Mark Reviews Movies: JOCKEY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 28, 2021

The protagonist of Jockey, a professional rider who has had some success and a lot of struggle in the sport, is on the verge of defeat. It has little to do with the current season of horse racing. In fact, his trainer has obtained perhaps the best horse with which either of them has ever worked. The mare is more or less a shoe-in. The jockey would have been, too, about a decade ago.

Today, Jackson (Clifton Collins Jr., the reliable character actor, who gives a fairly generic leading role some naturalistic authenticity) is near the end of his career. He won't admit as much, but his body is slowly failing his spirit to win.

There's nothing new about this. This is, after all, a man who has broken his back at least three times of which he knows. Watching him and other jockeys discuss their assorted injuries during a group session, it looks and sounds a bit like a kind of reverse therapy: They're all trying to get back to the thing that got them here in the first place.

Co-writer/director Clint Bentley, making his feature debut, starts this story with a simple truth: Jackson needs this, and nothing that has happened to him in the past or little that might happen to him in the future could stop him. Some filmmakers might see this as a source of potential inspiration, especially when team trainer Ruth (Molly Parker) introduces Jackson to their sure-fire champion horse.

Bentley and co-screenwriter Greg Kwedar, though, are more realistic in their assessment of the protagonist's past, present, and future. This life and this work are all Jackson has, for whatever it's worth. That's the main question here: What has it been worth?

There's a quiet sense of unspoken pain and desperation beneath Jackson's optimism, mirrored almost to the point of parody by Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso's choice to shoot just about every other scene at the golden hour (It's as if no time of day except sunrise and sunset exists in this place, unless it's the dark nights of Jackson's isolation and dread). The guy knows he can win, based on his skill and the horse Ruth has acquired for him to ride this season. The key, though, is that he must win, if all of his decades of hard work, long days, living out of a trailer, and injuries—too many to count or remember—are to have been worth it.

A lot of this gets lost as the screenwriters add more and more complications to Jackson's everyday routines, training, loneliness, and fearful determination to ignore his body's warnings that his time as a jockey may be coming to an end much sooner than he anticipated. Most of these additional story elements come from one source: a new jockey at the track named Gabriel (Moises Arias). In the few years of the young man's career in racing, Gabriel has been following Jackson and only works up the courage now to talk to the long-timer. Gabriel admires him, obviously. He's also convinced that Jackson is his father.

Jackson denies the possibility at first, but as the two keep talking and exercising and training together, he clearly begins to think Gabriel might be his son—or hope that it is possible. If the movie is about the fleeting and tenuous notion of legacy, here's another strain of that idea.

Most of this remains little more than an idea in the movie, though. The main through lines of this tale—Jackson's hopes for the season, health concerns, and possible parentage of Gabriel—feel more like sketches of potential narratives than fully developed ones (or ones that even seem connected beyond a vague notion). Much of the first and second acts play out in montage, vignettes of the day-to-day routines of preparing for a race, and scenes of dialogue that state (or re-state) the foundations of a character, a relationship, or the few matters of plot that seem to be in motion here (When will Jackson finally get his chance on the new horse, and is he actually Gabriel's father?).

A lot is established by Bentley and Kwedar script, in other words, and it all seems to be moving in a set of certain, familiar directions (Jackson will get his opportunity to win, and the father and son will form the bond that has eluded both for so many years). There's a pretty daring moment in this screenplay, though, when the bottom drops out for Jackson. The movie suddenly becomes, not about what the jockey might be able to accomplish, but about everything he hasn't—and what that void means for the entirety of his life until this point and whatever may remain in the future.

The melancholy air that has permeated the underside of this story is punctuated in that moment, and the whole thing turns from the story of scrappy underdog, working for one final achievement, into an inevitable tragedy. Jockey takes its time to get there, which is admirable and aids in heightening the moment's impact, but as with everything up until that the point, the filmmakers find themselves circling around the same points without making much of a concrete one.

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