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Tobey Maguire
Jeff Bridges
Chris Cooper
Seabiscuit
(2003)
For those who lament that Hollywood doesn't make them like they used to, Seabiscuit is just the (racing) ticket. An old-fashioned Hollywood history is a double-edged sword, of course, fudging the facts and casting familiar faces in glove-fit iconic characterizations. If Gary Ross's adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's runaway non-fiction bestseller—about the little racehorse that could—catches you in the wrong mood, you're liable to cluck disapprovingly at the screen. More likely, this handsomely mounted American epic will take you for a ride.
Seabiscuit descended from the legendary Man O'War but languished in obscurity after many wrote off the erratic horse as hopeless. The spunky stallion's ascent coincided with the interest of automobile magnate Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) and horse trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), who enlisted unlikely jockey "Red" Pollard (Tobey Maguire) to ride Seabiscuit into the history books. Ross aligns the ups and downs of Seabiscuit with the imaginative new-millennium leaps of inventive businessmen like Henry Ford, the despair of the Depression, and the promise of FDR's new deal. Seabiscuit became a popular distraction, an inspirational touchstone to America's troubled and downtrodden.
Writer-director Ross's true-believer American salesmanship—inspired by Frank Capra and honed in Dave and Pleasantville--suits this story of American entrepreneurship, optimism, and resilience. The stranger-than-fiction story of three men and a little horse is full of dramatic triumphs and reversals, and Ross gets the broad strokes right. Dramatic license is to be expected, and much of the license taken here is justifiable for the purpose of conflating history's sprawl.
In some details, however, Ross's willingness to sell out the true-life drama for presumed greater impact seems pointless or crassly manipulative, like the recasting of Howard's unfortunate son as an only-child tyke. Narration by historian David McCullough craftily sets a credible tone, allowing in some of Hillenbrand's prose and accompanying archival photographs. Some seams show in this 140-minute movie, like the thread of Pollard's family story, which Ross leaves suspiciously dangling (check the cutting room floor). Ross also marginalizes Howard's wife Marcela (and, for that matter, excises Pollard's wife) to focus on his multiple male leads.
The cannily cast-to-type stars—avuncular Bridges, rugged Cooper, and scrappy Maguire—bring their consummate skill to the enterprise. Bridges cannot help but call to mind his his indelible role in this film's superior model, Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Cooper fills in the script's blanks by embodying shrewdness while Maguire gets the best scenes, tenderly hanging out with a horse. Real-life jockey Gary Stevens does a bang-up job playing jockey George Woolf, and William H. Macy has a polarizing, over-the-top turn as the made-up radio personality Tick Tock McGlaughlin (I found his comic lift a useful tonal foil).
Jeannine Oppewall's detailed period production design—likewise mostly accurate but also trading lightly on movie dreams—steals the show. John Schwartzman's cinematography and Randy Newman's inspirational music add invaluably to Ross's sentimental throughlines. Ross wisely employs Pollard's well-known love of literature to reflect grand ideals of achievement; Dickinson's lines "We never know how high we are/Till we are called to rise" echo in Howard's assertion that "Out here, the sky is, literally, the limit"). The tried-and-true notion that the underdog's big wins are more deeply felt for each loss that comes before works to quadruple effect here. The film's pivotal bit of dialogue--"You don't throw a life away just because it's banged up a little"--folksily defends all life on planet earth, so the sky may also be the limit at America's box offices.
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