Respond to these rapid questions in our Dream Horse quiz and we will tell you which Dream Horse character you are. Play it now.
For years, I visited the Inwood, a converted three-screen Art Deco theater in the heart of my hometown of Dallas, Texas. It was so popular with me and my family that people assumed I was employed there in violation of child labor laws (in college, I worked there legally). During my last visit, they were showing “Spider-Man: Homecoming” on two screens and “Toy Story 4” on the third, which I found to be quite entertaining. If you’re in the business of running a theater, you’ll need a certain number of guaranteed moneymakers. Essentially, the Inwood equivalent of a Marvel or Pixar film was an upbeat ensemble comedy-drama about a group of people in a small rural community, usually somewhere in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, or France, who banded together in the service of a common dream. The likes of “Strictly Ballroom,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Muriel’s Wedding,” “The Full Monty,” “Brassed Off,” and “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain” hit the sweet spot between commercial success and critical acclaim by telling a relaxed yet clockwork-precise underdog story while cramming the screen with character actors who wouldn’t ordinarily get whole subplot
“Dream Horse” is another of those films, one that seems to have been made in another era. It could have been released around 1998, and if it had been, it could have played the Inwood for three months at the very least.
Toni Collette, who previously starred in the film “Muriel’s Wedding,” plays Jan Vokes, a bartender in a small Welsh town, in this film. With her husband Brian (Owen Teale), a retiree who doesn’t even bother to listen to her anymore, she leads a dull life. She wishes for something to shake up her routine and inject a little life into her economically depressed community.
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The decision is made by Jan, a seasoned whippet and racing pigeon breeder and trainer, to breed and train a champion stallion. She gets around the high cost (it isn’t called “The Sport of Kings” for nothing) by proposing a collectivist approach: the costs of purchasing, feeding, and maintaining a couple of horses (approximately £15,000 per year) will be shared among a dozen or so townspeople who will each contribute as little as £10 per month. It is decided by majority vote that the horse will be given the name “Dream Alliance” following a relatively uncontroversial meeting of the community. Jan’s business partner is an accountant named Howard Davies (Damian Lewis), who, let’s say, has had a bad experience with horses, but who is willing to, er, get back in the saddle if given the opportunity. Sorry. I’ve managed to hold out until now.
Dream Horse Quiz
It’s a dramatization of a popular documentary from a few years ago, “Dark Horse” (a better title, in my opinion), and like many fictionalized versions of true stories, this one tends to flatten out some of the idiosyncrasies and make things feel a little more like what would happen in a commercially viable art house picture that adult children can see with their parents on a Sunday afternoon. Unlike Marvel, “Star Wars,” or “Fast & Furious,” there is nothing about this kind of film that is innately less formulaic; it is simply gentler and more human-scaled than those other genre films.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Dream Horse quiz.
Throughout the story, there are setbacks and upsetting reversals of fortune that are placed exactly where you’d expect them to be, and the characters always find ingenious and heartwarming ways to rise above whatever difficulties they are faced with. It’s like those scenes in the “Rocky” movies (they all had one, starting with “Rocky II” and continuing through the “Creed”) where a doctor or trainer warns that if the fighter gets back into the ring, he will go blind or deaf or suffer irreversible brain damage or lose his spleen and both thumbs at the same time (that last warning never happened, but y’know, neith). Take a deep breath and admit it: if this were the story of a group of people who set out to do something great only to have it all come crashing down around them as a result of the injustices of society, the cruelty of chance, or their own pathologies, the film would never have received funding. Alternatively, it would’ve been made for pennies on the dollar, most likely by Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, and audiences would’ve raved about how scathing and incisive it was afterward, before retiring to their beds and staring at the ceiling until dawn.
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However, despite the fact that there is nothing particularly noteworthy or surprising about this film from director Euros Lyn and screenwriter Neil McKay, it is virtually impossible to dislike. Seeing the familiar story beats of machine-tooled, feel-good storytelling (including a “Rocky”-esque sequence in which the young horse is groomed, doted on, and fed from a bottle while townspeople stuff money into envelopes) applied to a story in which everything that happens onscreen could happen—or already has happened—is a rewarding experience. As a bonus, Toni Collette and Damian Lewis, whose careers have recently been defined by emotionally disturbed and/or relentless Americans in grim, repetitive tales of survival, are cast as the kinds of people you might meet at the grocery store or on the city bus, and whose extraordinary stories you would never know unless you decided to strike up a conversation with them.
Also, you must try to play this Dream Horse quiz.
The film is currently playing in theaters and will be released on digital platforms on June 11.
For more personality quizzes check this: Voyagers Quiz.
