Ride Like A Girl (2019) - Movie Review

When I was in high school, there were two major events that were deemed so important that our class was halted just so we could crowd around the wheeled-in television to witness them. The first was then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Sorry” speech, apologising for the systemic racially-biased treatment of the Indigenous population of Australia. The other was the Melbourne Cup, with all of us taking lots to see if our arbitrarily-chosen horse won.

It’s a sporting event that stops the nation, one of the closest traditions we have to the NFL Superbowl, and it’s one that has continued to sour in my memory over my lifetime, considering how it plays into our cultural history. Today’s film, a biopic about Michelle Payne, the first-ever female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup, is the first feature in a while that has outright forced me to consider the real-life side of the story being presented.

Before getting too deep into the conspicuousness of this production, let’s try and get into what it does right first. Teresa Palmer may have a bit of Jai Courtney Syndrome in regards to the scripts she picks, but her portrayal of a female athlete making it in a male-dominated industry is given weight by the quiet intensity she exudes in every scene. It doesn’t always work as intended, but as the emotional core of the narrative, she works well enough. And when paired with Sam Neill as her father and Stevie Payne (the brother of the real-life Michelle Payne playing himself), the rapport on-screen can be quite enthralling. Like, it is almost-impossible to overstate just how sweet Stevie and Teresa are together.

Even though this is ostensibly about Michelle’s story, the film is at its best when it shows her in conjunction with the rest of her family. The youngest in a 10-heavy racing family, the depiction of her Christian upbringing and her early on-set obsession with the sport gives the film a much-needed personal dimension. It also adds to the drama and tragedy of her mission to be the best, as we see one of her siblings lose their life after taking a fall mid-race. It plays into typical underdog sports cinema, granted, but it shows a level of honesty about the danger of the profession that makes her triumph resonate.

It certainly rings truer than the frequent quips about her place as a woman in a man’s world, that’s for damn sure. It’s more than a little bizarre that a framework that is meant to subvert the traditional genre expectations has become so tried-and-tested that it almost needs subversion from itself to work effectively. Teresa’s encounters with crusty old dudes who seem aghast at the idea of a woman racing in the Melbourne Cup, let alone winning it, just reverberate the same surface-level sexism that always crops up in films like this. It’s almost like first-time director Rachel Griffiths was hesitant about actually getting into the frictions of Michelle’s arc to the top, settling for just enough screen-time to make it clear that they wanted to cover it, but without the depth to make it stick.

And speaking of real-life aspects that feel like footnotes in this thing, there’s also the depiction of the horse racing industry itself to consider. This production was funded partly by TABcom, one of the biggest off-track betting companies in the country, and Racing Victoria, which might go some way to explaining how pristine the industry ends up looking in the final product. Whenever we get proper racing footage, it’s always filmed either very close to the racer’s faces (usually Michelle’s) or from very far away, both instances being edited just right so that there are never any moments where we see the horses getting whipped mid-race. We also get a single line of dialogue referring to a protest at one of the races, a moment that marks for one of the most alarming cases of “tell, don’t show” I’ve heard all year.

What that all boils down to is the notion that in order to properly depict the story of Michelle’s rise to ground-breaker status, it had to sacrifice certain aspects of realism to do so. That’s standard when it comes to glossy biopics, but when they stretched to bring in the real Stevie Payne, it reeks of the filmmakers picking and choosing where they decide to start being honest.

My own bias is probably leaking through on this one, as I’ve never felt all that comfortable about how much the nation adores an event where animals get beaten and possibly not even make it back to the paddock, and one the nation is taught from an early age to be a “responsible” place to start gambling, yet another issue that is rather systemic in our country. I honestly try not to have actual history affect how I critique films, unless I’m talking documentaries because that’s where the link to reality is supposed to be taut, but I can’t avoid it here.

If the film was more emotionally impactful, or if the story felt like it had a solid through-line beyond just Michelle going from last to first, or if the film showed enough guts to be honest about the business surrounding that rise, maybe I could have overlooked it. But as it stands, this really comes across as compromised, like a feature-length commercial for Big Equine, and it fills me with a rather icky feeling having handed over my money to it.