Chloe Zhao

From The Rider to Nomadland to the Eternals

I was a huge fan of Chloe Zhao’s 2017 film The Rider. It was a ravishing story based on the real life story of Brady Jandreau, a rodeo rider of the Lakota Sioux tribe, shot almost entirely on the Pine Ridge reservation. Brady has suffering a traumatic brain injury during a rodeo that gives him seizures, preventing him from doing the thing at which he is a virtuoso. Zhao spent years in South Dakota and cast Jandreau’s friends and family who play themselves in the film. Billed as a Western, it goes so deep into the relationship between the cowboy, the landscape and the horse, that the film takes the genre to another level altogether. Zhao shot the landscape in wide angle with a passionate need to communicate the devastating and desolate beauty of the prairie, intercut with unvarnished interior scenes of the Jandreau’s double wide trailer. The scene that brings tears to my eyes even while I’m writing now is one that Zhao shot of Jandreau training an unrideable horse named Apollo. Jandreau’s love and patience is Zhao’s love patience: the process of training a horse to accept a rider is one that has to be performed with both. We are allowed to see the most intense back and forth between human and horse with finely honed documentary realism.

The soundtrack of this film is incredible as well. Jandreau’s sister, who has cognitive development disability is an incredible singer and plays herself with no artifice and no self-conscious. Her gorgeous clear as water voice is captured very simply as she sings for her brother as he struggles with his injury and the skills he has lost.

I’m thinking of Zhao because I have been thinking about this small film — it cost 80K to make (most of it self-financed). After winning award after award at festivals, Zhao was picked to direct Nomadland, which I thought framed being an itinerant worker as some kind of ‘choice.’ And after Nomadland, Zhao ascended the Hollywood ladder and directed The Eternals, which had a budget of $263 million.

I didn’t remember a single thing about the film when I started writing this post. OK, I screened The Rider twice, maybe I’ve seen it three times, but it’s seared into my brain. I don’t blame Zhao for entering the MCU. I just wonder what would have happened to her career and her vision if she hadn’t. I mean she probably got crazy money at that point and even though she comes from a wealthy family, she could not say no I guess to the opportunity to work with the Starks and Angelina Jolie in one film.

Look for a new longer format piece on Film and Culture in the next few days. I thought I would put this one out there as a plug for The Rider. I wonder what has happened to the Jandreau family after the film and if they got residuals, SAG memberships. I wonder what happened to Brady’s paralyzed friend, crack bull rider Lane Scott, — this is his promo video for college recruiting.

The people in Hollywood are smarter and better educated than ever: they saw the promise in Zhao and they drowned it in money.