Seabiscuit (2003) Review

Much like Robert Redford's 1998 summer epic The Horse Whisperer, Gary Ross's faithful adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling novel celebrates the power of personal redemption.

Tobey Maguire in Seabiscuit (2003) (Courtesy of IMDB)

In the late 1930s, a nation of wounded souls sought comfort in the exploits of its baseball, boxing and horseracing heroes. Long before the NBA, the NFL and the expansion of the NHL to outposts such as Phoenix and Nashville, the United States was dominated by these three spectator sports.

And as sometimes seems to happen over the course of history, Depression-era America could not have hoped for a more emblematic messenger of hope than the tandem of downtrodden jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire) and his scrawny racehorse Seabiscuit, who won Horse of the Year honors in 1938.

Seabiscuit is the thrilling tale of how Pollard, abandoned as a teenager by his parents, scratches and claws his way across the American countryside before finally teaming up with a resilient entrepreneur (Jeff Bridges) and laconic horse wrangler (Chris Cooper) to pull off an upset for the ages.

On the one hand, the film is a refreshing gallop back in time to the gentler crowd pleasing charms of movies such as the Australian horse racing drama Phar Lap (1983) and the Peter Yates comedy-drama Breaking Away (1979). But thanks to the intricate father-son dynamics that circle around the characters played by Maguire, Bridges and Cooper and the fusion of documentary footage about the Depression narrated by historian David McCullough, Seabiscuit also comes about as close as the films of today's gold standard bearer of intelligent big screen entertainment, Tom Hanks, without the benefit of Hanks actually starring in the darn thing.

In between his various script doctoring assignments, writer/director Gary Ross has always managed to maintain an enviable balance between art and commerce in his own films. With Big, Dave, Pleasantville and now Seabiscuit, the Los Angeles native proves once again that it is possible to embrace the moral of a story without allowing it to interfere with the fundamentals of good storytelling.

Ross also understands the importance of good casting. Although he is extremely well served by the rock solid presence of Jeff Bridges and the return of his Pleasantville cohorts Tobey Maguire and William H. Macy, who is flat out hilarious as fast-talking radio reporter Tick Tock McGlaughlin, the acting honors in Seabiscuit clearly belong to Chris Cooper.

Picking up where he left off with his Academy Award winning performance in Adaptation, Cooper constructs an elaborate characterization that relies on everything from a turn of the century cowboy's diary and a lower lip prosthetic to an artificially modulated higher pitch voice, then seamlessly hides it all away to fashion a masterfully iconic representation of the foibles of an eccentric horse trainer.

It's certainly a far cry from the bag of tricks that Barry Fitzgerald used to play trainer Shawn O'Hara in The Story Of Seabiscuit, Shirley Temple's sanitized 1949 version of the same real life events.

In all likelihood, it would have taken an actor such as Walter Brennan or Walter Huston to match the level of Cooper's performance as Tom Smith.

Along with protagonists whose teamwork bucks the current trend in Hollywood of defining male heroism as the battle of one individual against the world, Ross has succeeded in capturing the visceral thrill of horse racing in a way that arguably has never previously been done on film. Thanks to the technical expertise provided by retired jockey Chris McCarron, the casting of fellow Hall of Fame rider Gary Stevens as Butler rival George Woolf and the painstaking recreation of the recorded details of each race, Ross is able to duplicate the mysterious thrill and emotional investment that comes from watching a bunch of thoroughbreds race towards a finish line.

On the surface, it might appear shocking that a newly appointed Hollywood heartthrob such as Maguire is without romantic interests in Seabiscuit. But there is in fact a lot of romance in the film. It's just not the kind we are used to seeing. Through their love of both the sport and their prize winning horse, the characters played by Maguire, Bridges and Cooper eventually rehabilitate themselves and come to terms with their personal pathways through the Depression.

In much the same way that The Horse Whisperer appealed predominantly to women, there is a small chance that Seabiscuit will resonate more in the long run with male moviegoers, since it is an action movie and a guy film first and a period piece second. However, given the dearth of entertainment this summer that resides below a certain threshold of decibels and edits, movie audiences young and old are likely to luxuriate in the opportunity of spending a couple of hours in a kinder, gentler movie theater.