Chloé Zhao (2017)

The standard this-is-a-work-of-fiction disclaimer at the end of The Rider comes as a surprise and controverts text ‘About the Production’ on the film’s website[1].  Chloé Zhao’s cast comprises non-professional actors almost all of whom play someone whose name is the same as their own.  The only significant exceptions, or partial exceptions, are the three family members playing the family at the centre of the story.  The father has a completely different name from his character; his two children share a forename with theirs.  The protagonist is Brady Blackburn, a young man in his early twenties, whose career as a rising rodeo star has been cut short.  A rodeo accident, which put him in a coma for several days, has left Brady with a metal plate in his head and long-term neurological damage.  He’s played by twenty-two-year-old Brady Jandreau.  According to The Rider‘s website:

‘On April 1^st, 2016, Brady entered the PRCE rodeo in Fargo, North Dakota.  He was to compete in the ‘Saddle Bronc’ section and felt confident after a string of successful rides during the season.  But that night Brady was thrown off.  The bucking horse stomped on his head and nearly fatally crashed his skull.  Brady’s brain bled internally.  He had a seizure and fell into a three day coma.  … Brady now has a metal plate in his head and suffers from other health issues associated with a severe traumatic brain injury.  The doctors advised him to never ride again. …’

Yet the closing titles assert that any resemblance to actual persons etc etc is entirely coincidental and unintentional.  Although the contradiction is baffling, I raise it not as come-off-it criticism of the film-makers but to stress how inescapable are the real-life elements of Chloé Zhao’s ‘contemporary western drama film’ (Wikipedia) for a viewer who comes to The Rider with some idea of its development history.  That’s equally the case when you watch the same writer-director’s Nomadland.  If, like me, you see the two films chronologically the wrong way round, the experience of Zhao’s latest succès d’estime will also tend to shape your response to The Rider.

At first, this places the earlier film at a disadvantage.  You observe Fern, the itinerant heroine of Nomadland, go about her mostly unexciting business and marvel at Frances McDormand’s skill:  she makes Fern as real as any of the actual nomadists on the screen while creating curiosity about the character in ways only a gifted actor can.  In The Rider Zhao’s introduction to Brady’s situation and family life is engaging but a scene such as a nighttime countryside outing with his friends seems in no man’s land between documentary and drama.  Brady, Cat (Cat Clifford), James (James Calhoon) and Tanner (Tanner Langdeau) sit chatting and smoking weed.  Their interactions don’t amount to much and I felt I was making twofold allowances for this.  I told myself that, since the young men were playing themselves, they were presenting unvarnished reality which should be sufficiently interesting per se.  At the same time, I realised I was excusing the occasionally awkward delivery of lines on the grounds that these were inexperienced actors.

You wouldn’t always guess it from their appearance but Brady Jandreau and other cast members are cowboys and Indians (Lakota Sioux).  Zhao got to know them while shooting her first feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  Brady Jandreau lives off the land, hunting on horseback and fishing.  Despite his increasing rodeo success, his regular work was breaking in and training wild horses.  Zhao was fascinated to watch this and communicates that fascination in The Rider.  It was during a sequence in which Brady pacifies and gains the trust of an unbroken horse that I started to see the film differently.  The episode is absorbing in purely documentary terms but it’s also more than that.  Zhao and her editor Alex O’Flinn have worked what in reality must have been a much longer session into something apparently continuous, thereby intensifying Brady’s magic touch with horses.  And because by now we’ve built up a strong awareness of his frustration at being unable to resume rodeo, we get an even stronger – a dramatic – sense of the importance of this complementary equestrian expertise as the means of maintaining his self-identity.  Riding horses is not just what Brady does but who he is.

His rodeo accident caused an immediate seizure; its legacy includes what a doctor describes as ‘complex partial seizures’ whereby Brady can’t use his hands.  The medical advice is never to get on a horse again, either in the rodeo ring or as a breaker-in.  Brady finds temporary work in a supermarket but seems denatured there.  It doesn’t help that he’s a local celebrity.  At the checkout, a man urges him not to give up on his dreams.   A young boy wants a photo of himself with Brady, his hero.  There’s another good moment when Brady, stacking shelves and pricing items, seems to be wielding his portable barcode scanner like a gun.  Brady Jandreau is always expressive but more interestingly so as the film goes on.  When, in an early scene, Brady visits his mother’s hillside grave, Zhao’s camera seems simply to observe his melancholy.  By the time the young fan asks for the photo with Brady, Jandreau seems to be using his face, and drawing the camera, to tell us more of his character’s feelings.

Chloé Zhao was intending to make a film based on Brady Jandreau’s way of life before the accident that radically changed it:  his predicament offered a newly urgent focus that Zhao could hardly overlook.  Since The Rider isn’t a documentary, however, the indivisibility of two other characters and the people playing them seems more problematic, even exploitative.  Lilly Blackburn has Asperger’s Syndrome because Lilly Jandreau has Asperger’s Syndrome.  Brady’s friend Lane Scott, whom he several times visits in a long-term care facility, was a star bull-rider until he suffered an accident even more damaging than Brady’s.  Wheelchair bound and unable to speak, Lane still has an active brain.  He can make himself understood by finger movements.  He can also watch videos of himself in his cocksure, bull-riding prime – videos, that is, of the real Lane Scott, before the 2017 car accident that left him paralysed, mute and now playing a character called Lane Scott whose resemblance to his actual self is supposedly coincidental and unintentional.  The only difference between them is that the ‘fictional’ Lane’s injuries resulted, like Brady’s, from a fall from a bucking animal rather than a car crash.  Lilly’s imaginative language and lack of inhibition are extraordinary to hear and see.  Both she and Lane would have been capable of consenting to take part in the film.  Yet I still felt uneasy watching these involuntarily compelling camera subjects.

After a climactic argument with his father Wayne, Brady drives off to take part in a rodeo competition.  Wayne says he won’t be coming to watch his son kill himself and walks away from the car.  Brady’s parting shot, addressed to his father’s receding back, is, ‘I don’t want to end up like you’.  In the film’s penultimate scene, at the rodeo, Brady is about to enter the ring when he catches sight of Wayne and Lilly looking on, and thinks again.  He walks over to them.  The three embrace before leaving the rodeo.  This may well signal, as the Wikipedia plot synopsis says, that Brady Blackburn ‘finally decides to walk away from the competition and life as a rodeo rider’ – as Brady Jandreau has done (though it seems he hasn’t given up breaking in wild horses).  Zhao does well nevertheless to follow this with another sequence in Lane’s hospital room, with Brady once more encouraging his friend’s wheelchair riding.   We hear in Brady’s voice that he, as much as Lane, still longs to be on horseback.

This last impression left by The Rider exemplifies Zhao’s success in taking her material beyond the quasi-documentary.  She’s done this more continuously in developing the relationship between Brady and his father.  The latter may be the most invented of the substantial characters, and not only because his name is different from that of the man playing him.  Tim Jandreau is the lead actor’s father and, according to the film’s website, ‘an old school cowboy who taught Brady all he knows’.  Wayne Blackburn too is an old-school cowboy but there’s no reason to think that the hints of Wayne’s casual womanising or his addiction to gambling machines, which has aggravated his family’s lack of funds, are inspired by Tim Jandreau.  They could be, of course, but Wayne’s key traits aren’t obviously dictated, as they are in other cases, by the traits of the person in the role.  And the mixture of feelings between Wayne and Brady is persuasive.  They infuriate each other – Brady is exasperated by his father’s wastrel side, Wayne by his son’s foolhardy stubbornness – but they evidently care about each other too.

In the end, I liked The Rider a lot – more than I like Nomadland.  That movie, for all its virtues, is sweeping up awards partly because it has a worthy subject and viewers can feel they’ve done a good deed by watching it.  That isn’t the case with The Rider.  Assets shared by the two films include Chloé Zhao’s lack of condescension towards people who might be thought deprived; an effective use of music (The Rider’s original score is by Nathan Halpern); and Joshua James Richards’ impressive landscape cinematography.  The widescreen grandeur of Richards’ images of the South Dakota Badlands is on a larger scale than other aspects of the film.  It’s thematically less ambitious than Nomadland yet the story of The Rider is tighter and tenser and, for this viewer, proved emotionally more involving.

22 February 2021

[1] The Rider || A Sony Pictures Classics Release (sonyclassics.com)