113 min | PG | May 21, 2021 | Bleecker Street
A Welsh barmaid talks her hollowed-out mining village into pooling spare cash to breed a racehorse. The horse runs. The formula runs harder.
Jan Vokes cleans floors and pulls pints in Cefn Fforest, a Welsh mining village the coal industry left behind. She decides to breed a racehorse. She talks her neighbors into chipping in a few pounds a week and forming a syndicate. The horse is named Dream Alliance. The film tells a true story, and underneath the underdog beats it is about what people do with their dignity when the work that defined them is gone.
Toni Collette plays Jan with a steady Welsh accent and a tired stubbornness that anchors the whole picture. She makes the gamble read as need rather than whimsy. Owen Teale plays her husband Brian as a man who indulges his wife and then finds a purpose he did not go looking for. Damian Lewis plays Howard Davies, a tax adviser who knows the racing world and joins the gamble against his own better instincts. Siân Phillips and Karl Johnson fill out the village with faces that look lived in. The ensemble does the heavy lifting the script leaves undone.
Euros Lyn directs from a script by Neil McKay, and both hit every beat the genre demands. The race sequences cut between the track and the syndicate members watching from the rail, and the editing borrows tension it has not earned. The camera shoots the green valleys above Cefn Fforest with warmth and the racing world with a colder, more polished light. The score swells on schedule to tell the audience exactly when to feel. The closing credits run real footage of the actual people, and that footage carries more weight than the staged version preceding it.
This is a comfortable film that knows precisely what it is. It earns its emotions honestly even when it telegraphs them from a mile out. The true story gives it a foundation the conventional treatment cannot squander. Collette gives it a center the formula cannot reach. It does nothing surprising and nothing wrong, and it sends you out the door feeling exactly the way it intended.