Dream Horse, review: this British feelgood story is both rousing and patronising
Dir: Euros Lyn. Starring: Toni Collette, Damian Lewis, Owen Teale, Karl Johnson, Siân Phillips, Lynda Baron, Joanna Page, Nicholas Farrell. PG cert, 113 mins
The word ‘underdog’ doesn’t feel sufficiently species-appropriate for this comic drama about a champion Welsh racehorse of humble origins: perhaps instead we should call it a classic nags-to-riches yarn, or an uplifting true tale of whinnier takes all. It is a fictionalised, feel-good-ified take on the early life of Dream Alliance, a chestnut gelding raised on an allotment in a South Wales mining village which went on to experience the kind of against-the-odds, social-class-defying success that causes British film producers to start salivating uncontrollably.
The story’s Full Monty and Billy Elliot-like qualities were previously capitalised on in the 2015 documentary Dark Horse, but here director Euros Lyn and writer Neil McKay hammer away at them with an insistence that ultimately leaves their film feeling like just the latest entry in a bankable trend. Its saving grace is a wonderful – and convincingly accented – lead performance by Toni Collette as Jan Vokes, an empty nester in a sleepy South Wales former mining village who mans a supermarket checkout by day and pulls pints by night. An conversation at the bar one night prompts her to start a racing syndicate – a decision which brings a welcome new shiver of purpose firstly to her own life, and then to the community at large, or at least those members of it prepared to chip in the £10 weekly fee.
One of them is her husband Brian (Owen Teale), a nice enough chap who has congealed over the years into a purposeless, sofa-bound lump. But the support he offers Jan is mostly moral. On the business side of things, her co-leader in the enterprise is Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), an accountant with some prior experience in the field, not all of it positive. (Joanna Page makes the best of the thankless role of Howard’s long-suffering wife.)
As for the rest of the gang, they’re the usual rag-tag band in films like these: Karl Johnson’s trouser-dropping town drunk; Siân Phillips’s elderly widow; Lynda Baron’s butcher who pays her debts in meat, slapping steaks down on the table with an unhygienic flourish. The group has a certain amicable comic energy, but the best on-screen chemistry by far is between Collette and the horse itself, whose nuzzling conversations are the most affecting sequences here by furlongs.
Meanwhile, the obligatory broad-brush social commentary comes courtesy of Howard’s growing despair at his day job, which involves finding ways for his rich clients to pay less tax – although the question of how this might relate to the economically depressed state of his own home town is never grappled with. Perhaps with an eye on the international market, Dream Horse never dares to go so gritty that it stops being picturesque, and vice versa.
Posh English stereotypes are present and correct in the form of the sceptical trainer (Nicholas Farrell) who takes Dream Alliance into his stable, grudgingly conceding the animal has potential, and also the various silk-scarf-wearing types who look down their noses at Jan and her syndicate whenever they come shambling into the owners’ enclosure, nattering excitedly away about Clare Balding and trying to smuggle cans of Special Brew past the security guards.
As the British feelgood canon has demonstrated all too often in the past, this particular strain of class-conscious whimsy can turn patronising on a sixpence, and it does so a number of times here – though never thanks to Collette, who invests Jan with an emotional complexity the plot’s predictable peaks and troughs simply don’t require, but greatly benefit from nonetheless.
A closing sequence in which the cast sing the Tom Jones hit Delilah alongside their real-world counterparts feels like a pantomime curtain call, and sums up the film’s tendency towards button-pressing uplift. There’s fun to be had here of an undemanding sort – but anything fresh, or memorable, or remotely unexpected? Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.
In cinemas from Friday
