Thursday, July 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Saddle saw

Seabiscuit

By Anthony Allison

Some movies so outclass the competition that watching them becomes a pleasant exercise in bemusement, bordering on boredom. As these cinematic thoroughbreds explode from the starting gate, effortlessly outrun other warhorses and canter casually down the stretch, the outcome is so obvious it's hard not to zone out and idly wonder why more big-budget flicks can't be like this.

Seabiscuit is the story of a second-rate racehorse and three men--owner Charles Howard, trainer Tom Smith and jockey Red Pollard--whose destinies serendipitously collided in 1936 to take this seemingly untrainable nag to the heights of fame as a cherished champion. Seabiscuit was a symbolic beacon of hope for a nation emerging from the penumbral misery of the Depression. For a brief shining moment he was, arguably, more famous than Garbo--and, until he became the subject of a 2001 best seller, just as forgotten.

Gary Ross' film of Laura Hillenbrand's exhilarating, vivid and superbly researched book Seabiscuit: An American Legend is more than just another predictable shaggy-horse story. (Hollywood already told it, incidentally, in 1949's Shirley Temple vehicle The Story of Seabiscuit, which TCM is screening this weekend.) Like The Legend of Bagger Vance, it seeks social-drama significance, conjuring up a lost world of golden sporting heroes whose prowess endeared them to a browbeaten populace.

This $86 million production isn't expensive by modern standards. But it's a model of the sort of massive collaborative project that only Hollywood studios can do well, yet rarely manage, even with bigger budgets.

The film's pedigree sure helps. Though not prolific, Ross (a double Oscar nominee for writing Dave and co-writing Big) revealed fine filmmaking instincts with his 1998 directorial debut Pleasantville, a masterful parable about tolerance, liberty and the loss of innocence. And under the beneficent aegis of producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, he assembled a dream cast.

Jeff Bridges, so natural as The Big Lebowski's hangdog slacker dude, also wears well the elegant clothes of period drama. His touching performance as Howard--who made a fortune as a groundbreaking Buick dealer before suffering a tragedy that broke him--even outdoes his unforgettable limning of another automotive visionary, in Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

As Smith, a laconic ex-cowboy whose world was changed forever by the advent of the horseless carriage, the versatile Chris Cooper adds another quirky characterization to his stunning resumé (Lone Star's sheriff, American Beauty's homophobic colonel, Adaptation's orchid thief).

Tobey Maguire slimmed down from his Spider-Man physique to play the scrappy, redhead Pollard, whose passion for reading was only eclipsed by his love of riding. He achieves a judicious mix of bravado, pain and bitterness as the loner, abandoned by his impoverished parents, who thrived under Howard's paternalistic wing.

They're ably supported by Elizabeth Banks as Howard's smart second wife, veteran jockey Gary Stevens, who makes an assured acting debut as Pollard's fellow jockey George "The Iceman" Woolf, and William H. Macy, adding welcome light relief as a (fictional) wisecracking radio commentator.

Ross intersperses the action with documentary-style sequences narrated by historian David McCullough, whose authoritative voice-over adds a wistful tone of verisimilitude to a film already authentic in every detail--from Judianna Makovsky's costumes and Jeannine Oppewall's sets to the races, painstakingly re-created by jockey Chris McCarron and horse wrangler Rusty Hendrickson.

Minor technical quibbles aside (mid-race closeups have the actors sitting on equicizers, mechanical training horses, whose heads bob rhythmically and unconvincingly up and down) it's hard to fault the film. Yet this nostalgic trot down memory lane doesn't quite transcend its narrative nuts and bolts to achieve that ineffable quality, movie magic. It pays fitting tribute to a racing legend, but fails to soar on Pegasus' wings to the heady realms of horse-movie heaven.