Review: The Cup (2011)
Cast: Stephen Curry, Brendan Gleeson, Alice Parkinson
Director: Simon Wincer
Country: Australia
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: The Cup opens in limited release Friday May 11th.
As the very public animal rights furore that resulted in the cancellation of HBO’s Dustin Hoffman starring Luck attests, horse racing is among the more contentious of sports. The harnessing of animals who quite often die in the line of “duty”—entertaining crowds of bizarrely-hatted spectators, that is—makes horse racing, and thereby works of fiction based around it, a difficult sell to many modern audiences. Opening at a ceremony where the emcee praises “men and women who, despite the dangers, dedicate their lives to keeping this great sport alive and well”, it’s clear from its earliest moments that The Cup is facing an uphill struggle.
The only indication that this is anything more than an afternoon true-life TV movie is the presence of Gleeson, who gives proceedings the minor and momentary lift of prestige before everything starts to sag around him.
At the heart of The Cup is an engaging mystery story: namely how the film managed to slip past careful eyes and sneak onto cinema screens. Director Simon Wincer, best known for Free Willy, has spent the great majority of the last decade on made-for-television films, a career path that has evidently rendered his an immensely uncinematic eye. The only indication that this is anything more than an afternoon true-life TV movie is the presence of Gleeson, who gives proceedings the minor and momentary lift of prestige before everything starts to sag around him. It’s a great shame to see such immense talent wasted here. Given the tremendous success he enjoyed with The Guard last year, Gleeson would do well to be more careful with his project choices; opting for films as dull and unchallenging as this and The Raven will do little to help him land the kind of meaty roles he really deserves.
The remainder of the cast do little to lend weight to a very weak narrative, based though it is on an emotionally ripe true story. Stephen Curry is positively lethargic as star jockey Damien, whose father’s death in the same line of work as he has not held him back from being one of the world’s foremost jockeys. Wincer, whose screenplay was co-authored with first-time screenwriter Eric O’ Keefe, fumbles desperately with grand emotions and familial disintegration, never managing to channel his many promising story aspects into a cohesively affecting drama. A universally flat range of performances seem only to read from the lifeless script with soporific sullenness. Gleeson’s character’s nationality sees some of the action briefly shift to Ireland, where no shortage of dodgy accents joins the fray of questionable story aspects.
Wincer, whose screenplay was co-authored with first-time screenwriter Eric O’ Keefe, fumbles desperately with grand emotions and familial disintegration, never managing to channel his many promising story aspects into a cohesively affecting drama.
Because there must be conflict, Wincer consigns the villainous role to a consortium of Emirati trainers who offer just as little in the way of excitement to proceedings. They arrive to seem vaguely threatening toward Gleeson’s character in what we can only assume is the filmmakers’ efforts to humanise the man, yet disappear again so rapidly that their role seems forgotten. It becomes ever more a mystery, as The Cup lumbers on, what everyone here was expecting to achieve. Curry exudes so spectacularly dry a screen presence that you find yourself wishing he might encounter a naked flame so that the film can take on some degree of excitement. Alice Parkinson strives vainly to emulate the worried protestations of Rocky II’s Adrian, but with dialogue so stilted and characters so vaguely sketched her concerns quickly fizzle away when narrative progress requires it.
As narratively unimaginative and ideologically empty as its instantly forgettable title suggests, The Cup seems just as lost as to its raison d’être as the audience swiftly becomes. Wincer searches vacantly and vainly for anything of value within his painfully underwritten screenplay; the end result is small more than a tasteless stew of staid drama and wooden performances. The whole production, in the end, is a lot like the horses at its heart: running around in circles with no clear aim in sight.
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