Ride
In 1991, country superstar Garth Brooks is quoted as crooning, “Well, it’s bulls and blood It’s the dust and mud It’s the roar of a Sunday crowd/It’s the white in the knuckles. The gold in the buckle He’ll win the next go round.” Those words, more descriptive of the rise and fall of a man to whom the rodeo is all and everything, set the tone for the complete feeling of “Ride”, the feature film debut of writer-director-actor Jake Allyn. It is in a similar sense that the viewer is taken across the walks of an old battered cowboy from where he walks within the innards of a stadium and out towards the rodeo ground. I could hear the crowd going crazy. The air was thick with dust and dirt. Blood and sweat were splattering all over.
Allyn, a male model, plays the role of Peter, a bull rider who just finished a four year term in prison for vehicular manslaughter. Peter is strung out, the drink, the pills and the rodeo have a grip on him. It is this dependency that caused the accident, which not only was fatal to one, but hurt his younger sister Virginia’s (Zia Carlock) arm as well. Picking up his grandson Peter from the penitentiary is the elderly Al (Forrie J. Smith), a former rodeo champion who has long become a man of the cloth. His acceptance of Christmas hampers shows him to have grown up with appalling neglect, ignoring parents (John, a rancher, great in every role played crushes it again, in his usual boring role of C. Thomas Howell, the rancher and former rodeo champ who is a school and FFA teacher) and Monica (Sheriff Annabeth Gish). Both parents are still grappling with the issue of forgiveness even as the accident pushed the diagnosis of cancer to the Virginia’s system.
On return, however, Town Peter has in mind Stephenville, Texas, otherwise Texas, also known as the Cowboy Capital of the World, shows up in the family cancer episode, Ovarian (‘It is very ironic, given the fact that I’ve never heard of such feminine cancer’ Peter would say.) By the way, do you have $40,000? That is what Jared needs before insurers will agree to cover aggressive treatment. Before long, new to sobriety Peter is back on the bulls, looking for the prize money to meet this need and to his astonishment finds himself pondering selling all his possessions as well as devising desperate schemes to raise the cash.
Something allows them both to firm up with shady Tyler (Patrick Murney, who is a definite firecracker), the drug dealer who is just as efficient in hot branding a person as he is in doffing his hat and announcing himself as a’ ma’am’.
Of course, all this is terribly melodramatic, and there are plenty of criminal elements in the action, but that’s not where the tension lies. To summarise however, this is simply a biopic of sorts where ‘Ride’ protrudes characters like Peter and John trying to find a place in the current society. And yet it is trying to grasp that world too. What does it say about today’s world when so often a family with two incomes still can’t afford the life saving cancer treatment their daughter needs? What kind of a reality is that in which one is expected? Thus, the temperamental attachment of John, Peter, and Al to rodeo becomes a surrogate for existence. “When I’m riding bulls, when that shoot opens, all my pain, all that emptiness, just goes away. When I’m on a bull for eight seconds, only thing I have to do is hang on,” Peter remarks much later in the story. For all the impulsive disarray that bull riding is characterized with, for someone like Peter, it is something concrete, a definite objective that is attained at times.
But like Allyn’s actors C. Thomas Howell and Forrie J. Smith, Allyn himself has the pedigree of bull riding and rodeo.
The same is evident from his lanky physique as it is in the elaborate setting provided in his film. Allyn’s visions and ways of making the viewer experience this world captures the unending clash of metal gates being swung, the elated fans, and the ever-present sound of country music as he filmed the movie on set in actual rodeos. Here is a place that is bathed in the miscarriage of the tragic reds, whites and blues from the fireworks as well as the brutally revealing floodlights. A place where one encounters such bulls as Tempest and Twister, rodeo buffons with all the grotesque pomp and splendour, straight shooting farmers suited in ten galloon hats, and queens of the rodeos with piles of retouched hair on their crowns. It is only in this feverish mix of clichés that one feels the parroting script, created by Allyn and Josh Plasse, and the directing’s balancing act with the archetypal actors still maintain a sense of authenticity and individuality.
Just before I caught the film, I was just done with the memoir by Louise Brooks where she writes that every great director “holds the camera on the eyes of the actors in every necessary scene” which G.W. Pabst once said that she must tell the audience must “see it in the actors’ eyes”. This is something Allyn as an actor and now director has an instinctive understanding of. In one of the most gut-wrenching scenes of the film, Allyn steadies his camera on C. Thomas Howell’s face as John gets the news about his daughter’s cancer. To start with, he is transfixed by his daughter who is bedridden in the hospital and is terribly ill. He then swivels away from a doctor, who cheerfully informs him that the nice coverage provided by the expensive oncology hospital “technically” has a slot for the girl who might as well be screeching on a chalkboard. It is all there in his aim. The fear for the daughter’s life. The contempt for the side leaps of the situations available in sciences. The worry about how in the entity is he expected to fund this latest medication. All possible elements of feelings are captured in his aim.
In another important scene, a battered and bloodied Peter sees an Oxy pill dropped on the floor in the locker room.
The rib is fractured, the pain is excruciating, yet there is one last bull that he will have to ride. Al urges him to “cowboy up.” When Peter aims for the pill, we understand that the ride closes yet the ride has no terminus, that life in its broadest hi and the nature of rodeo is an extension of this struggle. Allyn’s Peter is a tortured man, one who is unable to shake off the ghosts of the past. The ghost of the woman whom he had killed in a road accident that was not his fault. The ghost of his relatives who have now become estranged the ghost of the man that he used to be. So much does the weight of these ghosts straddle him that his lips are almost always fused in a scowl. His tall and lanky build however, leaves him out of place.
The film “Ride” delivers to audiences most effectively when it narrows down on the primary family dynamics that center on Peter, John and Al, all descendants of bull riding ancestors trying to find their footing in a society that is ever dynamic. Peter threatens and abuses drugs to ensure that his family does not fall short of the standards set by bull riders in the previous generations. John will not accept any help whatsoever to foot his daughter’s medical bills, seething with rage that he should provide for his family, never minding that he would be taking charity. Al forces both to the limit and beyond it’s either through prayer or pure old man’s style.
The actions and behavior of these men are neither condemned nor praised by the film. Rather, Allyn leaves judgment to the spectators.
Of the several figures the film introduces, not all of them are tied to the narrative in a fitting manner. Sheriff Monica remains more or less underused though a scene where she lets the hot coffee burn her fingers gives us a peek at her internal conflict, while a third act exposition allows Gish to have fun in the same ground of shady-dealing as the boys. While I did love the interactions with the other brother, Noah (Josh Plasse) and Peter’s girlfriend Libby (Laci Kaye Booth) which add color and texture to the place called Stephenville and its people, I almost wish we had been with Peter’s baby sister Virginia more rather than them.
“Ride”, in its own way, attempts to do the cnonsidered impossible and as such analytically misses the basic elements that would compromise the audience involvement but it works because the is that sense of urgency inherent in movies that happens and this barbarian filmmaker has to tell this story let’s put it in celluloid in this style before we bust.
This is the kind of film that firstly comprehends the contemporary American West, an area neither short of mores nor short of paradoxes, vehemently holding on to its traditions like a stick stuck in the mud even as the mud begins to dry and turn to dust.
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