Having not been invited to check Secretariat out, I can only take its Oscar allies at their word that the film is a high point in the horse-racing genre and as viable an awards-season contender as any this year. That doesn’t mean its makers are above pandering condescension.
A report today in THR elaborates on Disney’s strategy for pushing Secretariat among the “faith-based” audience that helped make The Blind Side an Oscar-winning $250 million smash last year. It’s no coincidence that both films feature an affluent white woman who, against all odds, social order and her own better judgment, crafts a winning athlete — a winning specimen, really — from underprivileged raw material. Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with either football mom Leigh Anne Tuohy or horse breeder Penny Chenery’s stories — anything but. It’s just that the implications for their other subjects are more than a little troublesome. “My meeting with the marketing team to EXPLAIN the problem would start thusly,” tweeted NPR’s Monkey See blog. “Secretariat … was … a … HORSE.” The mind reels, the skin crawls, etc.
Disney may or may not have anticipated this (reps aren’t talking). But writer-director Randall Wallace most certainly did, deflecting the matter with both demographic brio (“I have high hopes people with middle-American values will enjoy it, and we know from screenings it resonates with progressives who like Penny’s independence and strength”) and easy-to-Netflix qualifications (“We celebrated the same values in Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, but those movies had an element of loss in them. With this movie, the audience is cheering like it’s a rock concert”).
Fine. But here’s the thing: Beyond Sandra Bullock’s admittedly terrific performance, The Blind Side generally sucked. Its success was not a reflection of its quality but rather its word-of-mouth, especially as those “people with middle-American values” got a look and realized they could get behind that sassy, brassy, God-fearing Memphis socialite who implored them to change someone’s life for the better. To the extent it inspired, it galvanized viewers to within a pearl-clutching inch of their lives.
