes jockey, carrying himself with a cool, drawling, understated passion, intimate in the knowledge of horses and horse racing. But he's given all the more reason to stick it out when his good female friend, a horse trainer and platonic lover of sorts named Ruth (Molly Parker), introduces him to her excitable yearling. This is the first horse she's ever bought, representing a major step from being a trainer to becoming an owner herself. The pair look upon the young steed as it leaps and bucks impatiently in its corral, gazing on it and talking breathlessly with that kind of "you know if you know" spiritual reverence that we must take for granted as being about something only horse people fully understand. Friends for ages, Ruth intends the steed for Jackson to ride; and Jackson intends to ride it, or die trying.
Though technically Bentley's feature directorial debut, Jockey actually represents the latest collaboration between himself and fellow Texas-based filmmaker, co-writer and co-producer Greg Kwedar. The pair had previously collaborated on the 2016 feature Transpecos - also featuring Collins in a starring role - but with Kwedar in the directing chair. They trade places here to expand upon a subject and theme that Bentley first explored with 9 Races, a short film released in 2017, and still hosted on Bentley's official Vimeo account. Contrasting the short and the feature isn't quite essential, but it is fascinating in terms of mapping Bentley and Kwedar's progress as storytellers.
The horse-racing drama is a firmly established subset of the sports film, but it tends to intersect most often with the more bucolic strains of young adult romances, primarily catered to young women. Even if the horse-racing drama adheres to the grittier side of the sports film, its focus tends to be, as with many sports films, the mythologizing of certain canonical heroes and their long hard roads to victory. In either case, what immediately sets Bentley and Kwedar's particular focus apart as so refreshing in its potential is the title, Jockey... You know, as opposed to Seabiscuit or Secretariat.
What can safely be said about most horse-racing movies is that they are, mostly, horse movies. Though frequently marginalized in sports film canon, they vividly exemplify the sports film in their deployment of the horse itself as that which fully embodies some sort of primal, stoic, and romantic essence of strength, speed, and agility. The horse is made impossible to view without both sympathy and awe, a more perfect example of human excellence because it is both so identifiable in its emotional complexity and intelligence, while also being unalloyed by human faults.
Jockey treats horses as beautiful, but also, crucially, remote from our direct identification. Bentley's direction favors the horse-people exclusively. Adolpho Veloso's cinematography processes most of this sports drama in close-ups that are so extensive that even the geography of the setting, even the horse track itself, the crucible for the athlete's journey, is presented in the most abstracted terms. The setting becomes a series of mundane, fading, liminal spaces, reflecting Collins' singular, horse-like drive to bolt from the gate, to get it done, to run the circle of repeating events again for as long as his body, drive, and complacency will carry him. Horses themselves are obsessions rather than characters, even the automobile of the most ascetic car-racing drama rivaling them in their personalization to the spectator. Jockey is not about horses, and in eliding the standard sports drama's totemic fascination with the horse, Bentley and Kwedar articulate a captivating, poetic tragedy of the human athlete as its own beast of burden. Or, as somebody else's.
At a lean 11 minutes, 9 Races is fine for what it is. But as a prototype for Jockey, it lacks the melodramatic breadth of opportunity of a feature, and is undermined by a sense of Bentley and Kwedar's artistic motivation in creating a "real" sports movie that is really about jockeys as athletes. As the star of 9 Races, Luis Bordonada does his best to inflect his protagonist, a jockey intent to ride through a potentially career- or life-threatening collar-bone injury, with the same spitting, mad vigor of the injured athlete in any other emotionally intensive sports drama. But the role simply isn't weighty enough, precisely because Bentley and Kwedar go the wrong route of trying to legitimize jockeying to the uninitiated as "real athleticism" and horse-racing as a "real sport." All Bordonada can come up with in turn is a machismo that borders on unintentional parody. Jockey is not simply a longer version of 9 Races, but a full elaboration of Bentley and Kwedar's vision in all its aesthetic, dramatic, and veritably documentarian potential.
This is not to say that Jockey is good because it is absent cliche. This is the case of a technically excellent and imaginative enough experimentation with tried-and-true genre formula. Besides the horse-racing film, Bentley's debut sits comfortably into that pedigree of sports dramas concerning once "wild horses" that are either to be put out to pasture or are soon to be, victims of their own complacency and compelled into a reluctant search for a new mantle to carry their legacy.
Enter Moises Arias as Gabriel Boullait, a stall boy and aspiring young jockey who seems to be veritably stalking Jackson from circuit to circuit, believing himself to be Jackson's son. (Interestingly, Arias's character shares the name of Bordonada's character from 9 Races. Perhaps Jockey is a feature-length prequel.) Jackson denies the possibility that he could have sired Gabriel, but he nonetheless takes him under his wing, admiring his nascent riding ability, and unconsciously longing for a protege, if not a dependent.
Here, Bentley, Veloso, editor Parker Laramie, and composers Aaron and Bryce Dessner give us one of the most fascinating training montages in the new sports film canon, if not the one to beat. Jackson, intent just as much on dropping his own paunch to ride Ruth's horse as getting Gabriel into shape, or perhaps more intent on the former, shows us the ropes. It turns out that riding and controlling a horse is incredibly physically demanding. If not for the danger of getting thrown or trampled, the rider, responding to and guiding the horse, must have exceptional physical stamina and rhythmic discipline, particularly with regards to preserving the back and spine. Jackson will brush off his own motor control degeneration to Ruth as "just wear-and-tear." But even that wear-and-tear cannot be understated when you've got an athlete who is effectively sprinting, straining every muscle in their body, that back of theirs being throttled by the gallop of the horse like a paint can in a shaker. Gabriel's training to ride, aboard a cheap-looking hobby horse of sorts in a claustrophobic room, combines motifs for the ignorant (such as myself) of both rowing and gymnastics, clarifying and beautifying such seemingly humble, but clearly physically draining exercises.
The sense of claustrophobia, of enclosure related to the corrals, pens, and gates of the horses themselves, is carried over to the sauna, which, to the jockey is not a place of recovery, but another source of exercise. Jackson and Gabriel dawn PVC sweat suits and squeeze out water weight. By the end of the day, after all is said and done, Gabriel has lost six pounds.
The sequence is truly thrilling in a way that training montages themselves rarely are anymore, and this in turn makes the intimate rapport between Collins and Arias all the more authentic. There is something more than machismo here, something more than the crucible of manhood, something more than the camaraderie forged by self-discipline bordering on mutual masochism. When they spit ice at each other in the sauna, there's true tenderness. When Jackson and Gabriel jump rope outside the former's travel trailer, and Jackson must stop because of the spasms of the right side of his body, allowing Gabriel to go on in determined bliss, there is a real, tender sadness. And when Jackson distracts from this, rolling it off by having Gabriel do 52 card pick-up as a squatting exercise, there is the hint of something resonant, belying the self-satisfied bachelor's deeper longing for something more than just a protege.
Much of the conflict of Jockey is intensive rather than extensive. As opposed to the long hard road to victory, this horse-racing drama settles us in the melancholy void of Jackson's own denial and contradictory motives, which makes it instantly more interesting. Jackson is progressively torn between molding Gabriel as his inevitable successor and vainly clinging to that legacy for himself, and at his own folly. One could even say that Jockey is a clever twist on the johnny-come-lately, deadbeat dad parable. Indeed, Jackson takes to two surrogate children, Gabriel and Ruth's horse. Both war in his mind to be the continuation of his story, but only one of them represents any real hope of fulfilling that story, the latter only a more perfect object for his ego. (Thus, again, we see the totemic obsession with the horse in the horse-racing movie, but here deployed subversively by the filmmakers.) Jackson lies to Ruth about his health, knowing full well that his condition will hold back her horse, and thus hold back her aspirations as a trainer and owner. In turn, insisting on riding the horse crowds out Gabriel's chance to really break out in the dwindling horse-racing scene, aborting the very prospects for which Jackson so intimately trains him. Jackson at once takes to Gabriel as if he were his real son, but then latter admits to Gabriel's mother that, had he known about him, he would have been there, especially to tell him to never become a jockey.
The melodrama of Jockey flourishes against a backdrop that, while rendered in abstracted, poetic terms by the filmmakers, proves nonetheless informative upon the characters' compelling motives. By eschewing the long hard road to victory, the filmmakers also ensure that, like the horse in the corral, like the man in the cage, we ourselves are kept to the claustrophobic limits of the minor leagues of horse-racing. With the visual focus on the major characters being so intimate, we not only never conceptualize the full picture of the setting, we also never really get a full sense of the audience to these races. Jackson himself has become something of a minor celebrity to Phoenix's owners, trainers, and its last gasp of horse race fans, and that, combined with the exhilaration of riding and commanding the horse itself as it races and throttles out of the gates like a jet fighter taking off, is a totalizing thrill, not just an athletic achievement. As Jackson's friend Leo (Logan Cormier) says from his hospitable bed, recovering from a career-ending trampling by his horse, "Out of all the things you do in life, there's that one minute that you feel like you're the most important thing in the world because everybody's watching you." But then when we actually see who's watching, what we see are a handful of octogenarian men. And wherever they are in the stands, they are the only people in those stands. The emotional intensity of the film is shaped just as much by the melodrama of the main characters as it is by the discretely conveyed drama of the fading, shrinking world of the local horse-race, lingering on at the margins of heartland ephemera but, just like Jackson, degenerating, and in desperate need of new blood.
Shot on location and taking advantage of a supporting cast of non-professional performers - many of them, including Cormier, being real jockeys - Bentley and Kwedar's feature adheres to neorealist techniques that are seeing a new invigoration and favoritism among the stars and audiences of another degenerating sector of popular entertainment, the independent film. Their work shares space with those of the Safdie brothers and fellow Texas-based independent Sean Baker in terms of turning the attentions of spectators to the margins of their rapidly deteriorating society. But while Jockey shares space with, say, Baker's Red Rocket, it does not share DNA. Much of the new vogue in American neorealism is cast in a suspiciously visceral, black comic mold, fascinated by the superficial content of social marginalization or economic precarious lives, but detached from elucidating or exploring its context. Bentley and Kwedar distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, favored by a more alienated subculture of film fandom that thrives on the vicarious thrill of stress and trauma, in that there is no hint of a kind of gawking at an internalized freak show. The irony of Leo's conflation of his brief victories on the track with being "the most important thing in the world because everybody's watching you," when that world and that "everybody" is so vanishingly small, hits like a hammer, but not with condescending pity or vampiric thrill at what is often a completely alien way of thinking to the more cosmopolitan Americans who actually go see films like these, or can see them at all. The very sinew of the film bristles with the deepest empathy with the characters and their small but totalizing world. We learn about their world, rather than simply experiencing it, which becomes crucial to Bentley and Kwedar fulfilling the invective of neorealism that their contemporaries frequently prove too cynical to remember: That these techniques should, above all, be used to convey the human gravity of everyday life for the types of people who are virtually never meaningfully "represented" in our society, much less in our popular culture; that poverty, injustice, and desperation are not just dramatic fodder for the filmmakers' solipsistic license, but material realities that can and should be resolved.
Jockey is then, again, a refreshing and truly original film in yet another way, in that it is a sports film about the athlete as the working poor, as the proletarian. Though racing itself is a source of passion and fulfillment unto itself, it is nonetheless a labor which is exploited. As Jackson assures Gabriel upon their first meeting, by the time a jockey's winnings are split between the track, the horse's owner, the horse's trainer, there's hardly anything left. No less than a factory worker or farm laborer, though distilled in the most vivid terms by Bentley and Kwedar, these men push their bodies to the absolute limit, their wages a pitiful comparison to the sweat and blood they expend, or the surplus stolen from them in the production of capital. One of the most magnetic scenes of the film is when the jockeys, some still working, some forced to retire, literally meet in a support group to process not only the physical, but also the psychological, interpersonal, and financial trauma of their injuries. Much like the totality of the jockeys' own small world, Bentley and Kwedar's film attains a gravity of scope well beyond its humble boundaries. It implodes the pandering mythologies of sports films, horse-racing dramas, even the horse itself as totemic misdirection from the abject nature of sports as a space of labor and exploitation. It's romanticism as reserved and intensive as its protagonist, it reframes the human being itself as caged animal and beast of burden.
Comments
Post a Comment