Riva Ridge was omitted from the movie. Lucien Laurin was not nearly
as eccentric as he was written. Pancho Martin was not nearly as
over-the-top. Ogden Phipps never made a hard offer for Secretariat
after his 2-year-old season. When and where the jockeys were wearing
silks was not consistent with reality. The script leads the audience to
believe Sham won the 1973 Wood Memorial, not Angle Light. And a myriad
of other details, large and small, were misrepresented or flat out
wrong.
Yet for the purposes of Secretariat, none of this matters. Very few
people in the packed house at the Baxter Avenue Theater in Louisville
noticed the inaccuracies and judging from the loud ovation at the end
of the film, even fewer cared.
This is a moving story of a woman who tests her own limits to save
her family’s horse farm. Cliché? Of course it is. Secretariat is a
sports movie above all else and this genre falls in love with the
predictable underdog storyline nearly every time. To expect anything
more than that would be like expecting Keith Olbermann to keynote the
Republican National Convention.
So the litmus test for Secretariat should not be whether it’s
historically accurate or twisted into a cliché pretzel, but instead
whether the story of Penny Chenery and her super horse “Big Red” was
emotionally gripping enough to bring the masses to see a movie about
horse racing. With this as the measure, Disney’s newest movie is a big
success.
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