The Rider

Remember when America was the light unto nations? Then its independence, principled individualism and the ethical core of the civilization it brought to the frontier all made The Cowboy its natural icon. America was The Cowboy. 

Sometimes it was the world’s sheriff — like Will Kane. Sometimes — like Shane — he was the outlaw breaking from the community — at best, to serve it. 

But the Cowboy American was always the self-reliant man of principle, truth and honour. He lived and died by the code. He was also at one with his natural world of healthy, sprawling space, wild tameable horses and bursting dawns. He would build for his, his community’s and his nation’s dream of the future. 

As the times and America changed, so did the Western film. The genre was inflected to reflect the nation’s changing identity — the sweep westward, the building of the railroad, the conquest of the wild, the towns burgeoning into the modern urban, the outside wars, the McCarthyist suspension of American values, their recovery in the revolt against racism, Kennedy’s New Frontier. 
     The genre even accommodated the anti-hero spin of the ‘70s, and ultimately the newer frontier of space, when Star Wars grows out of The Searchers. The Western was the genre for all ages.  

Understandably, then, when a woman director born in China turns to make a contemporary American western she addresses the dominant current in contemporary America. 

The story of a broken cowboy — deprived of the macho career on which he based his life and self-worth — reflects a broken America, crippled by its self-destructive and obsolete principles of “manliness.” Any smack of a swagger seems delusional.  

In its clarity, humanity and realism this film stands alone in current American cinema. The cast has no actors. From hero Brady, his real father and sister, through his friends and rodeo colleagues, down to the even more broken ex-rodeo star Lane Scott, the performers are living or reliving their lives, not playing roles. 

If it’s sometimes painful to witness such honesty, it’s all the more moving and exhilarating. The dialogue doesn’t feel scripted. The lighting is natural. The events unfold with constant twists and surprises — like life. There are no formulae here. Whenever we think we know what’ll happen — a miracle cure, a new career training horses, a return to the rodeo, whether heroic or fatal — the story squirts away. Like life.

The actors playing themselves here ring truer than Clint Eastwood’s experiment with the real heroes in The 15:17 to Paris. That plot seemed cut to ennoble them. Not here. Mainly, though, none of Eastwood’s performers caught the sense of interior life, that the Jandreau family and Lane Scott reveal here. Eastwood’s gave their lines and went through the motions.  Thanks to director Chloe Zhao these characters are feeling and thinking anew, intensely.

The sister Lily is especially important. The mother dead, Lily is the only woman in the macho family. She has the purity and innocence of her name. A young girl with functional Asperger’s, she’s like a mustang in the family. Her words, mind and gestures are wild and unpredictable, but they careen into truth, as her whimsical singing does into beauty. 

Protecting Lily is an unspoken motive for Brady to keep on living, after his life’s passion and purpose are gone. He can’t put himself down like his broken horse Apollo. In his first clear sign of understanding his son, Brady’s father brings Lily to the rodeo where Brady is intent upon a possibly fatal ride. 

  Some key scenes reach poetic intensity. Brady breaks one horse with quiet delicacy, then a wilder one with a hard aggressiveness. In both cases he shows the sensitivity to realize what the horse needs. He adjusts to his partner. As it happens, the wilder horse is doomed from an unseen battle with a barbed wire fence. 

In contrast, the once wild Lane Scott is now completely crippled and helpless but he has the spirit to carry on. He has developed a digital system of “talking” to Brady. They watch Lane’s old rodeo success videos with more relish for what he was then than feeling reduced by what he is now. Brady takes Lane through rehab parodies of riding, which proves as useful a rehab for Brady as for Lane. He finds another reason to live.

The broken Lane delivers the film’s most resonant, but ambivalent, line:“Don’t give up on your dream.” Sounds good. But coming from a helpless, crippled man, that’s hardly good advice. 

That lesson may seem constructive but it’s not. Lane’s watching his old videos is not pursuing his dream but re-viewing the dream that died. Remembering the dashed dream may provide some consolation, but he can’t “pursue” it any more. 

Perhaps this is Zhao’s key message to her adopted America: Don’t be seduced into pursuing an impossible dream, a dream unrelated to reality. Pursuing his dream would take Brady on ride after ride till he’s killed. 

Instead, perhaps, pursue your dream as long as you can, but adapt to reality.  Brady fulfills his life not by pursuing his childhood rodeo dream but by accepting the adult responsibilities of staying alive and helping Lily and Lane. 

For America, that lesson translates to developing an awareness of one’s self and one’s situation, within its borders and beyond. Adjust the dream to reality and steer clear of the snake oil salesmen and cons who play on your vanity and offer to recover a past that you either can’t or shouldn’t. 

The “American Dream” — the promise that anyone can become anything they want in America — was never a guarantee. With that pitch, a con plunged the nation into its current nightmare. 

There’s another tacit lesson in the circle of Brady’s rodeo friends. Nothing is made of this, but it’s clearly there. His friends are a comfortable mix of indigenous Americans, Latino, Mexican. That’s the classic melting pot — that’s really what made America great. 

Indeed, the America based on human rights, freedom, equality and democratic values and government, that dream — currently suspended — is worth pursuing anew. 

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