Movie or documentary? Well the producers of Seabiscuit combine the two to tell the real-life story of this 1930s racehorse. The film, based on the book of the same name by Laura Hillenbrand, goes back and forth between real, still black & white photos with Ken Burns’ favorite narrator David McCullough lending his voice and your normal moving pictures with current actors and horses providing the story. Basically director Gary Ross (he also wrote the screenplay) uses the documentary portions of the film to provide the background information that makes the Seabiscuit story so compelling and inspiring.

The story of Seabiscuit the horse is that this small, abused, and lazy horse keeps getting put down, but keeps getting back up and becomes a champion and an inspiration to a down and out country that is in the grips of the Great Depression. But the film (and the book) also explores the redemption of the human characters involved with the little horse that could. For instance Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges, K-PAX) moves west in the early 1900s as a bicycle salesman and repairer only to become a top car salesman and owner of many dealerships in the Bay Area before the depression hit. Though financially he makes it through, he losses faith in the future and technology when his young son (Kingston DuCoeur) dies in a car crash. This splits his family apart as his wife Annie (Valerie Mahaffey) leaves him. Howard then heads to Mexico for a quick divorce and to partake in some activities that are illegal in the US at the time, and then ends up falling in love with a much younger woman in Marcela (Elizabeth Banks, Catch Me If You Can). The two marry while Howard becomes reacquainted with horses, and this new/old love leads him to yearn for the past and so he decides to start his own stables since cars and technology betrayed him. Mixed in with this story of Charles Howard are the stories of Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire, Spider-Man) and Tom Smith (Chris Cooper, The Bourne Identity). Smith is a horse trainer that ends up a transient with the economic crash who has an unconventional approach to training horses. He also becomes the one responsible for Howard buying Seabiscuit after Howard hires him to be his horse trainer. Meanwhile, Red Pollard came from a Canadian middle-class family that valued literature, but was also hit hard from the depression and become homeless. Eventually Red is able to use his horse riding skills to eke out an existence as a part-time jockey and horse hand at racing stables in California (in between boxing matches that he always loses). To where all three of these down-and-out men and this beaten down horse come together to redeem all of themselves, and provide hope for the future to a downtrodden nation.

Just a few others to mention that are in the film are Michael Ensign, Michael O'Neill, Annie Corley, Ed Lauter, Royce D. Applegate, Gary Stevens, Eddie Jones, Paige King, and William H. Macy (Jurassic Park III) as the perfect Tick Tock McGlaughlin.

It is not the acting, the writing, or the moviemaking that makes Seabiscuit a good movie, it is the great story that the filmmakers are able to capture on film. Now Tobey Maguire, Chris Cooper, and Jeff Bridges put in good performances, but what carries the film is the uplifting story. I will say that Gary Ross (last directed Pleasantville) does a great job with the screenplay and the directing to make this feel more like Americana than Hollywood. All-in-all a good film with a wonderful story that garners eight couches out of ten on the About-Movies.com scale, but please don’t clap at the end (it is not a live performance).

Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:46:09 AM

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