The Battered Bodies of “The Rider”
From it’s opening scene, Chloe Zhao’s strong sophomore feature The Rider announces itself as a film about bodies. In that scene, down-on-his luck rodeo rider Brady Blackburn pulls staples out of his scalp and wraps his head in plastic wrap so that he can take a shower without aggravating his head wound. The wound, we learn, was the result of a rodeo gone wrong that has left Brady suffering seizures and paralysis in one hand. Despite his injuries, Brady finds himself pushed back towards the cowboy life by the masculine culture that surrounds him and the lack of opportunity or meaning in his rural town.
The film that The Rider is most reminiscent of is Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, another story about the trauma men inflict on their bodies set in a hyper-macho subculture. Zhao’s film interrogates that subculture as well as the image of the dauntless, invincible cowboy baked into American culture and particularly cinema. In addition to the numerous injunctions to “cowboy up”, Brady’s rider friends reference The Last of the Mohicans (or “Moheeks”, as they say), and indeed there is something of Cooper in these hard-bitten men all but left behind by society. Throughout The Rider Brady’s father Tim describes his attempt to return to horse-rearing and rodeo competition as “stubborn”, but it becomes clear that what pushes Brady back towards dangerous pursuits is not an individual flaw but rather the world he lives in. The whole film could summed by the scene in which Brady struggles to force his non-responsive hand to tie a cowboy scarf around his neck.
Perhaps The Rider’s best scenes come when Brady returns to training horses, taming wild or disobedient animals. Zhao’s montages of this training process convey the mixture of love and dominance characteristic of human relationships with animals. Brady’s evident care for the animals is mixed with a sense of danger and tension, with the viewer well aware of the danger that one wild move by animal or human poses to the other.
Zhao shoots the film subtly, with minimal background music and without a conventional, forward-moving plot structure. Her camera luxuriates in the wide-open landscapes of the Great Plains, rendered poignant by the deft touch of cinematographer Joshua James Richards. Zhao’s choice to use non-professional actors playing characters with similar names and circumstances, a touch of Italian neo-realism, adds to the naturalism of the picture. In particular Brady Jandreau, playing the protagonist, stands out as a magnetic presence whose sense of inner turmoil keeps the viewer’s attention.
There are times when The Rider’s obsession with broken bodies risks becoming mawkish, as with the film’s two disabled characters, Brady’s developmentally delayed sister Lilly and his paralyzed rider friend Lane Scott. As admirable as the representation of disability is, these characters seem to appear only to bold and double-underline the dilemma facing Brady. Indeed, Zhao’s script is frequently too on-the-nose. But the obviousness of Zhao’s writing is more than makes up for by the subtlety and beauty of her direction, as well as the obvious care and affection she feels towards this location and these people. As a result, a story that could have been a melodrama becomes a touching meditation on masculinity and the limits of the human body.
