Two theatrical features that recently became available for home viewing are THE RIDER and JULIET, NAKED. Of the various 2018 releases that we have been screening at home, these two titles are standouts.
THE RIDER is just the second feature film of Beijing-born, U.S. resident Chloe Zhao, who is now in her mid-thirties. The film scrutinizes the dilemma of a young rodeo star in the Dakota Badlands. Brady Blackburn has sustained a severe head injury; he has a plate protecting the crack in his skull. He can’t afford to fall off any future horse. To make the point clear, we meet another character, Lane, – a young rider who will never again enter a competition or attempt to tame another wild horse. He is a once-handsome young man who has suffered severe and permanent brain damage, and he will never leave the hospital setting in which he struggles to survive.
Zhao met Brady Jandreau while she was making her first feature, and she turned his real-life story into this fiction film with him as the star. She even includes Brady’s nuclear family, including his sister Lily who has autism.
The greater part of THE RIDER deals with Brady’s innermost feelings and fears. How will he fit into his social circle of beer-guzzling, seemingly fearless fellow riders, and how will he be able to contribute to his family on an economic level if he can’t be around horses? Is stacking shelves in the local market going to be his future?
Not a lot happens in THE RIDER as far as conventional story-telling goes. Instead of fast-flowing action, we primarily follow Brady on an inward journey. The film is shot in a contemporary realist style. It is a thoughtful analysis of a young man of the American West who stands at the crossroads of his life. Some will recall seeing the 2017 feature LUCKY starring Harry Dean Stanton which presents the spiritual journey of a 90-year-old Westerner. To me, THE RIDER is a similar style movie, only Brady’s spiritual crossing takes place as his adult life is beginning.
THE RIDER is one of a minority of 2018 film releases that can be called art cinema.
JULIET, NAKED is based on a novel by Nick Hornby. It stars Ethan Hawke as Tucker Crowe, a short-lived, almost-forgotten recording artist of the 1980s. As the film begins, he lives in the garage of an ex-wife in exchange for taking care of one of his several children by various women. Meanwhile, in a quaint town in Kent, England, a college professor, played by Chris O’Dowd, leads a small cultish group that idolizes the singer. As the film progresses, Crowe will become involved with an unlikely new friend, the live-in girlfriend of this obsessed professor. JULIET, NAKED has lots of mildly comic moments, excellent dialog, and terrific characters. It also has oodles to say about the disconnects of contemporary relationships and muddled lives.
While most people will want to chat about BLACK PANTHER, GREEN BOOK, THE FAVOURITE, and A STAR IS BORN, and while THE RIDER and JULIET, NAKED did not earn major box-office money, I’ll remember the fine points of these two films for months to come!
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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