By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
Chinese-born writer/director Chloe Zhao, who lives in Denver, Colorado, obviously feels a deep affinity for America’s heartland, introducing intriguing, offbeat Native American characters we seldom see on the silver screen in “The Rider.”
Set and filmed on the desolate, poverty-stricken Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, this is the melancholy story of Sioux cowboy Brady Jandreau, playing himself, in a Badlands docudrama.
After a near-death rodeo injury leaves him with a metal plate in his head, neurological seizures in his right hand, and under a doctor’s order never to ride again, stoic Brady must decide what to do with himself after he’s deprived not only of his one true passion but also of the family’s primary source of income.
Living in a rented trailer, Brady’s taciturn, alcoholic/gambler dad (Tim Jandreau) has no money, and his ebullient little sister Lilly (Lilly Jandreau) suffers from a birth defect which has obviously limited her intellectual capabilities. His mom died of cancer years earlier.
To add to Brady’s dilemma, his best friend Lane (Lane Scott) is institutionalized with severe disabilities from his own rodeo injuries, all of which have been recorded on videos which they watch together and reminisce for hours.
Determined to help Lane, who is unable to speak, Brady devises a physical therapy exercise, hoisting his buddy onto a saddle, so he can hold onto the reins on an imaginary ride. Horses are and have been Brady’s life. To risk another head injury could be fatal, but that’s all Brady knows.
The actors are all nonprofessional, portraying fictionalized versions of themselves. Filmmaker Chloe Zhao knows the family well, having lived on their reservation while she filmed her first feature “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2015). Brady is now married with a child; he breeds and trains quarter horses.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Rider” is an evocative, empathetic, elegiac 8, a captivating contemporary Western.
In “RBG,” Gloria Steinem calls her “the closest thing to a superhero that I know,” explaining why diminutive Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become an icon.
As the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court — after Sandra Day O’Connor — Justice Ginsburg has become an unlikely celebrity. With rapper Dessa’s “The Bullpen” playing over glimpses of her exercising, along with disparaging quotes from her right-wing critics, this documentary illuminates why RBG is one of our best and brightest legal eagles.
When RBG entered Cornell University, there were four men for every woman undergraduate. She met her future husband, Marty, there; they married when they graduated. He became a New York tax lawyer and was her staunchest supporter; he died in 2010.
At Harvard Law School in the mid-1950s, she was one of nine women in a class of more than 500 men. At a dinner for the first-year women, the dean asked each one why they were taking a seat that could be occupied by a man.
When RBG argued her first case at the Supreme Court — 1973’s Frontiero v. Richardson — she was speaking to men who didn’t acknowledge or understand gender-based discrimination. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter put her on the federal bench; President Bill Clinton appointed her as the 107th Supreme Court Justice in 1993
Becoming ‘notorious,’ RBG believed that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should apply to women and could be used to rectify discrepancies in hiring, business practices and public policy.
“Marching and demonstrating wasn’t Ruth’s thing,” biographer Wendy W. Williams notes. Instead, RBG favored incremental change through litigation, which is how the civil rights movement achieved its greatest successes.
Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen intercut archival material with informative interviews and public appearances. A two-time cancer survivor, RBG forged a firm friendship with her right-wing foil, the late Antonin Scalia, and laughed at Kate McKinnon’s parody on TV’s “Saturday Night Live.”
On the Granger Gauge, “RBG” is an inspiring 7, highlighting this trendsetter’s dissenting opinions.
Islandic-born filmmaker Baltasar Kornmakur (“Everest”) cleverly manipulates chronology to twist and turn “Adrift,” a true ‘shipwreck’ story into a tension-filled romantic drama.
It begins in 1983 in Tahiti, where a 23-year old, free-spirited Californian, Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley), meets Richard Sharp (Sam Clafin), a suave, 33 year-old Brit with a sturdy sailboat that he’s made himself. As footloose adventurers, they’re immediately attracted to one another.
When an older couple whom Richard knows ask him to sail their luxurious yacht to San Diego (Tami’s hometown), offering $10,000 and two first-class tickets back to Tahiti, it’s an offer they can’t refuse.
But there’s a 4,000-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean. All’s well until they unexpectedly encounter a horrific hurricane, which badly batters their boat and tosses badly wounded Richard overboard.
Determined to save him, Tami stoically overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds: using duct tape to patch a hole in the hull, rigging a makeshift mast, freeing a tangled rudder, and pumping water from the flooded cabin.
Using a sextant, Tami realizes the odds are better if she heads for Hawaii and, despite being a staunch vegetarian, manages to spear a fish, eating it raw.
Adapted by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith from Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s memoir “Red Sky in Mourning: The True Story of Love, loss and Survival at Sea,” it’s magnificently photographed by Robert Richardson and adroitly edited by John Gilbert.
While there have been other lost-at sea tales — like Robert Redford’s “All Is Lost” and Tom Hanks’ “Castaway,” along with the digitally-enhanced “Life of Pi” — this is female-propelled. With “The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Spectacular Now” and “Divergent” behind her, Woodley’s up to the challenge.
FYI: More than 90% of filming was done at sea, beginning at 4 a.m. with a two-hour boat ride from Fiji. Plagued by seasickness, the cast and crew spent up to 12 hours on water with no land in sight.
On the Granger Gauge, “Adrift” is a suspenseful, even surprising 6, a seafaring saga.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
