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'Secretariat': A bit off track

There are those who'll look forward to "Secretariat" because they like family movies, or sports movies, or horses or thoroughbred racing.

From left: Diane Lane, Nelsan Ellis, Otto Thorwarth, and John Malkovich are shown in a scene from, "Secretariat." Lane plays the stallion’s owner, Malkovich its trainer.
From left: Diane Lane, Nelsan Ellis, Otto Thorwarth, and John Malkovich are shown in a scene from, "Secretariat." Lane plays the stallion’s owner, Malkovich its trainer.Read more

There are those who'll look forward to "Secretariat" because they like family movies, or sports movies, or horses or thoroughbred racing.

I looked forward to it because I like Diane Lane, but about halfway through "Secretariat," I realized that as much as I like her, I really don't like watching her run a horse farm.

I prefer her under a Tuscan sun, and being unfaithful, in something contemporary and sexy that reminds us why she's unique - Lane has reversed the Hollywood trajectory and become more beautiful and relatable with age.

In a youth-obsessed industry that's led many of her colleagues to have their faces stretched and lips inflated, Lane chooses to wear her age and experience, and it's given her a unique combination of gravity and vulnerability.

They're not put to very good use, though, in the flatly staged "Secretariat" - conceived by the same people who made "The Miracle" and "The Rookie," but without their agreeably human scale (with apologies to the horse).

Comparisons are also being made to "The Blind Side," the Oscar showcase for Sandra Bullock. Would that Lane had Bullock's foxy wardrobe. In "Secretariat," as owner Penny Chenery, she has Ann Landers' hair and horsey-set outfits of tweed skirts, starched blouses and wool cardigans. It's a wholesome role in a wholesome movie, which is a criminal waste of Lane, if you ask me.

Equally constricting is the conception of her role - a proto-feminist who inherits her father's property and fights off a series of bullying men who insist that she sell, on the grounds that a horse farm is no place for a genteel lady.

These men include her brother (Dylan Baker) and her husband (Dylan Walsh). You'd think these family dust-ups would provide fertile dramatic ground for emotional material, but Baker and Walsh are passersby here, and their confrontations register as short and superficial. (Daily News sportswriter Dick Jerardi actually has a stronger role.)

The only actor who makes a big impression is John Malkovich, playing trainer Lucien Laurin, the eccentric who Penny hires to replace the crooked, sexist brute she inherits along with the stock and stables when her father (Scott Glenn) dies.

Lane's main job is to play Penny as the plucky widow out to save the family ranch, which is $6 million in arrears to the IRS. Her only asset, aside from her fightin' spirit and the L.L. Bean catalog, is the talented, lazy colt in her stable - known informally as Big Red, formally as Secretariat.

Lucien finds ways to harness Big Red's potential while Penny figures a way to meet her debts. She arranges a risky $6 million syndication deal with prospective breeders, and no matter how hard the movie tries to make this process look homespun and underdog-ish, Penny's access to millionaires is enviable, and the whole thing seems like the kind of problem you wouldn't mind having.

The syndication terms are such that if Big Red loses more than one race, Penny loses everything. Not just the farm, but her chance to prove that a woman's place isn't just in the home, etc.

So Big Red thunders down the backstretch carrying Ron Turcotte and the fate of Western women, and it's a strange sort of anti-climax, because it feels secondary (once we get to Belmont) to Big Red's own neglected story.

He may have been the fastest thoroughbred ever, the awesome quintessence of a centuries-old process and art that peaked when he built his 30-length lead down the stretch, when everybody who watched somehow sensed we'd never watch anything like it again.