"Seabiscuit"

Director Gary Ross yearns to make this saga of the racehorse who transfixed Depression America into a Hollywood classic. But unlike the awkward real-life Seabiscuit, his version is pretty -- and lacks a soul.

By Charles Taylor

July 25, 2003 | Reading Laura Hillenbrand's wonderful "Seabiscuit" was like finally discovering a standard song you'd heard about but had never actually heard. A love song that drew a firm line between well-deep emotion and sentimentality and never strayed, the book had the mellow, melancholy beauty of a great Nat King Cole side. Hillenbrand earned every tear readers shed over her book.

Watching Gary Ross' film of "Seabiscuit" is like hearing a fully orchestrated version of the same song. It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul. The movie is a special sort of betrayal. Ross, who adapted the book as well as directed, takes everything that Hillenbrand trusted her audience to understand and makes it explicit. He calcifies the emotion of the book into standard Hollywood prestige-movie tropes. Shafts of dusty sunlight pour through the immaculately appointed period interiors. Triumphal music (composed by Randy Newman -- the bad Randy Newman) swells on the soundtrack.

The dialogue, which runs to lines like "Sometimes all somebody needs is a second chance" and "We didn't fix this horse. He fixed us -- and we fixed each other," spell out the meanings with topic-sentence baldness. Just in case we miss the import of what we're seeing, there are montages of archival photographs narrated by historian David McCullough to lend an air of gravity. The movie makes a show of being modest and sober and well-crafted, which is to say it's none of those things.

"Seabiscuit" is an imitation of classic Hollywood filmmaking that wants to proceed directly to moments of surging emotion without providing the things that get us there -- a well-constructed narrative, scenes that allow the cast to interact with each other and develop characters and relationships. Ross ("Pleasantville") is too busy reminding us that we're watching a story of Quintessential American Themes. But the most quintessentially American thing about "Seabiscuit" is that it wallows in Hollywood bushwah.

The subtitle of Hillenbrand's book was "An American Legend," and it was clear that the story of Seabiscuit, a horse written off as a failure and then guided to success by three men who'd had more than their share of bad luck, resonated particularly among Americans brought low by the Depression. But Hillenbrand was content to stick to the particulars of her story and let that meaning emerge implicitly. For all her feel and affection for the past, she never gave in to nostalgia. You couldn't feel nostalgic for the world Hillenbrand described, where horses were often raced to exhaustion, where jockeys were horribly injured or killed in races and decimated their bodies to keep their weight down. Ross gives us one discreet off-screen moment of jockey Red Pollard making himself vomit to make riding weight, and it turns his minuscule food intake into a running joke. (There's a forced politeness throughout the movie. When we see a gaggle of Tijuana whores, McCullough refers to them, unironically, as "companionship.")

Nostalgia is very much the point of Ross' movie. That's apparent not just in the fussed-over period costumes and sets. He wants us to see the '30s as a better place, or at least, in a post-Sept. 11 context, as an inspirational example for how America battles back from adversity. So instead of characters, the three men who came together with Seabiscuit become iconic representatives of the country's past, present and future. Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) the auto tycoon who owned Seabiscuit, stands for the American entrepreneurial spirit that puts its faith in the future. Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), the quiet trainer who first spotted something special in the horse -- a horseman who had ridden in the last great cattle drives -- represents the country's vanishing frontier past. And Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), the half-blind journeyman jockey, stands in for all the Americans thrown back on their own resources by the Depression.

It's not that Ross is wrong about what these men represent. It's that he's made them symbols first and characters second. The opening scenes hopscotch back and forth among the three, giving us bits of information but never getting inside them. (Seeing Tom Smith stoically riding in a boxcar with unemployed men is meant to tell us everything we need to know about him and the era.) By the time the three come together, they are too locked in to their thematic functions to develop the intricacies of breathing characters. Everyone I know who loved the book was ecstatic when they heard who had been cast in the three lead roles. (And the moviemakers have done a good job of getting an appropriate Seabiscuit -- a horse who, like the real Seabiscuit, looks about half the height of other horses, with an elongated front and a stubby rear end and crooked legs that fly out to the sides when he runs.)

It's a superb job of casting, but the actors don't deliver on the anticipation of seeing them in these roles. It's not their fault. None of the three leads are bad. It's just that they really don't get to give performances. Bridges plays the authority figure determined to be a decent man, Maguire plays boyish astonishment, and Cooper plays taciturn knowledge. Cooper fares best, maybe because Smith was so quiet that it's possible for Cooper to convey the way Smith had of assessing Seabiscuit in the way he narrows his eyes. And Cooper has made the canny choice of adopting a thin, somewhat high voice, the voice of a man not used to speaking to anyone but horses.

Next page: The actor who comes off best here -- real-life jockey Gary Stevens -- isn't an actor at all