Mark Reviews Movies: THE RIDER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 26, 2018

There's a documentary-like feel to writer/director Chloé Zhao's The Rider, which stars an assortment of non-professional actors playing either themselves or close-enough approximations that they might as well be playing themselves. The story, too, comes mostly from real life, with Brady Jandreau, a former rodeo rider who suffered a traumatic head injury while riding, playing Brady Blackburn, a professional rodeo rider who's trying to determine what to do with his life after suffering a traumatic head injury while riding. This sounds like it's going to be one of those typical sports stories about an underdog surmounting adversity and finding triumph, but Zhao is too invested in the truth of the lives of the real Jandreau and the fictional Brady to give us something that clichéd.

The film follows the usual trajectory of such a familiar tale, but its focus is on the beats in between such a story's big moments. Brady is neither an underdog nor a hero-in-the-making. He's simply a young man facing a crossroads that he never expected in his life. The fight here isn't to overcome his injury and find his way back to the rodeo. Brady's real fight is against the basic facts of his new life. He has been severely injured. His rodeo days are finished. Falling off another bucking bronco could mean his death. The question, then, is if a life without fulfilling one's passion is really a life worth living. Isn't it, in a way, a kind of death?

Zhao's screenplay gives Brady multiple reasons to return to the rodeo. His father Wayne (played by Jandreau's father Tim) is struggling to make ends meet. Not only has the family, which includes Brady's younger sister Lilly (played by Jandreau's sister of the same name), lost the income from Brady's rodeo riding, they've also lost what Brady could be making from training horses.

Brady's friends are certain that he'll return to the grounds and ride again. That alone is a lot of pressure. Like Brady, all of his friends are cowboys, and a cowboy who can't ride a horse might as well be nothing. Even Brady's best friend Lane Scott (playing himself), a former bull-rider who's now mostly paralyzed after taking a vicious fall, seems determined to make his way back to the rodeo. That's how Brady treats his buddy's situation, at least—a minor setback to reclaiming the fame he once had.

Whether the two men actually believe that is irrelevant. Riding is what cowboys do. When a horse is injured to the point that it can no longer do what it's supposed to do, a good cowboy puts the animal out of its misery. Brady comes to see himself in a similar position—being unable to do what he's supposed to do and in misery. Where's the mercy in this?

The film doesn't sugarcoat matters. The consequences of Brady's injury are apparent, from the opening shots of the multiple staples in his head, to the revelation that he has a metal plate fused to his skull, and to the violent fits of vomiting that arrive with even with smallest effort of a cowboy's usual work. We never really believe that Brady will return to his old ways, which we see in assorted online videos of him riding (as well as of Lane at his peak, serving as a stark juxtaposition to both Brady and Lane's present conditions). We don't believe that Brady realizes this fact.

To help make some money, he takes a job at a local grocery store, where he's met by people who recognize him and wonder when he'll get back to riding. This is temporary, Brady tells them and, really, himself. In a telling scene, he's giving away some of his old rodeo clothes to an up-and-coming rider, and confronted with a younger man who has his whole life and career ahead of him, Brady suggests an impromptu wrestling match, which he takes just a bit too far to prove himself. We're not watching a man who's obsessed with a dream. We're watching someone who is, in any way that he can, attempting to preserve whatever pride in himself that he believes he has left.

Here, then, is a film filled with rather quiet, observational scenes of Brady going about his new life, yet they are still imbued with plenty of inspiration and tension. Eventually, Brady starts to approach horses again. After working up the courage to get back into one part of his usual work, there's a montage of him training a horse that shows just how difficult the task is, as the light in the backdrop subtly fades with every cut until the sun is almost gone from the sky. It's also quite nerve-wracking in the intrinsic knowledge that any sudden movement, any unexpected kick, or any attempt to buck on the horse's part could spell Brady's end. On the other end, we see shots of Brady finally taking a horse out into the plains at a full gallop, with Joshua James Richard's cinematography giving us naturalistic, unadorned views of the landscape that mirror the simplicity of Brady's objectively small but relatively substantial victory.

We're never entirely certain how far Brady's pride will take him in his fight against this new reality, but in Jandreau's understated performance, we're always understanding of and sympathetic toward his dilemma. The Rider offers a subtle, mournful study of a man without purpose, seeking a reason either to destroy himself in the pursuit of his dream or to accept the truth of his situation. Zhao's film is raw and real in its dissection of this character and his search for something to keep him going.

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