Flak Magazine: Seabiscuit, 07-31-03

Seabiscuit is a sports story, not a cinema story, in spite of the best efforts of director Gary Ross and his team. They have dressed up Laura Hillenbrand's nonfiction account of the small horse facing long odds into a tidy little present for the Academy Awards. The film calculatedly hits all the usual marks — heck, the first thing you see is that serious Copperplate Gothic font; the first thing you hear are the gentle sus4-dominated string orchestrations that seem to follow Academy princes like Frank Darabont and Kevin Spacey everywhere. Ross even borrows Ken Burns' documentary style, with narration by David MacCullough to toss in some education on the Great Depression. But all he's got is a pig in a dress, which merely reiterates one of cinema's tried-and-true tenets: Real-life sports moments don't make good movies.

First off, the casting is a textbook demonstration of "hit or miss." The first third of the movie, entirely Seabiscuitless, sets up the film's tragic triumvirate as largely silent and beleaguered. Given the performances Jeff Bridges and Tobey Maguire turn in, this is delightful; the longer we have to wait for Maguire, as down-and-out jockey Red Pollard, to craftlessly squeak out his lines, the better. And Bridges, as promoter Charles Howard, falls into his bad habit of taking subtle moments and shouting them to the last row in the house, like when his son dies and his wife leaves him. His nuances are fine, but once The Voice gets going, duck for cover — although Bridges' natural tendency to sell every line fits perfectly once he starts promoting Seabiscuit across the country. Much better is Chris Cooper as Tom Smith; his silence as a laconic horse whisperer is the perfect antidote to the overactors sharing his screen. Once the men are united, though, these carefully demonstrated histories — that soak up the opening 35 minutes — barely matter.

Strangely, the horse only barely matters as well. Seabiscuit is no more a character than one of the cutting-edge automobiles Howard used to sell all over California. Smith talks about 'Biscuit far more than he talks to the horse, and Pollard only has throwaway lines a 4-year-old could predict: "There we go, now!" "Let's step it up!" "Yah! Yah!" Seabiscuit is in no way abused or neglected, but when they're not taking him around the track for a spin, they park him in the garage, gas him up for his next race and get back to their own business.

The main underdog strain culminates at the 100-minute mark with a Pimlico match race between 'Biscuit and Triple Crown winner War Admiral. Pollard, having broken his leg in 11 places in a raceweek accident, listens from the hospital as former rival George Woolf (played by Gary Stevens, a real-life jockey — ooh!) rides Seabiscuit to victory. It's here that the incompatibility of the historical record and Ross' pursuit of conventional drama butt heads.

Seabiscuit's victory isn't the panacea Ross thinks it would have been. Those viewers that don't know the history of the race could nevertheless see it coming from the first frames. Ross seems to think that despite this knowledge, the thrill of the underdog's victory will compensate for some of the film's creative lapses (the rip-off of Ken Burns, the underdevelopment of most characters, the use of Moby in a period film).

If Ross wanted to highlight this race as an inspirational coup, he wouldn't have followed it with 40 boring minutes about healing — additional healing, the kind that toppling the mountain apparently can't provide. Seabiscuit ruptures a tendon and lands next to Red on the DL. A questionable vignette follows both of them to recovery, affirmed by an ephemeral return to the track. This is where a sports story differs from a cinema story; comeback or not, the good sports story ended with Seabiscuit's win at Pimlico. For that part of the movie, the match race is the most important thing, as it would be in sport. To shift gears to the character scope of a cinema story and be asked to care for Pollard's recovery is disorienting. If he was fated to heal, you largely wish he would get on with it so the lift of the second peak could be judged against the first. But Ross's failure to make this type of drama interesting just shows that the only real dramatic energy he can rely on is the thrill of the sport, the basic adrenaline rush of a race. Like watching a movie that's only impressive for its special effects, you get a sad and sinking feeling when you realize just how impotent the rest of the drama — the movie-drama — really is.

In addition, Seabiscuit may have come too late. The viewing nation was prepped for this back in early June when Funny Cide made a run at the Triple Crown. The Bob Costases and Jim Hubers of the sporting world were telling us that much as Seabiscuit healed the nation during the Depression, Funny Cide could in light of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war. Unfortunately for Ross, Cide ended up bowing to Empire Maker in the Belmont Stakes; the director could have used the prolonged horse buzz a Funny Cide Triple Crown would have provided. Standing on its own legs, his film looks like it's been dressed up in Oscar garb to fool new, horse-loving viewers into thinking it's solid. Seabiscuit certainly was; Seabiscuit isn't. It's a great story for a SportsCentury, but not for the silver screen.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)