Why 'Slumnag Millionaire' movie Dark Horse is a political object lesson
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Version 0 of 1. Jan is a barmaid at the working men’s club of a depressed Welsh pit village. She has a dream: to rear a racehorse and break into the sport of kings. It’s an unlikely ambition. A horse with prospects can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and yet more on top to train, though only one percent of tyro steeds ever win a race. Still, Jan cajoles a few of her regulars and other village characters into joining her project. Some of them are unemployed, but each promises to put up £10 a week for purchase, stud fees, training, race entry payments and jockey charges. To kick-start the process, Jan empties her building society account without telling her husband and picks up a dud-looking mare for £350. She gets it sired by a clapped-out stallion for another £3,500 (plus VAT). The syndicate raise the resulting foal on a slagheap allotment and name him Dream Alliance after themselves. A couple of years later they’ve saved enough money to pay back Jan and hire a top trainer. Dream seems slow and unpromising, but on his debut run at Newbury he manages to come fourth. On his next outing, at Cheltenham, he takes second place. In his fourth race, at Chepstow, he stuns the racing world by outstripping fancied thoroughbreds to come first. Later, setbacks occur. Then disaster strikes. Yet in an apparently impossible comeback, Dream wins the Welsh Grand National, to be acclaimed by the tabloids as the “Slumnag Millionaire”. After another dramatic and emotional twist, he’s forced into honourable retirement, but his earnings leave syndicate members boasting a profit. With a fanciful writer, this scenario might have yielded a chirpy Britflick fantasy, if it wasn’t deemed too far-fetched. However, Dark Horse: The Incredible True Story of Dream Alliance is a documentary, with the original protagonists (including Dream himself) recreating their real-life roles. Deftly made and only mildly sentimental, the film won the audience award at Sundance, premieres in the Valleys tomorrow and is released elsewhere on Friday. (Don’t confuse it with The Dark Horse, also showing, a gutsy Kiwi drama sadly lacking in equine content). If the tale had indeed been a fictional drama, it would doubtless have shown competitiveness, sudden success and unwonted prosperity disrupting personal relationships, eroding communal values and leaving everyone spiritually if not financially worse off. However, The Incredible True Story has a different outcome. The whole saga is relentlessly uplifting, not only for the participants (including Dream), but for the otherwise benighted village, which, bathed in the glow of its triumphant enterprise, is reinvigorated. What, though, is the moral of this fable? At first glance, it vindicates socialised effort. Collective action enables a community brought to its knees by the vagaries of capitalism and the cruelty of Thatcherism to recover its self-respect. Dream’s own humble origins are seen as the source of the mettle that enables him to prevail over both his physical shortcomings and the pretensions of his blue-blooded rivals. In the course of their adventure, the lasses and boyos from the Valleys stick it to the over-privileged horsey elite. On that first day at Newbury, snotty gate-keepers try in vain to relieve syndicate members of the cans of lager they’ve brought with them to avoid paying racecourse prices. Once inside the trainers’ enclosure, they thumb their noses at their new-found peers by enjoying a lager-fuelled knees-up. When the whole thing is over, they remain untainted by their taste of the life of their betters. At £1,400 each, their payout is not life-changing. No matter. For them, honest toil retains its dignity. Today, Jan is an uncomplaining cleaner in her local Asda. She and her comrades find their satisfaction in a job well done, not in aspiring to the wealth and glory so valued by the la-di-da classes. Yet there’s another possible reading of this parable. The syndicate took no account of their members’ disadvantages. Well-off professionals didn’t subsidise the jobless. Whatever his or her means, anyone who wanted to participate had to stump up their £10, even if this would mean cutting back on one of those claimant Sky subscriptions which so upset the Daily Mail. The arrangement was as regressive as the poll tax. The winnings, such as they turned out to be, weren’t handed over to worthy local causes. Syndicate members hung on to them. After all, speculators are entitled to whatever return their investment delivers. Lord Tebbit might find cause to admire Dream’s owners. He might see them as breaking free from unionised negativism to discover self-reliance. Turning their back on the victim culture, they get off their bottoms, stand on their own two feet, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shape their own destiny. What Iain Duncan Smith might see as the whingeing South Wales losers featured in last year’s Cannes, Golden Globes, BIFA and BAFTA-accoladed Pride go on strike, take part in demos, fight the pigs, and get beaten up. Yet what good does it do them? How much better to join the real world, like the Dream team, and confront it on its own terms. Why plead for handouts, when you can prevail on merit? For, it turns out, the barriers to so doing can be scaled, even in class-bound Britain. The Welsh ingenues may get subjected to turned-up noses by racing’s door-keeping functionaries. However, the owners and trainers themselves show them no prejudice. “There’s no snobbery at all with other racehorse owners because it’s such a precarious sport,” Howard Davies, the group’s treasurer, told the Guardian. “Everyone unites in that supportive mode.” So which analysis is the more telling? The left-leaning or the right? It’s when the chips are down that true colours are revealed. Following a run of successes, Dream, now insured at £180,000, is entered for a hurdle race at Aintree. Halfway through, he suddenly staggers. A hoof has sliced a tendon in his front leg. It seems certain he will never run again. A normal syndicate would have had him shot. Dream’s owners, however, decide otherwise. They’re told that stem-cell surgery might help Dream’s leg recover, though not enough to let him to return to racing. It would cost them £20,000, which they’d have no prospect of recovering. Unanimously, they decide to go ahead. Why? In the film, Jan explains that she considered Dream’s winnings to belong to him, not to his owners. For her, it’s the worker, not the investor, who has first call on the proceeds of his labour. Davies sees it slightly differently. For him, Dream was not so much an employee as a de facto syndicate member, earning equity through toil as in an employee share scheme. Either way, when it came to the crunch individual need trumped personal gain. Whether the decision was right or wrong, Fortune smiled on it. To the amazement of the veterinary world, Dream not only recovered completely; after 15 months of rehabilitation, he took to the track once more. He entered that Welsh Grand National at 20-1, so those who retained their faith in him were richly rewarded. Today he lives quietly in Somerset, and may well be immortalised in a Hollywood epic. On balance, maybe, this one can be notched up by the left. |