Ride

Ride: More than two decades ago, Garth Brooks, a country music star, sang, “Well, it’s bulls and blood/It’s the dust and mud/It’s the roar of a Sunday crowd/It’s the white in the knuckles/The gold in the buckle/He’ll win the next go-’round.” Brooks’s lyrics resonate with a true fan of rodeo bull riders since they evoke the struggles of a man who gave everything to the lifestyle, which one such as himself has come to know as: the only roe he is willing to live.

I couldn’t help but think of the song in my head, both the lyrics and the melody, as I witnessed the beginning of the film “Ride,” which was written, starred, and directed by Jake Allyn. When we watch a tattered cowboy without clothes dragging himself through a stadium and out onto a rodeo arena’s ground, the film appears to be embodying the music in a visceral form. The audience was electric. The arena was dirty and dusty. And blood and pain? They were significant enough to feel.

Allyn pequeno actividad where Peter, a character that just got out of prison serving 4 years for vehicular manslaughter, assumes the bullfighting role has recently pursued. Peter is an addict, dependent on alcohol, prescription meds, and rodeo. It was Peter’s drug-filled evening that caused the crash where unfortunately a life was lost including his infant sister Virginia who was hurt (Zia Carlock).

His grandad Al (Forrie J. Smith) a past rodeo champion as well brought him up from the prison where he continues to live estranged from his folks John (the always stellar C. Thomas Howell) who also used to be a rodeo champion and later became a rancher and an FFA educator, and Monica (Annabeth Gish) the town sheriff. The two parents have been forgiving their boy for the incident for so long but it did help detect cancer early on in Virginia.

Just when Peter comes back in the picture, Virginia is diagnosed with cancer and the offices require dollar forty which the family needs on top of what their insurance has already covered.Well, moving on to Shaw’s interview, the bullfighter jokes around saying he enjoyed being back to bull riding. He was convinced that with the money earned, some of the family’s hospital bills can be covered. Even now, John ended up selling his stuff and got so desperate that he was thinking about illegal transactions in order to obtain the money necessary for treatment.

Pressured from all directions, Tyler, a drug dealer, whose outlook doesn’t seem very violent, is played superbly livewire by Patrick Murney, gives the impression of a gentleman politely tipping his hat while being very comfortable pouring hot substance on someone.

While the crime aspect and the melodrama run through the beats of the film, they are not its spine. At the center of ‘Ride,’ however, is an exploration of characters, of individuals like Peter and John, and their place in contemporary society. But it is attempting to make sense of that society as well. What does it say of present-day society, the society is so often struggled a family of two wages to afford the treatment of the cancer and their daughter has none? How do you deal with that sort of fact?

The tenuous bond John, Peter, and Al have with rodeo constitutes a distinct connection about life. Towards the end of the movie, a transformed Peter would say, “When I am bull riding, when that shoot gates open, all I feel is no, all of that grief just disappears. For eight seconds, it is over, it is merely hang on, that’s all you need”. For someone like Peter, who has to thrive within so much unpredictability that bull riding promises, it is all about having a very clear objective.

Like his actors C. Thomas Howell and Forrie J. Smith, Allyn has a bull riding and rodeo background of Ride movie.

You can clearly spot this quality in his oversized plaque and also in his expertly created film. Allyn immerses you in this universe, filmed on location amid actual rodeos, through a chorus of clangs, applause, and country-pop that permeates every element. Here is a place of bright fireworks and stark floodlights scattered across the horizon.

A place fostered by Tempest and Twister the bulls, rodeo clowns in their fleshy disguise, good ‘ol boys with ten gallon hats, and rodeo queens with hair plumped on their heads. But in light of these many cliches, and despite Allyn’s co-writing with Josh Plasse the script, and the director’s work with his performers, never aimed for the grand but transformed format into something sincere and intimate.

A month ago, just as I was about to watch the film, I finished reading a memoir written by Louise Brooks. In the memoir, she states that “every great director holds the camera on the actors’ eyes in every vital scene,” and she remembered G. W. Pabst saying that the audience has to see it in the actors’ eyes. It is something Allyn, who has crossed over from being an actor to being a director, understands without effort.

In one of the film’s climaxes, Allyn focuses the camera on the face of C. Thomas Howell who plays an unfortunate father John receiving the distressing news about his daughter being diagnosed with cancer. First, he looks at his daughter who does not have much time left and is asleep in the hospital.

After that, he looks at a physician who is cheerfully saying that an expensive cancer hospital “technically” has a room for the girl who looks as if she should be put up to a dartboard. His eyes cover it all. The horror of the fact that his child’s life could be lost. The contempt for the formalities of medical practice. The panic of how on earth will he find the money for the new option. His gaze encompasses everything, all the conflicting emotional states at the same time.

In another of the crucial moments, a helpless yet enraged Peter’s bulged eye falls on an Oxy capsule on the floor of the locker room.

His rib is fractured, and he is in terrible agony, yet he still has one last bull to ride. Al urges him to “cowboy up”. Peter’s eyes focus on the pill, and we understand that his tour does not really end. This is how life goes, it is just like the rodeo, a perpetual struggle. Allyn, in the movie Peter, tries to live a life tormented by apparitions.

The apparition of a woman whom he has accidentally killed. The aura of the family who has ceased to communicate with him. Also the ghost of his past self that he has now become. These faints hardly let him be, he is always seen with a scowl on his face. His hunch frame rarely fits in anywhere.

“Ride” is at its best and most engaging when it tackles the fundamental issues of love, conflict and bond between Peter, John and Al which revolves around three generations of men who play rodeo trying to cope with the changing times. Peter resorts to his vices so that the family he is trying to hold together, does not lose faith in bull riders like himself. John does not want free money to wean off his daughter, insisting hey has to support his family. Al takes them both to the limit and beyond, by means of his prayers and brute masculinity.

The characters in the movie are never portrayed negatively, however, they are not idolized either. Instead, Allyn allows the viewers to form their own conclusions.

Irrespective of how many characters are portrayed in the film, some are not as detailed as what they should be. Sheriff Monica is mostly underused, although a moment in which she allows hot coffee to scald her fingers gives insight into her emotional displeasure and a third-act surprise enables Gish to blend into the boys’ world of confusion as well. While I liked the parts concerning Peter’s sibling, Noah (Josh Plasse), and his wife Libby (Laci Kaye Booth) who in their own way add some flavor to the mundane life in Stephenville, I would have preferred to explore more of Peter’s younger sister Virginia instead.

“Ride” is a surfeit of themes, concepts and figures yet it is effective because of the fact that it is the creation of a director in desperation to tell this particular story who just has to make the film and cut it all on celluloid immediately or else it’ll be blown off.

The contemporary American West is portrayed in this film as a region with its own set of customs and inconsistencies. The West is depicted as a stuck whirling stick that remains in the muck when it begins to dry out and disintegrate.

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