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Seabiscuit by a mile
Jul. 28th, 2003 10:58 amMini-review of Seabiscuit
I had, quite literally, been counting the days until Seabiscuit opened. I adored Laura Hillenbrand’s book, and was incredibly excited about seeing such a pedigreed production of it — Chris Cooper, Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges... it looked like it was going to be perfect.
Then I mistakenly overscheduled myself, and couldn’t get to it until Sunday, and in the meantime started hearing some of the fair to middling reviews of it, which made me wonder how I’d feel once I finally got there. It’s really easy, when you love a book so much, to build up the potential for the film translation so much in your head that either the film fails miserably or you’re blinded to its faults. I was afraid I’d be in the latter camp, and possibly, I am: the truth is, it may be a less than stellar movie, but I wouldn’t know, because it was everything I could have hoped for.
Stories of personal redemption and overcoming huge obstacles are my favorites. The fact that this story was so much about the redemption of these three broken men, a broken horse, and this broken country hit a lot of my buttons, plus it had horsies, so that was a bonus. The book conveyed the nearly ruined, lonely lives of Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and Tom Smith (probably my favorite parts of the story were Smith’s, because he was the last of the true cowboys and I have such a soft spot for the old west) so beautifully and quietly, counterpointed by the ruined America they lived in, that it touched a chord a lot of us had forgotten existed, I think. Books never make me cry, though movies can; this book actually made me sniffle a number of times, and during the movie I found myself constantly tearing up.
It could be that I was filling in a lot of the spaces in the movie because I’d read the book, but I’m not so sure. What the filmmakers did beautifully was to let the beginning setup, and the introduction to these three men’s lives, play out in its own time and space. The movie is astonishingly quiet and spacious at the beginning, and we’re not introduced to Seabiscuit himself until about a half hour in. It seems as if audiences have lost the ability to watch stories with such open spaces and quietude in them, movies with little dialog or action, where the actors are showing us the emotions and telling the tales subtly. Seabiscuit lets us simply enter their lives, be introduced to them as they all cope with the personal and professional disappointments that leave them so broken and ready to be healed by this broken, ignored horse.
There’s also been some criticism leveled at the film’s use of documentary-style narration and still photos, but for me, this worked beautifully to convey the idea that we are almost watching a documentarian’s film of real lives, rather than actors attempting to recreate real human beings. The man who narrates these portions (David McCullough) has done the voice for Ken Burns’s documentaries, so his voice provides a kind of aural cue about how the personal is unfolding within the larger political and civil context. The filmmakers used some of the documentary-style techniques in unusual ways, too, to move the story forward. I was particularly surprised by their choice to use a documentary style for the beginning of the ballyhooed race with War Admiral; it was a surprising move that worked breathtakingly well for me, largely because it was so unexpected.
The movie never suffers from the “tell instead of show” syndrome that so many books of real-life events and characters suffer from; we’re given the opportunity to discover Howard’s empty heart after his son dies, or Smith’s closed-off loneliness, totally on our own time. The narration fills in details for us about the state of the country, and how these men fit into it, with subtlety and quiet style. Cooper and Bridges are two of my favorite actors and their excellence is almost a given; I’d never been much of a fan of Maguire’s until recently, but he captured, with such delicacy and understanding, the demons and pain and loneliness inside Red Pollard that I’ve completely changed my feelings about him.. A scene where both Pollard and Seabiscuit are healing together was one of the more quietly uplifting moments I’ve seen in years; all the force-fed examples of uplifting movies in the past few years pale in comparison. Maguire will get a lot of attention for this and he deserves every bit of it. And William H. Macy, another lovely fave, turns in a hysterical performance as a kind of amalgamation of a number of reporters and journalist types; he’s nothing like anyone in the book but he’s a riot every time he shows up.
The horse racing sequences are incredibly exciting, and the camera techniques they created so that they could put the audience in the thick of the pack really paid off. Visually the movie is stunning, but over and over it comes back to the human elements, to how Seabiscuit helped heal these people and came to be a representation of healing for America. The filmmakers never lost sight of the goal — to tell a personal story of redemption and understanding that’s both touchingly tragic and uplifting at the same time. A lot of critics have slammed the movie for trying too hard to worshipfully film the book without straying too far. And even though I realize that my own adoration of the book may be blinding me to the movie’s faults, I just can’t agree with that assessment. The director told me he trusted me to understand what was going on, he didn’t tell me how to feel, but let the stories carry me there, and that’s something I value more than anything else in filmmaking. Yes, it’s a very Hollywood-style movie in the way that only Hollywood can make them, but that, to me, isn’t a criticism. Most of the best movies ever made came out of the Hollywood picture system, so a movie taking me back to the days when a personal story about three broken people and a spectacular but misunderstood racehorse could be successfully made is something to value rather than criticize.
As soon as I left, I wanted to go back again, I wanted to read the book again. If a movie can make a person feel that way, it doesn’t really get any better than that.
ETA: I almost forgot to mention, for Buffy fans: Danny Strong (Jonathan) has a tiny, tiny role in the earlier part of the movie. He only gets one line, but it's nice to see him.
I had, quite literally, been counting the days until Seabiscuit opened. I adored Laura Hillenbrand’s book, and was incredibly excited about seeing such a pedigreed production of it — Chris Cooper, Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges... it looked like it was going to be perfect.
Then I mistakenly overscheduled myself, and couldn’t get to it until Sunday, and in the meantime started hearing some of the fair to middling reviews of it, which made me wonder how I’d feel once I finally got there. It’s really easy, when you love a book so much, to build up the potential for the film translation so much in your head that either the film fails miserably or you’re blinded to its faults. I was afraid I’d be in the latter camp, and possibly, I am: the truth is, it may be a less than stellar movie, but I wouldn’t know, because it was everything I could have hoped for.
Stories of personal redemption and overcoming huge obstacles are my favorites. The fact that this story was so much about the redemption of these three broken men, a broken horse, and this broken country hit a lot of my buttons, plus it had horsies, so that was a bonus. The book conveyed the nearly ruined, lonely lives of Charles Howard, Red Pollard, and Tom Smith (probably my favorite parts of the story were Smith’s, because he was the last of the true cowboys and I have such a soft spot for the old west) so beautifully and quietly, counterpointed by the ruined America they lived in, that it touched a chord a lot of us had forgotten existed, I think. Books never make me cry, though movies can; this book actually made me sniffle a number of times, and during the movie I found myself constantly tearing up.
It could be that I was filling in a lot of the spaces in the movie because I’d read the book, but I’m not so sure. What the filmmakers did beautifully was to let the beginning setup, and the introduction to these three men’s lives, play out in its own time and space. The movie is astonishingly quiet and spacious at the beginning, and we’re not introduced to Seabiscuit himself until about a half hour in. It seems as if audiences have lost the ability to watch stories with such open spaces and quietude in them, movies with little dialog or action, where the actors are showing us the emotions and telling the tales subtly. Seabiscuit lets us simply enter their lives, be introduced to them as they all cope with the personal and professional disappointments that leave them so broken and ready to be healed by this broken, ignored horse.
There’s also been some criticism leveled at the film’s use of documentary-style narration and still photos, but for me, this worked beautifully to convey the idea that we are almost watching a documentarian’s film of real lives, rather than actors attempting to recreate real human beings. The man who narrates these portions (David McCullough) has done the voice for Ken Burns’s documentaries, so his voice provides a kind of aural cue about how the personal is unfolding within the larger political and civil context. The filmmakers used some of the documentary-style techniques in unusual ways, too, to move the story forward. I was particularly surprised by their choice to use a documentary style for the beginning of the ballyhooed race with War Admiral; it was a surprising move that worked breathtakingly well for me, largely because it was so unexpected.
The movie never suffers from the “tell instead of show” syndrome that so many books of real-life events and characters suffer from; we’re given the opportunity to discover Howard’s empty heart after his son dies, or Smith’s closed-off loneliness, totally on our own time. The narration fills in details for us about the state of the country, and how these men fit into it, with subtlety and quiet style. Cooper and Bridges are two of my favorite actors and their excellence is almost a given; I’d never been much of a fan of Maguire’s until recently, but he captured, with such delicacy and understanding, the demons and pain and loneliness inside Red Pollard that I’ve completely changed my feelings about him.. A scene where both Pollard and Seabiscuit are healing together was one of the more quietly uplifting moments I’ve seen in years; all the force-fed examples of uplifting movies in the past few years pale in comparison. Maguire will get a lot of attention for this and he deserves every bit of it. And William H. Macy, another lovely fave, turns in a hysterical performance as a kind of amalgamation of a number of reporters and journalist types; he’s nothing like anyone in the book but he’s a riot every time he shows up.
The horse racing sequences are incredibly exciting, and the camera techniques they created so that they could put the audience in the thick of the pack really paid off. Visually the movie is stunning, but over and over it comes back to the human elements, to how Seabiscuit helped heal these people and came to be a representation of healing for America. The filmmakers never lost sight of the goal — to tell a personal story of redemption and understanding that’s both touchingly tragic and uplifting at the same time. A lot of critics have slammed the movie for trying too hard to worshipfully film the book without straying too far. And even though I realize that my own adoration of the book may be blinding me to the movie’s faults, I just can’t agree with that assessment. The director told me he trusted me to understand what was going on, he didn’t tell me how to feel, but let the stories carry me there, and that’s something I value more than anything else in filmmaking. Yes, it’s a very Hollywood-style movie in the way that only Hollywood can make them, but that, to me, isn’t a criticism. Most of the best movies ever made came out of the Hollywood picture system, so a movie taking me back to the days when a personal story about three broken people and a spectacular but misunderstood racehorse could be successfully made is something to value rather than criticize.
As soon as I left, I wanted to go back again, I wanted to read the book again. If a movie can make a person feel that way, it doesn’t really get any better than that.
ETA: I almost forgot to mention, for Buffy fans: Danny Strong (Jonathan) has a tiny, tiny role in the earlier part of the movie. He only gets one line, but it's nice to see him.
