Seabiscuit Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)July 29th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
SEABISCUIT
Written/directed by Gary Ross
PG-13, 140 minutes
Seabiscuit was more than a great race horse. He was a horse we needed, a horse who came along when the country was mired in hard luck and trouble and gave people something to lift their spirits. The new movie based on his life does much the same.
"Seabiscuit" is a horse story, but that's only a part of it. It's a story of broken creatures coming together and healing each other. The cast of characters includes Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), a wealthy California automobile dealer reeling from the death of his son and the breakup of his marriage; Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a cowboy horse trainer who finds himself marginalized and lost in a land that is changing in ways he neither can nor cares to keep up with; Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), a young man torn from his middle-class family by the crash of '29, too big to be a jockey, too small to be a boxer, scrabbling out a hard-knock living at both. And then there's Seabiscuit - a runty, crooked-legged little racehorse, well-born but cast early onto the slag-heaps of the thoroughbred world, unprized, unloved, and trained to lose.
The story of how these four came together, and what they accomplished, is as inspiring a tale as you'll ever come across. Writer-director Gary Ross ("Pleasantville"), working from the phenomenal best-seller by Laura Hillenbrand, has created a marvelous film that throws a net wide enough to haul in just about every kind of moviegoer, and he does it without explosions and digital effects. He begins with the two-legged creatures, introducing us to Howard, Smith, and Pollard, taking his time, showing us the context of a nation plummeting through the terrible years of the Great Depression, making it real with old newsreel footage and the narrative voice of historian David
McCullough.
It's not until we've gotten to know these fellows inside and out that the horse comes along and provides the catalyst, pulling them all together in a union that towers above the sum of its parts. It's a story of losing and winning and losing and winning again. It's a tale so improbable and so overflowing with dramatic juice that nothing could possibly redeem it except that it's true.
And Ross's telling doesn't cover the half of it. Hillenbrand's book, which has been riding high on the bestseller list for the past couple of years, is full of more twists and more drama than a movie can hold. Ross has had to leave out huge chunks of the story - we hear nothing of Pollard's battle with alcoholism, or the excessive weight allowances Seabiscuit had to struggle under, or the almost incredible series of circumstances that conspired to postpone and nearly scuttle the colt's famous match race with 1938's Triple Crown winner, the majestic War Admiral. It was a race that so captured the popular imagination that it brought the country to a halt while fully a third of the population, from the White House to the bread lines, crowded around radios to cheer. As it is, the movie runs a very short two hours and twenty minutes, which thunder by like thoroughbreds pounding down the home stretch.
Good as it is, there is fault to find. The dialogue is strewn with red flag lines that fairly throb with meaningfulness. "You don't throw a whole life away just 'cause it's banged up a little" is a mantra that telegraphs its message as importantly as if there were trumpeters announcing it. It's not a bad line, it's just the sort of thing that calls attention to itself . And it has plenty of company. "Better to break a man's leg than his heart."
All right, they're a little corny. But that kind of corn grows freely in life, and it goes down easily here without doing anyone a bit of harm. And the richness and the emotion and the excitement of the story of Seabiscuit and his friends provide a feast that nourishes on every level.
The casting is perfect. Jeff Bridges imbues Howard with a fatherly warmth and patient understanding that makes you want to hug him and call him Dad. Cooper, who does taciturn as well as anyone, whispers to horses and lets the lines of his face do most of his talking. Maguire, who lost his Spiderman bulk to make the weigh-in for this role, shows a toughness and a wry humor that make Pollard endearingly and sometimes painfully human. William H. Macy provides bracing comic relief as "Tick Tock" McGlaughlin, a fictional race track announcer with an arsenal of sound effects and an inexhaustible supply of words. An unexpected pleasure comes from the performance of real-life Kentucky Derby winning jockey Gary Stevens as George Woolf, Pollard's friend and rival, who pinch hit for Pollard when he was in traction and rode the Biscuit in the great match race.
The race sequences are an unmitigated triumph. Meticulously designed by veteran jockey Chris McCarron, working with Ross and his brilliant cinematographer John Schwartzman, they put you right out there on the track with the horses, pounding around the turns with the dirt flying in your goggles and 1,000 pounds of thoroughbred under your saddle. It may be that real jockeys in the heat of a race don't engage in the easy banter we sometimes witness here ("Well, there's my opening, gotta go!"), but with McCarron staging it and Stevens saying it, you're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
There is another damaged figure caught up in the web of healing that this story weaves, and that is its author Laura Hillenbrand. She researched and wrote this remarkable saga while so crippled with a devastating form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that she could only eke out a few painful paragraphs a day. Her personal triumph is as remarkable as Seabiscuit's. Our times are far removed from the grainy grimness of the Thirties, but with life today again showing signs of strain, it is a wonderful thing to look up and see that plucky little misfit of a pony romping down the track, ahead of the field.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
