Housewife and mother Penny Chenery agrees to take over her ailing fathers Virginia-based Meadow Stables, despite her lack of horse-racing knowledge. Against all odds, Chenery - with the help of veteran trainer Lucien Laurin - manages to navigate the male-dominated business, ultimately fostering the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years.
Quite decent story telling. Not too big pretensions and nice performance from a well chosen cast. The story is quite stereotypical but it is well done.
I thoroughly enjoyed the performances of Diane Lane and John Malkovich, the film itself may not match those two but it still makes for a pleasant time. This is another sports drama from Disney and another film about horses, of which they have been a fair amount down the decades from the studio. It fails to reach the (very) high levels of 1976s emThe Littlest Horse Thieves/em and 1991s emWild Hearts Cant Be Broken/em. However, with that noted, emSecretariat/em still produces a fine time. Lane and Malkovich are very good together, Lane particularly stands out. Margo Martindale is involved once more, playing a sweet and lovely character as she always does - shes perfect for those roles. Nice to see James Cromwell, also. The cinematography is solid, as is the pacing of events. It does feel a little light of serious story at times, but thats hard to avoid when youre dealing with something as interesting but repetitive as horse racing. In the end, its a nice story about Secretariat and Penny Chenery.
