Dreamer
is the sort of unabashed charmer that only some sort of serial creep could come
away from without a little wisp of cotton candy trailing from their cardiovascular
vicinity. Dreamer plays it to the grandstands more so than any film in recent
memory, but thanks to solid acting by a reliable cast the film works - no matter
how Grinched-up and Scrooged-over one my happen to be. Written and directed by
Coach Carter scribe John Gatins, Dreamer pushes every syrupy button in the book
and still managed to bring it across the finish line without the kind of diabetic
reaction you’d expect. That alone is something of a feat.
Supposedly
inspired by a true story, a once successful race-horse business, has fallen on
lean times - to the point that there’s scarcely a bale of hay to be found
on the once great Kentucky breeding ground of champions. The place is owned by
the beleaguered Crane family, Kurt Russell still trains horses for a nearby racetrack,
his wife Elisabeth Shue waits tables and wunderkind child star Dakota Fanning
plays Cale their tweenage daughter. Kris Kristofferson is also on board as her
curmudgeon of a grandfather who, due to some sort of falling out with his son,
keeps his horse sense to himself.
We
get underway when a callous racing baron played by David Morse insists on allowing
one of his aging champs - a horse named Sonya - to be entered into a race, despite
a recent injury. I’m sure there was some sort of diabolical ulterior motive
for this decision, but whatever the reason I missed it as I had to take one of
my daughters to the restroom where I too took the opportunity to see a man about
a horse. By the time we re-entered the theater it was clear that Sonya had suffered
a broken leg during the race. True to form, the heartless owner (Morse) orders
the horse’s destruction, but due to his anger that the horse was forced to
race in the first place, Russell steps in and saves the doomed creature and offers
it as a gift to his horse-crazy daughter. The place could use some horseflesh
around the stable and Sonya may be worth something in the breeding department.
At this point a 14 year old could write the rest of the film - but it maintains
your interest largely due to the lovely fire that the horse begins fanning beneath
the eyes of young Dakota.
The
similarities between Dreamer and Seabiscuit are I suppose the most noticeable
of any recent horse-racing film. We soon meet Freddie - a jockey who once had
a brush with death as a consequence of a racing accident - and has yet to take
the time-honored advice of getting right back on the horse and riding. And just
as we know that Sonya will once again run for the roses, we know who will be in
the saddle. In defense of such overwhelming familiarity is the huge heart that
drives the story and the actors that can get it across even when the dialogue
is clumsy and cliched. The relationship between Russell and Fanning is so authentic
that you end up rooting for the movie just as much if not more than the horse
or the shaken jockey, or for the relationship between father and son to mend along
with Sonya’s leg.
Along
with the auto-pilot sentimentality, among Dreamer’s biggest liabilities is
the enormous waste of Elisabeth Shue. She’s even less integral to this story
than she was with Fanning a while back in Hide and Seek. She just isn’t given
anything to do, her character has no place to arc, and the dynamic of the story
seems to call for a deceased mother figure. She’s alive in Dreamer, but you’d
have to take a pulse from time to time to be sure.
Still
for all of the film’s weaknesses, the straight ahead, earnest performances
by Fanning, Russell and Kristofferson make Dreamer a film worth seeing. Particularly
if you have a family to share it with. There are just some things that are so
universally real and true that I suppose they bear repeated viewings - regardless
the title or the color of the horse.
