Seabiscuit

Synopsis: An American racehorse mitigates post-depression suffering.

Memo to budding film-makers – make sure your star can talk. A nags-to-riches story about a little racehorse that could, probably looked promising on paper – particularly when the paper was Laura Hillenbrand’s runaway bestseller. 'Seabiscuit' the novel won a nose-bag of awards and rightly so – it’s a riveting read. Seabiscuit the film however suffers the same fatal ailments of other biographies, chief among them a chronically episodic structure. Listless acting, a four-legged star lacking charisma and no authentic sense of occasion don’t help either.

Any coverage of 'a book on the life' can’t help but show that life in vignettes of action. The narrative flow is sorely impacted by gaps in time and character development. It has to be if we’re not to watch a film with a running time spanning the lifetime of the star – a veritable equine version of The Truman Show.

As with all adapted screenplays, the difficulty is showing just enough of the story without encumbering proceedings. This often means literary precepts such as depth of character and the myriad social, emotional and psychological increments that make a life a life, are discarded. We are given a cluster of symbolic scenes, each representing a particular period in a character’s or story’s growth. The result is almost always a pastiche of events lacking coherence and realism – for instance early in Seabiscuit we are asked to accept that the horse becomes the darling of the common man after a single long-odds win.

Jeff Bridges’ dreamy performance as owner Charles Howard suggests the 4 time Oscar nominee cheerily acknowledges this role won’t garner him a 5th. Toby Maguire is pleasant as jockey “Red” Pollard and Chris Cooper is completely wasted as taciturn trainer Tom Smith. The photography is strong although it is clearly impossible to film a horserace realistically. Close-ups of jockeys hanging onto horse’s necks during races resemble earnest kiddies on frantically spinning merry-go-rounds. Laughable heavy-handed symbolism is everywhere – horses led from stables as new-fangled automobiles take their places as the doors close on a sinking sun - the dawning of a new era, get it? And don’t get me started on string sections that well up each time our hero gallops gallantly across the turf. Seabiscuit is a plodder.

 

 

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