Films have long existed in the coastal majority. They explore places, people, and stories that are recycled, repackaged, and sold as shiny and new. These movies pour budgets into name-recognized stars placed into the world’s titular cities of New York and Los Angeles, juggling commonplace (or in recent cases, heroic) problems.
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider kicks in the opposite direction. Zhao focuses on a singular man with a unique story: Brady Jandreau. Jandreau is a real cowboy, with a hat glued to his head and boots laced too tight to take off. He lives in South Dakota on the ranch where The Rider was filmed. His dreams have been stomped on, and his options are increasingly limited. His story is the one being told, and he has the rare opportunity to present it himself.
Zhao’s picture of Jandreau, who plays a (slightly) fictionalized version of himself in Brady Blackburn, is graphic and immediate. We watch Jandreau pluck the staples from his head within the first five minutes, staring into a mirror with a gaze of disappointment. Jandreau does lots of looking in this movie, and each non-verbal sentiment pierces a bit deeper. His magnetism can’t be diminished or understated, and his performance is honest almost to a fault. We feel perched upon his shoulder, following his pain without an invitation.
Jandreau is an untrained actor, reliving his own struggles and conversations. He is difficult to understand at times, shrouded in unease and broken in confidence. His reactions are slight. His laugh is rarely larger than a smirk. And his frustration is warranted and constant. Zhao didn’t cast a wide net for the supporting cast either, plucking Jandreau’s father, sister, and friends from the South Dakota plains.
His sister, Lilly, and his friend Lane Scott, stand out above the rest, due to their bonds with Brady. Lilly and Lane are the only characters that seem to make Brady happy. He makes promises to them. He hugs them with deep tenderness. He has a tinge of desperation when he speaks with them, yet they both have difficulties of their own. The rest of the cast’s effect, though, rest on their familiarity and their own roles in this community.
South Dakota is striking throughout the film, and the plains take on the role of oceans or skyscrapers: an endless and unchanging environment. The beauty takes your breath away, not just because of the landscape, but because of its mere existence. We forget about the plains, and we block out the people living within them. Jandreau and his family are one of thousands of homes in the middle of the country knowing one way of life, one track to follow. A note of poverty even seeps through the scenes.
Jandreau’s story isn’t one I’ve seen before, yet I have a feeling it’s much more common than I’d like to admit. His livelihood rests on his ability to tame and ride wild animals. His story is heartbreaking at every stage, and the scene with his horse Apollo is gut-wrenching yet crafted with care. I’ve never heard a whistle with such sadness.
Towards the end of the film, Jandreau has a conversation with his sister which has been entrenched into my mind. He is talking about his accident and his purpose. “I got hurt like Apollo did,” Jandreau mumbles while looking away from Lilly. “But I’m a person so I got to live. If any animal around here got hurt like I did, they’d have to be put down.” About an hour earlier, we see Lilly stroking Brady’s back like a horse, singing him softly to sleep.
Every shot in Zhou’s film is either expansive, or tightly cropped onto the character’s faces. The story itself is remarkable in its specificity, yet the problems, the communities, and the hopes are far from the margins and rooted across the entire country.
The Rider wasn’t just a film about recoveries or rodeos, but as one of Jandreau’s friends jokes, “It’s all the same to a cowboy.”
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