Flicka

Last year around this time, there was a family drama released about a girl and her horse called Dreamer. It was nothing spectacular, but it had some winning performances, a good heart, and was mostly able to avoid coming across as too melodramatic or sappy. Now we have Flicka, a remake/update of a classic story that covers many of the same themes as the earlier film, yet does so in a way that is so heavy-handed and over the top that it crushes the featherweight story that it tries to tell with its own self-importance. Director Michael Mayer (A Home at the End of the World) stages each scene so dramatically that you'd think the characters were talking about lives hanging in the balance, rather than wondering if a teenage girl should attempt to tame a wild mustang horse. Too silly and melodramatic for adults, while at the same time being too leisurely paced and old fashioned for most kids, Flicka will most likely appeal solely to young girls in the single digits who are nuts about horses.

Fiery teenage girl Katy McLaughlin (played by 27-year old Alison Lohman) has a lot of problems. She's flunking out of school, she can't seem to connect with her emotionally distant father, Rob (country singer Tim McGraw), and worst of all, her dad is starting to have thoughts about selling the land that makes up their ranch home where they breed horses. Katy is a free spirited girl who doesn't follow the rules, and thinks she has found a soul mate when she discovers a wild mustang running free in the mountains nearby. Determined to befriend and tame the creature, Katy strikes up a slow and uneasy bond with the wild horse, whom she names Flicka. Rob, however, is set in his ways that a mustang is bad news for a ranch, and wants to sell the horse to a local rodeo. Knowing that her dad would never accept the special bond she shares with Flicka, Katy is determined to do whatever it takes to keep her new friend by her side, even if it means disobeying every rule he has placed before her.

Flicka is a story that has been told numerous times, and seems just as outdated and worn as the cliches that it tries to pass off as an actual plot. From the wooden and stilted dialogue, to the overly dramatic acting and line delivery, the film becomes almost unintentionally comical, especially when the characters start trying to pass off lines like "She's got mustang blood, just like our daughter" as serious pieces of dialogue. The paper thin plot is your standard "troubled girl finds horse, troubled girl befriends horse, troubled girl loses horse, troubled girl risks life to get horse back" plot that's been around since the days of the old Lassie pictures. Sure, the book this film is based on is pretty old, but screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner (Mona Lisa's Smile) really should have made more an effort to update the story, or at least add in some material to make the movie more interesting. The family conflict between father and daughter that is supposed to drive the main plot is too underdeveloped to get us involved, and not even an attack by a mountain lion that seems to come out of nowhere and puts Flicka's life in danger could draw heartbreak from a notorious sentimental fool (especially when it comes to animal films) like myself. This is most likely due to the fact that we never get a good glimpse at this seemingly unbreakable bond that girl and horse are supposed to share, so much so that it seems to almost reach psychic levels. (There's a scene late in the film where Katy almost seems to be calling out telepathically to the creature while in a fevered state.) Most of the sequences concerning Katy and Flicka are montages set to pop music or popular country songs, and the dialogue between the two doesn't go much deeper than "Good girl, Flicka", so when young Katy is brought to tears at the prospect of the horse possibly being taken away, we watch with casual indifference and wonder why she's so upset.

It's a problem that carries all throughout Flicka, as not one single character is interesting or engaging. The father, Rob, as played by Tim McGraw, comes across as overly shallow and emotionally distant. This is because McGraw plays the part so stone faced and with as little emotion as possible until the screenplay forces him to break down in tears and sob over how much he loves Katy. Maria Bello as his wife gets a couple of tender scenes with both McGraw and Lohman, but since her individual relationship with both characters is never quite established as well as it should be, the scenes do not resonate with us. And then there is young Alison Lohman in the lead role. While she is amazingly successful at passing herself off as a 16-year old for a woman her age, every line she recites is drenched in over the top melodrama, and talks like no teenage girl I have ever met in my life. Whether she's waxing poetic on the nature of horses in a series of overwrought voice over monologues that keep on popping up throughout the movie, or if she's sobbing as she tries to convince her father not to sell Flicka to the rodeo, she takes the part a bit too seriously, and seems to forget that she's acting in a movie intended for children. Girls will likely be able to relate to her character's love of animals, but she talks like she stepped out of some 1940s romantic melodrama, and gives a performance so over the top that it would feel right at home in one as well. The bombastic and overly emotional music score that hits us over the head in each and every scene doesn't help matters either. Because the movie takes itself so ridiculously seriously, there's just no fun to be found in Flicka.

I have no idea what kind of audience Flicka was aiming for. Kids are likely to be bored, and only overly sentimental adults will find themselves wrapped up in the film's plotless and moldy plot structure that's been around for years. The film offers no joy or surprises, and the only positive I can think of is the cinematography by J. Michael Muro that captures the Wyoming countryside quite beautifully. As a tool to sell soundtrack albums, the movie is successful, as I happened to hear an elderly couple talking to each other about how they want to buy the CD while waking out of the theater. But as a movie that tries to make us feel or care about the characters, Flicka fails in just about every way. Put this one out to pasture, or better yet, put it out of its misery.

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