Seabisuit

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Seabiscuit, the true overlong Hollywood story of the little-horse-that-could, written and directed by Gary Ross, is a pandering, politically hamfisted biopic that trumpets phony populism, forces analogies between its characters and the country they lived in, and hawks faith and redemption of the five-and-dime variety. It made me cheer and it made me cry in that cheap trick way, but it never made me believe.

Based on Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling history, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, about the racehorse that went from ruin to riches and captured the Depression public's hopeful imagination, this adaptation is less subtle even than Dave or Pleasantville, from Ross's pen and chair, respectively. The film trades the book's dynamic, inspired portrait of three men and a horse for a soulless mock-up of heartfelt inspiration. Characters are shorn of depth and dimension, complex circumstances are streamlined into formula, life's ironies are flattened into plot devices, and both fate and faith are shorthanded to be given short shrift. Not to despair for those who like their film emotions neatly packaged -- what the film lacks in depth and commitment to its subject (everything), it makes up in pure hoke: simulated spirituality trimmed and topped for easy consumption.

It should not have been a hard story to tell, nor so strained an effort to let it tell itself. Seabiscuit is the perfect dramatic icon: scrappy underdog, unworthy offspring, misshapen and misunderstood miscreant who, with a little bit of help from his friends becomes a champion, a star, and a hero. His tale is a natural parable: fallen on hard times, beaten and abused, he put his trust in three men: a father (businessman Charles Howard, played here by Jeff Bridges), a son (jockey John "Red" Pollard, played here by Tobey Maguire), and a holy ghost of a man (trainer Tom Smith, whom author Hillenbrand described as having an "unsettling tendency to blend with the sky," played here by Chris Cooper), and was redeemed. But there is little in the film to make you feel the horse, identify with it, understand it, or even come to love it. We are told of his fierceness and intelligence, and there are fleeting moments of sweetness and of pride, but it all feels tacked on, as if the filmmaker never got the horse's sense. (I've read that there were as many as 12 horses playing Seabiscuit - it barely felt like one.)

It should have been even easier to make this film fly with the actors on hand, but Ross betrays them all. Bridges plays the optimistic entrepreneur nicely, as likeable and engaging with a touch of Tucker and a touch of maturity, but he is limited by the way the character is written: too good, too jovial, too earnest, too fictional. Cooper's horse whisperer is somewhat more understated, and he carries off his performance with his usual panache - but he, too, is hamstrung by the clichés the film uses to define him. Maguire, no longer wonderboy or spiderman, starved for the part and persuasively wide-eyed, angry and needy, is also cheated by the film's abbreviated character investments. The film skimps on character development, hops from one key life event to another like the Hulk leaping across mountain tops -- a little too light, a little too weightless, and a lot too green. There is one particular scene, intendedly emotional flashback, where Ross turns Maguire into the butt of a bad SNL skit.

Unfortunately, Ross's screenplay - choked with the sorts of cornball lines no serious actor should be forced to read ("We didn't fix this horse - he fixed us . . .") -- is more interested in preaching obvious platitudes and imposing historical mythologies ("relief" being the best thing that ever happened to men, for example, because it made them feel like men again), than in breathing life into the players who once breathed the amazing true tale he was meant to tell.

The peripheral roles fare no better. Elizabeth Banks, as Charles Howard's second wife, Marcela, gets to do just two things: smile encouragingly and look smilingly encouraging. Though more fleshed out than his first wife, she is a non-entity. Gary Stevens, real-life jockey playing real-life jockey George Woolf, an amazing character in his own right, gets merely stock lines, though he gets them over with an easy charm and a twinkle in his eye. Kingston DuCoeur, Howard's retainer, gets to do nothing at all, as almost an afterthought token entry. And invented announcer/racecaster Tick Tock McGlaughlin, played for over-the-top cutesy by William H. Macy, who adds color and humor, seems to be written and directed for a different film altogether - a version of the Bob Uecker character in Major League, with an eccentric staccato silliness.

The film's worst misstep, though, is the pompous self-important voice-over by the pompous self-important David McCullough, talking to the audience over archival photos as if he were the invited lecturer to a junior high school assembly - PBS dignitary condescending to the masses. There are few narrators who can sound so informed and so uninteresting at the same time - or who can convey so consistently their belief that it is their voices that give weight to their message, and not the other way around. He eulogizes the past with a sanctimonious air that distracts from the strength of the stories he tells.

Hillenbrand's book closes its tale, rounds up the storylines, and brings certain ironies full circle. Ross's film pretends to lighter life lessons. "It was the beginning and the end of imagination all at the same time," McCullough droned at some point over the images. Nothing more apt could be said for this version of Seabiscuit's story.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
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