☆☆☆☆½
It would be easy to mistake The Rider as nothing more than a thinly veiled documentary, since it stars an injured rodeo rider named Brady as an injured rodeo rider named Brady, features the real Brady's family as his on-screen family, and his badly injured friend Lane as his badly injured friend Lane. As a docudrama it would be fascinating, but director Chloé Zhao has done so much more with this slow and lyrical film than relate mere facts.
In the story of Brady Blackburn (played by Brady Jandreau), Zhao and her cinematographer Joshua James Richards find inspiration in the lonely, wide open spaces of South Dakota, where Brady wanders after a near-fatal rodeo accident. Everything he knows has been taken from him, every bit of identity he has developed has been stripped away. He tries to hold on, but his brain is wracked by seizures. His only solace is that he has avoided the fate of Lane Scott, who is brain damaged and nearly paralyzed.
The Rider is an intensely specific, carefully observed view of one person's life and fears and then, surprisingly like James Joyce's "The Dead," it leads into an ending that is both true to the story and the characters and staggeringly meaningful and moving. The Rider turns into a powerful and beautiful exploration of the impossibility of moving on when life changes with ferocious suddenness -- and an empathetic benediction: moving on, whether bravely or with painful resistance, is the most human experience.
Viewed January 8, 2018 -- DVD
In the story of Brady Blackburn (played by Brady Jandreau), Zhao and her cinematographer Joshua James Richards find inspiration in the lonely, wide open spaces of South Dakota, where Brady wanders after a near-fatal rodeo accident. Everything he knows has been taken from him, every bit of identity he has developed has been stripped away. He tries to hold on, but his brain is wracked by seizures. His only solace is that he has avoided the fate of Lane Scott, who is brain damaged and nearly paralyzed.
The Rider is an intensely specific, carefully observed view of one person's life and fears and then, surprisingly like James Joyce's "The Dead," it leads into an ending that is both true to the story and the characters and staggeringly meaningful and moving. The Rider turns into a powerful and beautiful exploration of the impossibility of moving on when life changes with ferocious suddenness -- and an empathetic benediction: moving on, whether bravely or with painful resistance, is the most human experience.
Viewed January 8, 2018 -- DVD
No comments:
Post a Comment