Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Clint Bentley
Starring: Clifton Collins Jr., Molly Parker, Moises Arias, Logan Cormier, Colleen Hartnett, Daniel Adams
Jockey, the feature debut of writer/director Clint Bentley, is the
latest in a line of movies to focus on battered, bruised and burnt-out
sportsmen. Its predecessors include Darren Aronofsky's
The Wrestler, Chloé Zhao's
The Rider
and of course, the Rocky franchise. This variation is set
in the world of horse racing, a milieu that has inspired a thousand
paperbacks but has rarely been given a cinematic exploration.
Clifton Collins Jr, who comes from a line of horse-riding
western bit-part players, gets a rare chance to shine in a leading role.
He plays Jackson Silva, a revered jockey coming to the end of his
career. As is so often the case with protagonists of this nature,
Jackson is told early on that the damage he's sustained to his body
throughout his career means he's on his last legs and that his next race
could be his last. Jackson keeps this a secret from his trainer, Ruth
(Molly Parker), as he stubbornly persists with his trade.
Jockey isn’t set in the glamorous world of European
horse-racing, but rather the meat and potatoes circuit of the American
SouthWest. The horses Jackson and his colleagues ride aren’t owned by
princes, sheikhs or oligarchs, but by down to earth stable owners a few
bad races away from bankruptcy. As such, Jackson has little to show for
his career financially, and as this is the US, getting the treatment he
requires would wipe him out. Besides, he's known nothing else but
horse-riding, so he's reluctant to leave the saddle.
Though inspired by his own upbringing in the horse-racing world,
Bentley's film can't help but feel derivative of its predecessors. We've
seen this storyline of the horseman who can’t face a future in which he
can't do the one thing he loves in Zhao's The Rider, and with its handheld camera and numerous shots of its protagonist
silhouetted against a big American sky, it liberally borrows that
movie's ruggedly beautiful aesthetic. Jockey also features
a subplot in which an up-and-coming teenage jockey (Moisés Arias)
claims to be Jackson's son, putting the film in territory covered by
The Wrestler and extensively in the
Rocky and subsequent
Creed
movies.
Yet for all its familiarity, Jockey feels uniquely alive.
Collins Jr has been acting for many a year, but he's usually reduced to
minor "that guy" roles, which makes Jockey almost feel
like we're watching his debut. He usually plays characters brought in to
deliver a few lines of exposition, but here we get to see what Collins
Jr can do in the moments between the lines. There's something of the
Warren Oates about him, as his small frame takes up little screen space
but always draws your eyes, not by his actions but his inaction, by what
he's doing when he's unsure of what his next move should be, which makes
for a lot of the running time of Jockey. Jackson is a man plagued by uncertainty, and as a jobbing actor,
that's no doubt a feeling Collins Jr is all too familiar with.
Parker is a similarly under-rated actress, and some of the movie's best
scenes revolve around the relationship between jockey and trainer, and
the trickery of combining friendship with business. There's a wonderful
scene in which, drunk on tequila, the two hang out in Jackson's trailer.
As Jackson struggles to find what Kris Kristofferson might call his
"cleanest dirty" shot glasses, we assume a romantic entanglement will
follow, but refreshingly the movie is willing to portray a purely
platonic relationship between Jackson and Ruth that's more romantic in
its genuineness than the unconvincing couplings of most rom-coms.
Taking another cue from Zhao, Bentley populates his supporting cast with
amateur actors, most of whom are veterans of the racing world. Though
this results in some rough, self-conscious acting in parts, it lends the
film an authenticity. Former jockey Logan Cormier is particularly
captivating as one of Jackson's friends and fellow riders, and he
delivers the sort of performance that suggests the director secretly
began recording him while he was off on some riff about racing and
life.
Jockey's narrative is set in a brutal world where all that matters is how you
cross the finish line. But in the peaceful poetry of Bentley's direction
and the quiet contemplation of Collins Jr's performance, it feels like
these two men have only just come out of their respective traps. Put
your money on more greatness from this pair in the future.
