In the American dream, an individual fights adversity to climb from the bottom to the top of the social order. The more class-structured British dream is similar, except a whole community prevails, not just one person.
That can be seen in two recent films with similar titles. In the true life drama “The Dark Horse,” released in April, a bunch of disadvantaged Maori kids in the former British Dominion of New Zealand, trained by a schizophrenic ex-chess master, took on the toffs in the national chess championship. And this week, in Louise Osmond’s documentary “Dark Horse,” members of a working-men’s club in the former Welsh coal town of Cefn Fforest, pool their resources to pit their rough-around-the-edges stallion against racers bred by billionaires.
The latter is a remarkable tale about ordinary people, and Osmond keeps it simple with her conventional style and good-natured manipulation. Through earthy interviews with the participants, illustrated with archival material and re-enactments, it relates how in 2000 Jan Vokes, a waitress at the Cefn Fforest club, decided to raise a thoroughbred. Her father had bred show budgies, and she herself tried with pigeons and whippets, so why not horses?
She asked club regular Howard Davies, who had once tried and failed in a similar endeavor, to join her. Despite his and his wife’s better judgment, he couldn’t resist. Vokes’s husband Brian (whose missing teeth attest to his profession as a bouncer) and other club members pitched in 10 pounds a week for the “syndicate.” With this investment they bought a washed-up mare for a few hundred pounds, got a deal on stud service, and produced Dream Alliance, a sleek, gangly chestnut with a blaze, four socks, and a chip on his shoulder.
The rest might be familiar from “National Velvet” and “Black Beauty,” not to mention “The Full Monty” and other 1990s British films about the socially disenfranchised uniting in unorthodox schemes to overcome hardship. But when “Dark Horse” leaves the feel-good realm to show news footage of a failed miners’ strike, or to have the camera linger on the impoverished surroundings where Dream Alliance’s owners still dwell, it suggests that it will take more than a few fairy tale finishes for their reality to change.
★ ★ ★
DARK HORSE
Written and directed by Louise Osmond. At Kendall Square. 85 minutes. PG (some mild thematic elements and language).