I saw Secretariat last weekend and was disappointed. The movie was very little about Secretariat and very much about Penny Chenery.
I was an adult when Secretariat was racing. I read everything I could get my hands on, saw all his races, was around when Penny Tweedy (this was the only name she went by back then) decided to go by Penny Chenery and even have a scrapbook of all the articles from way back then.
Where was Riva Ridge? Riva won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont in 1972 but was completely left out of the film. This horse helped pull the farm out of the red way before Secretariat became a household word. What is also funny is that Penny favored Riva all the way over Secretariat. And Ron Turcott was Riva’s jockey whereas in the movie, she met him just before he rode Big Red. Way too much history played around with and I think this made the movie completely fiction for any Big Red/Riva Ridge and horse racing fans in general.
The scene where Ron Turcott comes in the restaurant, where Penny is eating, waving a newspaper and announcing that Secretariat won horse of the year almost made me fall out of my seat. And we were supposed to be fooled into thinking that Keeneland (one of the smaller tracks in the country) was really Belmont Park (the biggest track in the country). And the soft spoken Laffit Pincay came off as being very arrogant.
I find it sad that the movie was so much Penny and so little Secretariat and this will probably be the only movie made about him and it really was not about him, it was all about Penny. I know that Mrs. Chenery was sent scripts and then would edit them which I think was really the work of her daughter Kate (who has a book out now) and her husband Jerry (who is a loose cannon). I know this because I’ve dealt with him before. With Lucien Laurin, Mrs. Hamm and Eddie Sweat all being dead, they had a lot of freedom to paint the story any way they liked.
Here is something I took off another forum but I think this poster summed it up very well:
"I can’t imagine that anyone who went into this movie with no background would come out with any understanding at all of why Secretariat was extraordinary, or any understanding that he became a “celebrity” in his day. We hear references to the TC not having been won in 25 years but there is nothing that makes us care about it; we hear that Sec is on the cover of two [sic] national magazines but we don’t see the covers, there is nothing to make us realize his popularity in the public eye. The cheering crowds and signs at the Belmont come out of nowhere - nothing earlier makes us understand that the horse had transcended the racing world.
Making Sham’s owner into a cartoon villian was cheap and trite. It would have been harder but far more effective to show Sham as a pretty extraordinary horse with a passionately believing owner - just like Penny, in fact, with his own emotional involvement in his “big horse” - it would have made the emotional stakes higher- hell, it might have injected some emotional stakes into a film that is otherwise absent any.
The racing scenes are exciting, but again, since there is absolutely nothing to make us understand that Sec’s performances are extraordinary in themselves, they lack any emotional content - it’s just big horse wins big race, Penny is happy."
I guess if you like a movie where a woman defeats all odds in a man’s world and saves the family farm (and can even talk to horses yet!), some exciting horse racing scenes and just a general all around feel good Disney movie than this is your film. If you wanted the story of Secretariat, you still didn’t see it.
