Someone once described a particularly beautiful thoroughbred as being "nothing but run." I thought of that during "Seabiscuit," because that wondrous animal was everything but run.
Biscuit, as he was called, was small, kind of ugly, temperamental, lazy and, compared with the other steeds of his time and place, pretty pitiful. The only thing he could do was beat the hell out of them just about all the time, to the delight of an American public stressed out by the Depression.
Real-life jockey Gary Stevens, as George Woolf, rides Seabiscuit to victory after regular jockey Red Pollard (played by Tobey Maguire) is injured.
(Universal Studios)
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That fabulous story is re-created -- well, distilled -- from Laura Hillenbrand's brilliant book in a movie that, although nowhere near the class of its equine hero, is quite a satisfying ride. In places, it looks a little too much like a high-gloss car commercial -- I kept expecting someone to say "rich Corinthian leather" -- and maybe we could use fewer slow-mo trumpet-driven struts across the finish line. It comes to resemble a "Chariots of Fire" for quadrupeds.
Oh, let's get all the snottiness out of the way while we're on a roll. Writer-director Gary Ross ("Pleasantville" was his breakthrough) imagines the story as a kind of populist fable, as if he's Frank Capra and the horse is the angel Clarence sent down by Joseph not only to win match races but also to give hope to poor souls. He ain't a horse, he's a salvation machine. There's also an implication that in political terms, he was the New Deal, a kind of surrogate for FDR.
This is okay for a while, but I think Ross takes it too far. After all, racing then, as racing now, is a sport of kings and car dealers. And Seabiscuit's owner, Charles Howard (big, buoyant Jeff Bridges), whom the movie presents as a little guy taking on the big guys, was a much bigger guy than the movie pretends. He was way rich, even in the Depression; he'd landed the West Coast's Buick franchise back in the teens. And, though he arrived in San Francisco with 21 cents in his pocket, he actually hailed from wealthy stock (his father was a Canadian millionaire). He had grown up in military schools and had unusual entrepreneurial and marketing skills. And he was no outsider: The movie forgets to mention (but Hillenbrand didn't) that he was one of the founding partners of the Santa Anita racetrack, and he hung out with a best pal, a fellow horse enthusiast and Santa Anita investor named Bing Crosby. So he was hardly a scruffy Capra dreamer-hero.
As for Seabiscuit himself, he was, after all, still a thoroughbred, whose lineage was noble (by Hard Tack, by Man o' War; out of Swing On, by Whisk Broom II). It's not as if he was pulling a milk wagon in Cincinnati or on the way to the glue factory when discovered by accident. He was where most racehorses are when they are seen by their ultimate owners and trainers: at the racetrack. Though smaller and spindly, his blood was as blue as, say, his ace opponent War Admiral's. He was more a fallen prince (his early career had been disastrous) than a plucky, talented working-class guy.
Still, as narrative recipe, this willed misreading of the truth works. It's as if Howard and his ragtag crew of retreads, never-weres and walking wounded were challenging the money and the power of the plump, truffle-eating snobs and debauchees of the tainted Babylon of the '30s. That's how Ross imagines Baltimore, home of Pimlico and the Maryland Club, those unstormed bastilles of privilege and pampering. Even Pimlico's stud muffin, War Admiral, is presented as a villain of the upper classes! Hey, he was Seabiscuit's uncle (both were descended from Man o' War, though in different generations).
Oh well. On it goes, handsome, thin and compelling. As Ross simplifies it, the humane Howard is shattered because of the loss of his only son (he actually had a batch of children) and the subsequent desertion of his wife. He goes to Tijuana, where he meets a beautiful young society woman. (The movie leaves out the somewhat unusual fact that she was the older sister of the wife of his oldest son!) She was a horsewoman (they met at a rodeo, actually, not a racetrack, as the movie has it). To save himself, to woo her, he gives himself over to horses -- that is, to racing.
He begins to acquire oddball geniuses. He's attracted to an old trainer named Tom Smith (well played by Chris Cooper) with almost silent ways and unusual empathy for horses, sometimes called the first horse whisperer. And a scrappy li'l rider named Red Pollard. Here again the movie goes slightly awry. Tobey Maguire plays the role, because (a) he's red-hot and (b) he's thin and short enough to just barely pass as jockey-size and (c) he has a relationship with Ross from "Pleasantville."
But if you read Hillenbrand's book, the Red Pollard you'll see in your mind's eye is as tough as brass bushings, and could chew up and spit out any 20 sensitive young Tobey Maguires. Maguire is to this story almost as Leonardo DiCaprio was to "Gangs of New York" -- too pretty to fight. Ross and Maguire play Red's off-again, on-again boxing career as a kind of joke, with the boy always getting comically knocked out. Ha ha ha, except that you don't get in the ring to be knocked out, you get in the ring with a serious aggression fixation and you want the savage joy of sending the other guy to the canvas, blank-eyed and bloody. There's no warrior in Maguire's Red, whereas Hillenbrand's Red was all warrior, a guy literally bred for combat, with a pain threshold off the charts -- he was thrown from more horses than any other jockey of his time, but he always got back on.
The last member of the team is Seabiscuit, and here again I wish the movie had been more successful at evoking the horse's personality. We see it only through the eyes of others; the animal himself seems to have no permanent character. We never make true eye contact and feel his presence as a sentient being. (Possibly this is because 10 horses, each trained to perform a certain action, depicted the Biscuit on the set.) It's just the horse, in the way that movies used to always have "the girl." And, speaking of that, Elizabeth Banks, as Howard's wife, Marcela, is pretty much "the girl."
Where "Seabiscuit" excels and thrills is in its evocation of the races themselves. Horse-racing movies are rare enough, but the few that have been made always see the race from the bettor's point of view and track the progress by his reactions. Not so here: Ross cares not about bettors, but about jockeys (a dozen worked on the production, including hall-of-famer Gary Stevens in a big role as the Biscuit's alternate rider). Ross takes us inside the frenzy, the thunder, the danger of these affrays. They feel more like cavalry action, a charge of the slight brigade. The horses shudder and shoulder together as this jock or that searches for the hole that will let him spurt through and take the lead, though it may be open only for a fraction of a second. The ground, roaring by beneath, is hard and treacherous and seems to yearn to crush your body; the other horses feel immense and violent. Dust and noise clot reality, sweat stings eyes, the wind whips, the action blurs. It takes a cool head, great strength and stamina, and a spider monkey's tiny body to master this world. "Seabiscuit" puts you in the middle of it.
And the reality itself is terrific. Seabiscuit just kept on winning and soon was on the trail of War Admiral, then the most famous horse in America (he'd won the 1937 Triple Crown). A shrewd marketer, Howard personalized the conflict between the horses and campaigned for a match race -- that is, a two-horse showdown -- against the bigger, more powerful animal. He actually took Seabiscuit on a cross-country barnstorming tour, holding news conferences in every state. National radio, the dominant medium of the day, played a big part in the campaign, too. Howard finally got the Admiral's owner, Samuel Riddle (played by Eddie Jones as if he's got a case of the gout from too much duck a l'orange and terrapin soup at the Maryland Club), to agree to a one-on-one at Pimlico in 1938. It has been called the greatest horse race ever run.
Of course, reality isn't always a tidy story editor. How nice to end the story on that excellent adventure; instead, however, the Biscuit was shortly thereafter injured (jockey Pollard had been injured before the race, and didn't ride that one) and the movie has to account for a last drama, as the injured horse and the injured man heal each other for a race they'd never been able to win, the Santa Anita Handicap. Maybe by that time, you'll be just a little fatigued of horse racing.
But generally, "Seabiscuit" is a winner. Like its eponymous hero, it runs and runs and runs.
Seabiscuit(134 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for sexual situations and violent sports images.
