Equine-assisted therapy has been helpful to many in various settings. Although the following two movies aren’t about this actual mode of practice, they do involve a bit of what I’ll call “horse therapy” of a sort.
I. The Rider (2017)
Not an actor by profession, The Rider‘s Brady Jandreau plays a version of his real self, a member of the Lakota tribe who experienced a severe head injury while riding rodeo.
Following is an introduction to Chloe Zhao‘s The Rider by Michael Phillips,Chicago Tribune, a big fan if this take on horse therapy.
Brady lives at home with his father, a taciturn denizen of the bars and casino poker stools, and his 15-year-old sister, a vibrant spirit living with Asperger’s syndrome. They’re played by Jandreau’s real-life father and sister; Brady’s friends are played by his real friends.
The story follows a clear throughline, concerning how hard it is to give up the most important thing in your life. Brady tries to ignore his calling, on doctor’s orders; one more head injury could kill him…Brady tries to adjust to a new, tamer routine, working various jobs at a supermarket and settling for training his friends how to last eight seconds in the ring. His best friend, Lane (played with fierce resolve by Lane Scott), is paralyzed from a rodeo fall. He is living proof of the dangers of this life.
As Phillips also states, “Brady’s life’s work may kill him; a life without it may kill him more slowly.”
The Trailer
Godfrey Cheshire, rogerebert.com: “The best American movie this critic has seen in the past year…the kind of rare work that seems to attain greatness through an almost alchemical fusion of nominal opposites…so fact-based that it almost qualifies as a documentary. Yet the film’s style, its sense of light and landscape and mood, simultaneously give it the mesmerizing force of the most confident cinematic poetry.”
Robert Abele, The Wrap: “…a neo-Western about rodeo riding, hobbled masculinity and reflective grace that feels unlike anything else out there.”
II. Lean on Pete (2017)
More horse therapy in the same year? Another movie about just a-boy-and-his-horse? It’s actually much more than that and possibly not what you’d expect from seeing the trailer. Jeffrey Bloomer, Slate: “Not everyone likes a movie that sneaks up on them, so be advised that Lean on Pete is the ugly-cry event of the spring. But it more than earns its emotional ravages.”
Review Excerpts Regarding the Horse Therapy of Lean on Pete
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: “…(H)is childhood memory of an estranged aunt [is] the closest thing to a loving maternal figure he has ever known. But even more central to the story is Charley’s bond with the aging quarter horse whose name gives the film its title, a gentle nag that Charley is determined to save from the slaughterhouse once it has been run into the ground by its shady owner [Del, played by Steve Buscemi].”
J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: “Certainly the boy has been treated like a horse for most of his life, led around by the nose from one place to the next. Charley’s mother abandoned him when he was a child, and his good-timey father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), drags Charley from town to town as he searches for unskilled work…”
Brian Tallerico, rogerebert.com: “It sounds clichéd, but you really don’t see a lot of movies like ‘Lean on Pete’ in a calendar year…I worry that it’s a tough sell for people who are going to consider it either a movie for young audiences or a manipulative melodrama.”
