Three men and a horse
For the first half-hour you can't imagine how Seabiscuit is ever going to get out from under the truly awful ideas that writer-director Gary Ross has inflicted on it. Ross, whose last film was the clumsily sentimental fable Pleasantville, begins by giving a mythic overlay to the story of the celebrated Depression-era racehorse, an unlikely champion because of his puny size and his early rebellious nature.
The historian David McCullough provides a rambling voice-over narration that offers familiar images of '30s destitution and truisms about hope battling despair. Meanwhile Ross moves the three protagonists--Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), the automobile manufacturer whose only child dies in a car accident; the erstwhile jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), whose itinerant parents abandon him tearfully when he lands his first (adolescent) job, as a stable hand; and the laconic westerner Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), who has an unerring instinct for horses--toward one another in a blocky, graceless fashion. The only agenda that seems to govern this lengthy opening section is the impulse to make a big, Oscar-worthy picture.
But then the story begins to seep through. It's the one Laura Hillenbrand told in her best seller, but that Hollywood, incredibly, hasn't gotten around to before (you can't count the fatuous 1949 The Story of Seabiscuit, with Barry Fitzgerald as the horse's invented Irish trainer and Shirley Temple as his dimpled granddaughter). The faith of these three men in a horse that was bred as a loser (though his father was Hardtack and his grandfather the great Man o' War) and Howard's faith in his eccentric, homespun trainer and his oversized, eruptive jockey surmount a set of obstacles so daunting that it's easily the stuff of legends. So is the animal, not because of his extraordinary beauty--the characteristic of most great movie horses, like The Pie in National Velvet and The Black in The Black Stallion--but because of his unlikeliness as a champ. When Seabiscuit, trained in the west and thus emblematic of a natural, roughshod spirit, defeats the eastern mount War Admiral, winner of the Triple Crown, the movie swells with feeling.
