2004 Oscar Dialogue: Seabiscuit

Stephen Himes | Was Seabiscuit Behind the Invention of Social Security?

As Gary Ross would have us believe, it was Seabiscuit that pulled the nation through the Depression. I understand how Seabiscuit is a symbol of the American spirit — as Randy Newman's score insisted you notice every time something inspirational happened. And I enjoyed Tobey Maguire's performance as Red Pollard. But the whole movie struck me as a shorthand, Cliff Notes exercise in adaptation. Take Chris Cooper's character, Tom Smith. He just sort of wanders in from the plains and starts, well, horse-whispering. He's the Bagger Vance figure — that pseudo-spiritual guru that helps you find your feel, or whatever. It didn't feel fleshed out enough; absent some sort of potentially embarrassing backstory, there could have been more conflict with the other two men. But there's not, really. In fact, the story avoids several potentially dramatic conflicts, as when the substitute jockey just hands Red back the reins, even though he's damn near crippled. It just seemed that Seabiscuit avoided conflicts that might have made the story less INSPIRING!

So what might have been cut out to make room for that fleshing-out time? I would nominate David McCullough's history lessons, for one. All of what Ross wanted to say should have come directly from the narrative of the movie. We see the poverty, we see the strife, we see the automobile replacing the horse — but he insists on using cinematic postcards to arouse nostalgia for a bygone era. I know that's a middle-school show-not-tell argument, but if I wanted to watch a history lesson on PBS, I would have stayed home and watched PBS. That time would have been better allocated to his characters.

I'll grant that Ross's development of his three main characters is practically nonexistent, and doesn't even come close to the vivid descriptions of Red, Tom and Charles Howard in Laura Hillenbrand's book. I was a huge fan of the book, which got to me mainly because I didn't know how any of the stories were going to end. I'm a sports nut but I've never really been into horse racing, so every race in "Seabiscuit" the book and every bad turn taken by Pollard and Howard (not so much Smith, who always seemed to know what he was doing) had me biting my nails.

The movie, obviously, couldn't do that for me, though I did find myself sweating how Ross was going to screw it up. I didn't like his Pleasantville much at all, and the trailers for Seabiscuit oversold the story's whole "uplifting" angle. I practically cackled when I saw the trailer that had Maguire crying "I can't … see … out there!"

So it surprised me to no end when Seabiscuit started working on me from the opening scenes. You mention the wasted space of the McCullough narration, but it was kind of cool to begin the movie with what amounts to a 45-minute montage, driven by a surfeit of subtly inventive editing and camera movement. It's a bold opening gambit, and like a lot of daring moviemaking, it doesn't always work. Ross stays too long on some moments while breezing too quickly past others, and some of his boldfaced dialogue insults the audience's intelligence, as though he were desperately trying to assure that everyone "gets it."

But I think that upfront quality has a larger meaning, which I'll get to later. For now, I just want to praise the way Ross just bit down hard and said, "we've got to cover 30 years of backstory before the horse shows up, and the movie won't have any depth if we don't, so let's just go for it." Maybe he could've found a better way. Maybe he took the lazy way. But he certainly didn't take the safe way.

Stephen Himes | Like an Analogy

You didn't think it was "safe" to prop up his story with David McCullough narration? I felt the opposite: He trades on the authority of a PBS voice to shorthand his themes, without embodying them in the characters and narrative itself.

My main complaint about the movie is that Gary Ross doesn't seem to measure the characters as precisely as he should have. Let's look at a single scene: Chris Cooper's mystical horse trainer gets Seabiscuit a lady friend that's supposed to settle him down a bit. Of course, this does the trick; the two lie together in the barn, Cooper smiles at them, and we get the idea that this companionship will bring the Biscuit an inner peace that will bring out the best in him. Then we cut directly to Jeff Bridges and his wife standing together — singing hymns in church, no less. But these characters haven't been drawn so that this makes sense. We're given a lot of reason to think that Bridges' Charles Howard character has a lot of anger, maybe even violence in him, but we never see any evidence of it. Charles is all soft hands and smiles, a benevolent huckster molding the team of Seabiscuit and Red into his personal race for redemption. Heck, he handles that "wild" post-divorce foray to Tijuana like a gentlemen. He and Valerie share a few tequila shots, they get married, she stands by her man. But if we don't see any anger, resentment or bitterness — if he's not a danger to himself — then what's there for her to tame, or for him to sublimate into his drive for Seabiscuit's success? I understand the analogy Ross wants to make between Charles and the beaten-down Seabiscuit, but he just ends up angelizing Charles and his wife. (I know angelizing isn't a word, but I'm going to use it — as in, they keep "angelizing" Morgan Freeman.)

Noel Murray | It's the Horse, Of Course

I don't think the McCullough narration in and of itself is all that radical, but the decision to run it through such a long introductory sequence is either really brave or really lazy. I've settled on the former. It reminded me of Michael Mann's wild opening montage in the otherwise iffy Ali.

Anyway, I think Ross has to make clear the historical scope of this story. At the time the horse shows up, we're mired in a Depression-era United States where excessive faith in industrialization has spawned a generation of the obsolete. One of Hillenbrand's major themes was how Howard, Smith and Pollard transformed the too-small, too-obstinate Seabiscuit into a champion by reapplying knowledge all but lost when the century turned, and the movie follows the same path, showing how the useless were made useful again during a decade of shaken confidence.

If the characters aren't much more than sketches, it's because they don't have to be (though I do think the performances, especially Maguire's, add some soul). These folks are stand-ins: for power, for labor and for wisdom. And what makes Seabiscuit more than just a good movie — what makes it one of the best of the year (though I should be honest and say that I'd rank it only in the Top 20, not the Top 5) — is the way Ross uses McCullough to stand in for the other nonequine major character in the movie, that being the American public.

McCullough's role is to express the consensus, to say, "This is what Seabiscuit meant to a large group of people." There can be no ambiguity about it. The public's own participation in making Seabiscuit an icon proved to be a healing act — a restatement of the national character.

If Ross presses too hard on this message in the film, it's because he has faith in the old ways, which in his case translates to an affection for creaky old Hollywood morality plays. The problem is that Ross often misinterprets the appeal of retro entertainment, ignoring the sophistication and swing of the classics while exaggerating their squareness. At times, corn threatens to overwhelm the more elegant flavors in Seabiscuit, especially when characters serve up lukewarm platitudes like "he just needs to learn to be a horse again" and "you don't throw away a life because it's banged up a little."

But the film survives because those lines are true. And just as you don't quickly dispose of a flawed life, the same could be said of crowd-pleasing movies. Seabiscuit has too much going for it to shrug off. It succeeds because it's an object lesson in how ingenuity is old wisdom recycled for a new age. Passing on the Seabiscuit legend is in the tradition of repurposing the past, so that even when the storytellers play on the audience's emotions, it's not a shameless act. When an audience cheers Seabiscuit, they're affirming that they're the kind of people who can appreciate the beauty of a skillfully trained longshot. It's an affirmation.

Stephen Himes | Peed in the Trough

Hell, how can I attack a movie if part of its glory is that it's a little banged up? It looks like somebody peed in the horse trough this colt of criticism was going to drink from! You definitely point at Ross's best move in the film, taking the time before the big race to cut to the American people tuning into the race on the radio. I like those old inspirational movies, too. Seabiscuit's characterizations should still be stronger, though. As you say, Ross exaggerates the "squareness" of the those classics, but those are still exaggerations. He honors his own misperceptions of those old Hollywood movies; He indulges his own simulacratic vision of old Hollywood. That's the same annoyance as in Pleasantville. My complaint is that Ross seems to pardon himself from more carefully measuring his characters because he's "representing" the standards of the past. Still, there's no denying the power of Seabiscuit, and his reconstructions of the races are top-rank. I especially liked his integration of the race strategies (especially when those were symbolic themselves) into the drama of the race. Still, though, it's too bad there wasn't as much attention paid to the human relationships. Because of this, I have to pull the reins, rather than let my enthusiasm for the film run wild.

Noel Murray | And Down the Stretch They Come

Yeah, there's no more annoying critical argument than one one critic says that a movie is kinda stupid and another critic says "Well, it's supposed to be!" But that's not really what I'm saying. The movie would benefit if the lead characters were better developed, and that is a flaw … just not a crushing one, especially in a movie that deals in iconography. (And I won't even get into the overrated semi-cameo by William H. Macy, whom I usually love but who I thought was a distraction here.)

Anyway, I have no expectations that I can sway the opinion of people who thought Seabiscuit was creaky. If it makes you cringe, it makes you cringe. Heck, I expected it to make me cringe, and I already loved the story. But the thrillingly edited racing sequences, the rich sound design and the glowing John Schwartzman cinematography … it's genuinely exciting. I ultimately decided to swallow my cynicism and just go where I was being led. And at the end, watching the movie with an audience that was cheering every race, I really felt like I was a part of something larger than myself — something true. This movie is like populism in pill form, and since populism has its roots in respect and trust for your neighbor — a faith that they're trying as hard as you to make the right choices — Seabiscuit ended up being well-worth rooting for.

E-mail Stephen Himes at stephenhimes@hotmail.com.

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)