Flicka - 2006

Not bad, but not a movie I’m eager to watch again. Mostly because I didn’t like the main characters. The horses are beautiful though. 

The story: Kate (Alison Lohman) attends a private school away from home, but she leaves her final essay totally blank, and because of this, (and only this) the school writes home that she’ll have to repeat the year… repeat the whole year because on the very last day of school she didn’t write an essay about the West for the American History course? Come on!

School’s over for the summer holidays and she goes back home to Wyoming (if I’m not mistaken). She loves the family ranch and the horses, and the first night she sneaks out and goes running with a horse. She sees a mountain lion, and also a black mustang that scares the lion away for now. She goes home all excited about it, saying they have to find that horse, but dad’s all angry because of the school letter, and because of all the money that they spend to give her a private education while the ranch has lots of money problems. She doesn’t seem too interested in that :-/

Her mother (Maria Bello) tries to take her side, but dad (Tim McGraw) is very stubborn. She is too, and more. She goes back looking for the horse and finds it, and tries to take it (on her own, a wild mustang…), but it’s too wild and runs away, of course, and dad and his men (Jack=Danny Pino and Gus=Dallas Roberts, who calls Kate ‘Flicka’, meaning pretty girl) has to stop it before all his horses escape following it (her: Kate will name it Flicka). They put Flicka away from the other horses, and Kate sneaks out every night to go talk to her and try to calm her down and basically tame her. She makes progress quite quickly, I guess the horse likes how she sings… 

Her brother Howard (Ryan Kwanten) doesn’t like the life on the ranch and wants to go back to a university (with I don’t know what scholarship), and her father considers selling part of his land because they need money but she goes all wild again, saying he can’t sell because that’s not who they are; I might agree with the sentiment but it seems like it’s very difficult to have a reasonable conversation with these two. 

(After all these years since I watched the ‘Robinson’ as a child, I still find it weird that mother and son would kiss on the lips…)

Dad sells Flicka and she screams her heart out, then she plans to compete in the oncoming rodeo to win it by mounting Flicka and buy her back with the reward. She disguises herself as a boy (why?? Because she’s too young or because she’s a girl? Nobody asks their age, so is there still some kind of rule that says girls can’t compete in a rodeo?? I don’t remember if they give an explanation or not right now). 

When her crazy dad tries to stop her running inside the arena among all the horses and cowboys, Kate and Flicka run away. She doesn’t know the way but of course the horse does, and rides towards home. The mountain lion attacks them again, this time hurting Flicka so she can’t move. Kate puts her shirt on it trying to help and waits there under the rain to be rescued. Her father finds her and brings her home in his arms while she seems almost delirious and then unconscious. Flicka is in bad shape and he wants to put her down, and Kate tells him “it’s alright, you can shoot us” because she identifies with Flicka, thinking they’re the same (not sure though, she wants to tame Flicka, who tames her?). Dad goes out and a shot is heard, but come on, I’m pretty sure that didn’t fool anybody, I was sure she shot the lion, not Flicka. Still, Kate believes he did. 

She’s in bed with a high fever all night, and her mother is of course worried, but we have a scene with dad speaking to her at her bedside as if she was dying! I mean, fever is a serious thing of course, but a strong, healthy teenager dying for a bit of rain? Perfectly understandable that they were all worried, but the deathbed-speech seems to be a bit too much. 

Of course the fever has gone down in the morning, and they tell her nothing. She has to go downstairs with pain in her heart thinking he shot her horse because it makes a nice scene when she opens the doors and sees Flicka alive and rather well, all considering. She’s a bit patched up but on her feet! 

During the night dad read Kate’s essay on the west where she wrote about Flicka and how good it feels to run free together, and he writes it on a computer and sends it to the school, and the next morning when Kate sees Flicka he already had a reply apparently saying that they accept the essay and she won’t have to repeat the year ( :-/ rather easy…). So she’ll take care of Flicka from now on (during the summers I guess, she’ll have to go back to school right? It wasn’t her last year, was it? ), Howard leaves for college and I suppose she’ll happily run the ranch one day. 

The end.

ITA Flicka - uno spirito libero