HORSE POWER.("Seabiscuit")(Movie Review)

From 1937, a Profile of the horse Man o' War

"Seabiscuit" is a triumph-of-the-equine-spirit movie. The legendary horse of the nineteen-thirties--small, knobby-kneed, and often torpid, with an irregular gait and an uncertain temper--is all heart: he wins every race by overtaking the field just before the finish line. Intelligent but perverse, he has to want to win in order to do so, and, when he does, he makes the humans who care about him overcome their own difficulties, too. At least, that's the way Laura Hillenbrand told the story in her vigorously written account from 2001 of the amazing animal that became a national obsession. Allowing for some condensation and a few invented episodes, the movie "Seabiscuit" follows Hillenbrand's scheme closely enough. Written and directed by Gary Ross ("Pleasantville"), the picture is effective and satisfying--both realistic and poetic, and always vivid emotionally. Yet there's an element of Oscar-grabbing opportunism and bullying in "Seabiscuit." The movie is shaped as a national epic--not as a good story but as the good story, the story of you and me. Upbeat and redemptive, "Seabiscuit" at times seems no more than a galloping variant of "A Beautiful Mind" and "Forrest Gump" and "Chariots of Fire" and "Rocky" and the many other half-good, half-embarrassing melodramas about losers overcoming adversity. When a director exploits our hardwired responses to pathos, he fails, so to speak, a test of honor. For all his skill and tact, Gary Ross often fails in that way.

The movie begins oddly, with photographs of early-twentieth-century automobile factories, and a familiar voice narrating. Puzzled, we wait for the gratuitous introduction to be over. Eventually, Ross, who has learned a lot about pacing and momentum since the soporific "Pleasantville," gets the story going by separately establishing the lives of the three principal human characters and then weaving them together. He begins with a quick tour through the early career of Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), an Easterner who went West, sewed up the Buick franchise in Northern California, and became a wealthy man. As Howard, Jeff Bridges has a big, broad smile, a hearty manner, and a gleaming intelligence disguised by the heartiness; his performance is a more complex and melancholy version of the grinning, upbeat businessman he played fifteen years ago in "Tucker: The Man and His Dream." Bridges never says anything remarkable, yet he convinces us that Howard is a wonderful entrepreneur-sportsman--a generous risk-taker with superb judgment. Howard loses a son in an automobile accident (not, as the movie tells it, his only son but one of four), becomes interested in Thoroughbreds as a kind of solace, and hires Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a hardscrabble type who knows everything about horses, to be his trainer. The two have a folkloric meeting by a campfire, each sizing the other up with profound glances and a minimum of small talk. The meeting is so exquisitely polite it borders on unintentional comedy. Yet I was impressed with Ross's bold delicacy, the conservative-humanist approach to directing that evokes John Ford's strong-and-silent mythmaking manner. And, in Chris Cooper, Ross has an actor with genuine mythic qualities. Cooper turns Tom Smith into one of those unnerving people who say exactly what they want to say and nothing more. He creates interest by his insistent wariness, his mouth slightly open as if to receive the vibrations in the air, his head turning and nodding gently, the way a horse tastes the wind.

The final member of the triumvirate is the jockey Johnny (Red) Pollard (Tobey Maguire), a bitter young man abandoned by a prosperous family that has fallen on hard times. Pollard is a lousy boxer and a so-so jockey, but he has the same streak of ornery independence as Seabiscuit, and Tom Smith, watching the horse bucking at one end of a stable yard and Pollard brawling at the other, has an intuition that the two might suit each other. A calculating young actor, Maguire draws attention to himself by slowing down the pace; he holds the camera with his big eyes, his slightly goofy smile, and his scratchy voice confidingly lowered to the microphone's intimate ear. Maguire is the Seabiscuit of movie stars--he seems to lack the physical ...