Diane Lane Joins the Best Actress Race

It’s official, Diane Lane is now a strong contender for one of the nominated five for 2010. We have to make room. Step aside. Another actress is also being considered to push in at the last minute and that’s Tilda Swinton for I Am Love. Yes, she’s been kicking around for a good, long time but her general popularity in the industry and her performance in the film means she should at least be on the long list at this point.

I wasn’t really sure if Lane’s portrayal of Penny Chenery would be nominated when I saw Secretariat – I’ll be honest. But the critics have praised Lane’s work here, some calling it her best ever. Ebert gives the film four stars.

Roger Ebert gives the film four stars — Ebert have lived too long to not get what was so special about that horse — he is helped by having known William Nack, who wrote this great piece for Sports Illustrated on the death of Big Red (you should really read this if you’re at all interested in Secretariat).¬† Ebert writes:

There was something about Secretariat. Bill, who was a regular visitor at Meadow Farm in Virginia throughout the horse’s life, tried to get me to understand: The people around the horse felt it was blessed. Penny Chenery refused to sell the farm, turned down an offer of $7 million for the still-untested horse, and left her husband and family behind in Colorado to commute to Virginia. She had faith. So did he groom Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis), who was with Secretariat more than any other human being during the horse’s life. And so did Lucien Laurin (John Malkovich), the trainer who had been trying to retire when Penny hauled him away from his golf clubs.

The movie focuses closely on the owner, the trainer and the groom. It has no time for foolishness. When the time for the coin flip comes with millionaire Ogden Phipps (James Cromwell), we understand why Mrs. Chenery wants the mare she does, and director Randall Wallace underlines that with admirable economy, using a closeup of Malkovich studying a breeding chart that works better than five minutes of dialogue.

Gene Siskel uses to say his favorite movies were about what people actually do all day. That’s what “Secretariat” is. It pays us the compliment of really caring about thoroughbred racing. In a low-key way, it conveys an enormous amount of information. And it creates characters who, because of spot-on casting, are vivid, human and complex. Consider how it deals with the relationship between Penny and her husband, Jack Tweedy (Dylan Walsh). They became estranged because of her decisions, Nack says, but the movie only implies that rather than getting mired in a soap opera.

As a woman, Penny is closed out of racing’s all-boy club. If a man neglected his family for a race horse, that might be common. But a woman is committing some sin against nature. And when she refused to sell, her whole family ‚Äî husband, brother, everyone ‚Äî put enormous pressure on her. They were sure her decision was taking money out of their pockets. How she raises money to keep the farm is ingenious lateral thinking, and best of all, it’s accurate.

This whole movie feels authentic. Diane Lane, who is so good in so many kinds of roles, makes Penny a smart woman with great faith in her own judgment and the courage to bet the farm on it. Every hair in place, always smartly turned out, she labors in the trenches with Lucien and Eddie, negotiates unflinchingly with the Old Boys, eats the stomach-churning meals at the diners where the track crowd hangs out. She looked at the greatest racehorse in the world and knew she was right, when all about her were losing their heads and blaming it on her.

Of the actors, I especially enjoyed John Malkovich. He has a way of conveying his reasoning by shorthand and implication. He creates a portrait of horse trainer who’s slow to tip his hand, which is correct. No role in Mike Rich’s screenplay is overwritten, or tries to explains too much. Like “The Social Network,” another contender for year-end awards, it has supreme confidence in its story and faith that we will find it fascinating. This is one of the year’s best films.

The funniest, and oddest, is Salon’s Andrew O’Herir, who loads up a big ol’ bong hit of hydroponic weed before writing (no, he didn’t really) what has to be one of the funniest reviews anyone has ever written about a film. It could be its own movie practically:

The set-up:

“Secretariat” is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn’t stop me from believing that in its totality “Secretariat” is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.

He then goes on:

In its own strange way, “Secretariat” is a work of genius. On its lustrous surface, it’s an exciting sports movie in a familiar triumph-over-adversity vein, based on the real-life career of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat, probably the greatest racehorse ever, and his owner, Penny Chenery, played by Diane Lane in a resplendent collection of period knitwear and steel-magnolia ‘tude. “Secretariat” is self-consciously crafted in the mode of last year’s hit “The Blind Side” (which made a zillion bucks and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar), and clearly hopes for similar rewards. Like that film, it uses a “true story” as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues — self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. — without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context.

Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in “The Blind Side” (where it’s more like text, period), “Secretariat” actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord. In the world of this movie, strong-willed and independent-minded women like Chenery are ladies first (she’s like a classed-up version of Sarah Palin feminism), left-wing activism is an endearing cute phase your kids go through (until they learn the hard truth about inheritance taxes), and all right-thinking Americans are united in their adoration of a Nietzschean √úberhorse, a hero so superhuman he isn’t human at all.

The √úberhorse! Whoa, dude.¬† Despite this glorious review, I have to say a few words for Secretariat here – I simply will not allow Him to be painted with the gloss of anything close to tea-party (cough racists cough) or Palin or any of those trashy folks; the horse was a champion. Period. Nevermind that he might be interpreted here as a pawn in the “let’s bring American back – where the white people are still in charge” game. I am not going to let that poison my love of that horse.

Now, the fact that director Randall Wallace and screenwriter Mike Rich locate this golden age between 1969 and 1973 might seem at first like a ludicrous joke, if you are old enough (as I am) to halfway remember those years. I’ll say that again: The year Secretariat won the Triple Crown was the year the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate hearings began. You could hardly pick a period in post-Civil War American history more plagued by chaos and division and general insanity (well, OK — you could pick right now). Wallace references that social context in the most glancing and dismissive manner possible — Penny’s eldest daughter is depicted as a teen antiwar activist, in scenes that resemble lost episodes of “The Brady Bunch” — but our heroine’s double life as a Denver housewife and Virginia horse-farm owner proceeds pretty much as if the 1950s had gone on forever. (The words “Vietnam” and “Nixon” are never uttered.)

One shouldn’t impute too much diabolical intention to the filmmakers; for all I know, Penny Chenery really did live in an insulated, lily-white bubble of horsey exurban privilege, and took no notice of the country ripping itself apart. But today, in the real world, we find ourselves once again in an enraged and dangerously bifurcated society, and I can’t help thinking that “Secretariat” is meant as a comforting allegory, like Glenn Beck’s sentimental Christmas yarn: The real America has been here all along, and we can get it back. If we just believe in — well, in something unspecified but probably pretty scary.

AGH! Glenn Beck! Would you stop already, Andrew O’Herir? I can’t take much more of this! Seriously, dude. Chill baby chill! Okay, so, even if the movie was designed not to be offensive to the silent majority who want whites in power for all time, it is still a movie a bleeding heart such as myself could enjoy: are they going to take down every strong leading female role because this is the only way America can choke down a strong woman?

Secretariat isn’t offensive to me; The Blind Side was.

Skipping ahead a few paragraphs:

If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more. That’s pretty much what happens here, with the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat’s archrival. (Even the horse’s name is evil!) The competition between the two horses was real enough; they raced neck-and-neck in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. But the depiction of Martin as an evil, chauvinistic braggart is fictional and highly unpleasant — and it’s tough not to notice that he’s one of only two nonwhite speaking characters in the film. The other one is Eddie (Nelsan Ellis), an African-American groom who belongs to a far more insidious tradition of movie stereotypes. Eddie dances and sings. He loves Jesus and that big ol’ horse. He is loyal and deferential to Miz Penny, and injects soul and spirit into her troubled life. I am so totally not kidding.

You know, not really. One can look at it that way if one chooses but I took that more as how Eddie Sweat really did talk. I’ve read interviews with him and unfortunately, regardless of how we liberals would like to revamp him as an actualized, liberated, strong black man he worked in a white world where it all had be yes ma’am and no ma’am. At least this film has the excuse of being a period film – they didn’t try to make it more pleasing for the whitey guilty.

The Blind Side, by contrast, had NO EXCUSE for how they portrayed Michael Oher — as a head bowing Negro humbled before the white folk. The interviews of Oher show him to be very different from the “you teach me how to play football and sleep in a bed” nonsense. Eddie Sweat was one of my favorite characters in Secretariat – liberal agenda be damned – because he seemed authentic to the Eddie Sweat I’ve read about. I only wish he’d been in the movie more. He was the person who spent the most time with Secretariat – so if Andrew O’Herir wants to make something of this, he should have said that they show the spiritual connection to be between Lane and Big Red when it was, in reality, between Eddie and Big Red (in my warped mind anyway). They all had a kinship with Secretariat because he was a one-of-a-kind horse – with a funny, playful personality who got on well with people; how could you not love him? I don’t think the movie got across his personality all that well. Nonetheless, you can’t paint Virginia as something it just wasn’t.

As far as the war and Watergate go, well yes. But to put that in would require Penny (in real life a Republican) to take sides, as no doubt they all did back then. The movie is supposed to be about Secretariat – not the political world into which he ran his magnificent race. You can want it to be that story if you want – you can tell that story, but this wasn’t that story. Moreover, they spent too much time on the adults as it was. All we wanted to see was the horse.

Nonetheless, can we just say that, buried in O’Herir’s truly well written and funny review are the following words:

Diane Lane gives a weirdly compelling performance, one of her best. She renders Penny Chenery as an iron-willed superwoman, striking and magisterial but utterly nonsexual, illuminated from within like a medieval saint. She busts down the doors on the boys’ club of old-money Kentucky and Virginia racing, outwits the tax authorities and defangs Pancho Martin, in between doing loads of her kids’ laundry. It’s hard to say who is more indomitable, Penny or the magnificent colt she called Big Red, who capped his Triple Crown with an unbelievable 31-length victory at New York’s Belmont Stakes. It’s a charismatic, ultra-cornball performance, and right about the time that Rich’s screenplay runs out of let’s-go-get-’em speeches for Lane to deliver, Wallace and cinematographer Dean Semler step in with wonderfully varied and dazzling approaches to Secretariat’s four big races (the Triple Crown plus the earlier Wood Memorial, where he finished fourth).

That means, Ms. Lane is in. If a radical like O’Herir stopped his tirade long enough to acknowledge Lane? Well, then, that’s something. But how is she faring in other reviews?

I am sure plenty more reviews more like O’Herir’s and less like Ebert’s (there is room for both perspectives, I think). But for now, we can imagine that Secretariat has everything going for it. In the end, what mattered to me was that I could sit in the theater with my 12 year-old girl, both of us horse lovers, and watch a woman be the hero for once. She wasn’t the hero because she had great tits and an inclination to undress. She wasn’t the hero because some dude came along and taught her how to read. She was the hero because she was the smartest woman in the room when it came to seeing what Big Red could really be. Yes, it was the racist white South. Yes, she was a Republican. But it isn’t really about that. It’s about that horse. That once-in-a-lifetime beauty.