Dream Horse
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What it’s about: Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) lives in a small Welsh village that has been hit hard by any number of recent economic downturns. She works at the local co-op grocery store in the day, scrubbing the floors and manning the till, and at a local pub by night in order to pay the bills and support her loafing husband. A chance meeting with Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), a former racehorse owner who had been driven to near bankruptcy, sparks Jan with an idea: pool together a group in her depressed community to breed a horse for glory. After years of throwing a tenner into the pot each week, their stallion Dream Alliance becomes the pride of Wales, winning races across the UK countryside and giving new hope to a community that desperately needs it.
Unorganized thoughts:
Dream Horse is adapted from a true story that was also made into a documentary, the similarly named Dark Horse in 2015. I do recall seeing Dark Horse back then and it reminded me of many of Dream Horse’s narrative beats (the general economic depression of the community, how the horse alliance came together, Dream Alliance’s unlikely rise to fame, etc.). Otherwise, I remember it as a fairly standard documentary. If this is a story that appeals to you and only had time for one version, I think either would be fine? Usually in this case, I’d go for the doc, so I guess that there isn’t a clear choice, that’s a good point for the narrative film.
It might also be a bad sign for the documentary (which, again, I remember as totally fine) that it took me about 10 minutes of internet searching to find - with Dream Horse out now, I just remembered/assumed the documentary was also called Dream Horse and not Dark Horse. And that’s a shame, because Dark Horse is the better title on the face of it, though Dream Horse certainly fits the vibe of the new film a bit more.
Dream Horse is definitely the kind of based-on-a-true-story film that ends with photos of the real people (though, thankfully, Dream Horse does this in a particularly inventive and cheerful way). With that in mind the whole way through, Toni Collette and Damian Lewis starring could have been more distracting than it comes out. Collette, in particular, is obviously a good enough actress to make all the emotional and relationship beats of film to work. Seeing the side-by-side with the real Jan Vokes at the end, yeah, Toni Collette is a Hollywood actress by comparison. And I don’t know if she is quite downtrodden enough to completely fit in with her less famous (and more toothless) counterpart Owen Teale. But overall, her performance works.
Collette works so often as Americans and her accent is usually so good that it has now become odd to hear her in a different dialect. I’m not expert enough to know if her Welsh accent is authentic and how it compares to her native Australian accent, so I’m not fit to judge.
Dream Horse pads out the documentary with narrative focused on Vokes’s relationships with her husband, her new business partner(s), and her parents; her adult children are referred to in the film via a phone call but are otherwise absent. Jan and Brian, though maybe mismatched, really work together. Strangely it is Brian’s growth through the film that becomes the most compelling, possibly because he starts at a lower level. The couple of scenes where Jan deals with her aging parents are helpful to understand her place in the community (everyone completely relies on her, even her parents), but don’t do much than reinforce that theme.
They also give a bit of plot to Howard Davies regret for screwing up in the horsing game in his past through a straining relationship with his wife (played in a small role by Joanna Page, who you may recognize as Just Judy from Love, Actually) and a backstory monologue about his dead father. This Davies drama is definitely a C-plot, so it doesn’t have nearly enough time to really develop.
Early on, Dream Horse does a pretty good job of efficiently but clearly describing how the group of investors come together and their plans play out. I’m far from a horse or horseracing fan, so quickly going through the steps of purchasing a mare, getting her knocked up, and raising the young horse were appreciated. I’m sure this short section of the film took liberties with the real-life sequencing, but it allowed me to ease into the film well.
A distinct and surprising narrative decision is made as soon as Dream Alliance is taken to his trainer, probably about 40 minutes into the film. In order to keep the focus on Jan and the gang, we get very little of the horse for the rest of the film, outside of the handful of race sequences. I’m not sure if this played into that conscious decision, but it allows for the film to almost completely sidestep a lot of heavy lifting. How did Dream Alliance become such a great race horse? How did he overcome serious injury to race again? This is all behind the scenes. Maybe that would make for a more compelling sports film. That would have been a completely different film.
Without this backstory, Dream Horse really has to nail the racing sequences, and it does pretty well with it. They are swiftly edited while also aiding the greater themes of the narrative in short bursts. I felt the emotional punch with every win and loss. That said, the relative simplicity of horse racing as a visual sport presents a challenge in their storytelling - none of them are particularly distinct from each other.