Jockey: Moving Drama About Insular World of Pro Riders Soars Down the Stretch
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A+
American drama Jockey is superb, the perfect confluence of a great story expertly directed, with outstanding performances, stunning cinematography, and a dazzling score. That’s a lot of lofty adjectives to throw around, but it’s simply impossible to overstate the film’s beauty and emotional heft.
Jockey is also wildly intimate and propelled by scenes —most set at either sunset or sunrise, perhaps mirroring two key characters’ stations in their career — where dialogue is central. Much of that rests on Clifton Collins Jr. as aging jockey Jackson Silva. Years on the job have taken an enormous toll, and Jackson is sliding irrevocably towards retirement whether he wants to or not.
Into this already emotionally fraught period comes Gabriel (Moisés Arias), a young upstart who claims to be Jackson’s heretofore unknown son from a long-ago fling. Jackson works through the possibility that he and Gabriel might be related by mentoring the younger rider. In the wings is Ruth (Molly Parker), a trainer who is Jackson’s friend and confidant and may be his ticket, along with her dazzling new acquisition, to Jackson’s final big win.
Writers and co-producers Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley dive deep into this rarefied world of professional riders. The film was based on a short which served as a litmus test for blending a small crew with a live working racetrack. It worked; Jockey was filmed at Turf Paradise, a thoroughbred and quarter horse course located in Phoenix.
It’s a world Bentley, who also directed, knows well. The son on a jockey, Bentley said in a December 2021 interview with Below the Line that, “I grew up in that world. I know all those people. Not all the people in the film but that milieu of people.
“I also did a ton of research to learn the world of horse racing as an adult versus what I knew as a kid. And doing that research alongside my co-writer Greg and Clifton… gave me a new understanding of the world.”
Well, it shows. In one scene, a kind of ad hoc support group of riders wryly trade anecdotes on the barbaric physical toll riding professionally brings to bear. (A portion of the film supports the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund). There is also the constant, nagging issue of weight and the imperative to stay rail thin added to the usual stressors of high-stakes races, nervous owners, and restless purebreds of various dispositions.
Read our Q&A with Clifton Collins Jr. and Molly Parker
Two scenes near the end of Jockey featuring Gabriel and Jackson in deep conversation — one by a small lake at sunset as geese skronk overhead, the other in a dressing room before a critical race — scan with such authenticity that you almost want to look away for fear of eavesdropping.
But you can’t look away. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso frequently shoots up from down low, to underscore both the majesty and daunting dimensions of the paradoxically tiny jockey’s four-legged cohorts, painting the film with the brilliant orange, pink, and cerulean hues provided by the Arizona sky.
Meantime, Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner, of rock combo The National, provide a synth-y and eerily spot-on score that dissolves in the final scene into sublime and haunting anthem that didn’t leave my head for days. It also exalts the film’s trailer.
Although completely different in tone, style, and subject, Jockey seems like a kind of spiritual cousin to Nomadland, using as it does a mix of professional and non-professional actors (in this case, actual jockeys) while quietly observing an insular and seldom-considered world seemingly steeped in outsize successes and heartbreaks.
It also soars on Collins Jr’s towering performance which, like Frances McDormand in Nomadland, seems to locate his character’s soul. Indeed, Collins’ Jr. won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for his role at Sundance 2021, where Jockey premiered.
One can only hope that Jockey will also find an appreciative audience far and wide. It’s only March but I already feel like I’ve seen one of the best films of the year.
Jockey. Written by Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley. Directed by Clint Bentley. Starring Clifton Collins Jr., Molly Parker, Moises Arias. Opens in theatres March 4 in Toronto (TIFF Bell Lightbox), Vancouver, and Montreal.