Broken Horses

Broken Horses is a film by an ‘A’ grade Hindi movie producer who has written and directed a Hollywood movie that can only be described as adolescent in its delineation of family and bonds of brotherhood. The film is about two siblings, the older one mentally challenged and the younger a talented violinist, who have their lives turned upside down when their father, a Sheriff on the Mexican border, is shot dead.

The older boy, Buddy, is drawn into a world of guns and horses, and the kid brother, Jakey, goes to New York to audition for the Philharmonic orchestra. But when Jakey (Anton Yelchin) comes back from the big city to invite his brother for his wedding, he realises that Buddy (Chris Marquette) is being used by a local gangster, Julius Hench (Vincent D’Onofrio). Hench exploits the mental slowness of Buddy to turn him into a hitman who will execute anyone who he is persuaded to think of as a ‘bad man’.

Is Jakey able to extricate his brother from this mess? This is the plot of Broken Horses, and had the film’s treatment been more contemporary, more mature and more interestingly styled, it might have been a better movie. As it is, the movie gives the impression of having been based on a script in a rather early stage of development.

There is no complexity to the work. There is no take on violence in American society, no opinion on family ties in that culture; not even a perspective on the idea of sibling devotion—supposedly the subject of the film. Surprisingly, even the panoramic American landscape that a lot of European filmmakers are struck by is not poetically described.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra seems to have made a Hollywood film in a cultural vacuum. If his idea was to bridge the notional divide that he sees between the two largest producers of cinema in the world, it hasn’t worked.

About The Author

Ajit Duara