Katy McLaughlin is a dreamer in the classroom. She fails history in the exclusive Wyoming academy she attends. After two hours of exam time she hasn’t put a word down on paper, although, she tells her father, “I wrote it in my head.”
What she’s dreaming about are horses their strength and power, their ability to run free. Where she wants to be is home on the family ranch.
The opening narration in Katy’s voice makes it clear that horses in general reflect her character. “I can see in them an expression of my own restless spirit. Charged with an appetite for adventure I see them running wild and free.”
Flicka is a remake of the 1943 classic My Friend Flicka from the novel by Mary O’Hara, in which the hero was a boy, played by Roddy McDowall. But the story essentials are the same.
In this version Katy (Alison Lohman) is the strong-willed child bumping up against the authority of her equally strong-willed father, Rob (country music star Tim McGraw), by attempting to tame and ride a wild mustang she has discovered on an early morning ride. She repeatedly sneaks out to a small corral at night to approach the dangerous horse, in direct opposition to her father’s orders.
But Flicka (as she names the wild stallion), in particular, is another incarnation of her own wild spirit yearning to be free. Katy identifies with Flicka so closely that when Katy is endangered by a high fever and the horse is lying injured and about to be put down, Katy tells her father, “It’s all right, Dad, you can shoot us.”
There’s another theme running through the movie as well a romantic ideal of the West as the embodiment of the pioneer spirit, and all that suggests. As Rob discusses Katy with his wife (Maria Bello) astride their horses on the windswept wild grasses high on a Wyoming mountain, he sums up the importance of keeping their ranch going. “I see these kids hanging out in the mall, they’re sullen, they’re lazy, got no ambition, got no dreams. This is the only way that I know how to save our children.”
Perhaps much of the viewing audience is sympathetic to Rob’s perception of today’s youth, if not to his solution ranching in the untrammeled West.
Flicka is beautifully shot. Its soaring aerial scenes of herds of horses thundering along open hillsides, revealing gorgeous steep canyons, help us feel the emotional draw of the West. Katy is a strong and appealing character in that context, dedicated to the land and to her family.
As a teen, she is on a journey of self-discovery that involves rebellion. She is fearless and headstrong and has much to learn. So much so that the viewer might feel a little ambivalent in determining the balance between cheering on a wild child seeking her destiny, and blanching at the repeated disobedience Katy displays in order to do that.
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