And yet—this is the kind of unabashed crowd-pleaser that was made with care, down to a Toni Collette performance that sells every up and down experienced by her character Jan, who decides to the breed a race horse. The movie also has plenty of gorgeous establishing shots for the small Welsh village that she lives in, creating a sense that this movie can be as concerned with composition as much as having fun with a story that was told in the 2015 documentary “Dark Horse” (which also played at Sundance).
Jan is a grocery store employee who decides to breed the horse as a way to make some money, but also to find a new passion to care about. Joined by her husband Brian (Owen Teale), she rallies a batch of people from the town to throw in, making for broad humor and rag-tag team-building scenes. Jan also receives a lot of help from a former racehorse syndicate leader named Howard (Damian Lewis), who guides them and their horse Dream Alliance into the high-stakes world of horse racing.
Lyn has a sturdy vision for such a movie that balances feel-good highs and expected lows, and also when it comes to sprucing things up a bit—attaching a camera to the side of Dream Alliance during a race is a nice little jolt of energy, and the race scenes as a whole garner some significant momentum. It’s more that the story always feels like it’s on automatic. "Dream Horse" also goes for the easy laughs, like Karl Johnson playing the town drunk whose antics are constant but actually very lonely and sad. And then there’s Lewis’ Howard, who is given a subplot about a gambling problem, of which the movie more or less carelessly supports by the end for the sake of a flat-out victory.
One of the more baffling movies that I saw in Park City was Michael Almereyda’s “Tesla,” a type of philosophical celebration of perhaps the most overlooked inventor in history. Ethan Hawke stars in the movie as Nikola Tesla, eschewing any Serbian accent and free-wheeling through a movie that starts off with gliding around on roller skates.
Premiering just months after Alejandro Gomez-Rejon’s similarly focused “The Current War,” “Tesla” escapes the shadow of focusing on different time periods by leaning entirely into the artifice. It’s not uncommon for the movie to break into a slide show of Google searches, and it’s not all that surprising when Kyle MacLachlan’s interpretation of Thomas Edison whips out his iPhone, or that Jim Gaffigan seems to have just walked on set to play George Westinghouse. Scenes are created using painted backdrops, and often take place in bars, or modern bistro spots, as if parodying one's expectation for how such historical scenes should be recreated. This looseness provides a strong contrast to the dialogue-driven script, which is meticulous all the way through Eve Hewson's professorial narration.
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