In my other writing life, I aspire toward fiction, so I know from experience that the first rule of fiction is to show, not tell. This means that if you want to depict an angry, drunken man, upset about his wife's death, then you write a scene in which the reader can infer the man's situation from his behavior. You do not write, "John was an angry, drunken man, upset about his wife's death . . ." because it is not interesting or vivid.
Seabiscuit, the new film based on Laura Hillenbrand's 2001 bestseller, has not mastered this first rule of fiction. Maybe it is because the movie is based on a non-fiction account and not a novel that the characters seem so thin and perfunctory. Or maybe it is the scholarly voice-over narration by the historian David McCullough, which makes Seabiscuit often seem less like a movie and more like the PBS documentary that already covered this same material. Whatever the case, the filmmakers insist on telling us, in simple black and white, everything we should think and feel about the story and characters, while deliberately excluding any interesting gray areas.
The movie tells the story of three men and a horse who come together to create a racing sensation that thrills America during the 1930's. The three men are Red Pollard, an undisciplined, oversized young jockey played by Tobey Maguire; Charles Howard, a wealthy businessman played by Jeff Bridges, who has taken to breeding and racing horses; and Tom Smith, an eccentric and almost preternaturally gifted animal trainer played by Chris Cooper. The horse is Seabiscuit, who is too small to race and who is also, like his jockey, angry and undisciplined. The movie follows them as the three men find, train and race Seabiscuit, who, against all odds, becomes a champion racehorse and captures the hearts of Depression-ridden Americans.
The story swings predictably between triumph and tragedy, self-consciously paralleling the courage and grit of its long-shot heroes with the heart and resourcefulness of never-say-die Americans who survived through the Great Depression. But the movie, swelling with its Aaron Copland-esque soundtrack, and practically bleeding lush color over the edge of the frame, never feels convincingly set in the Depression. It's more like a fantasy of the Depression in which even poor people look dapper in their jackets and jaunty caps. The movie seems afraid to get dirty, physically or emotionally.
To bolster its persistent claim as a great American story, Seabiscuit even deliberately echoes Citizen Kane, the greatest and perhaps most quintessentially American of films. It does this with an awkward scene in which a teenaged-Red is given to a horse trainer who can help usher the young man into the proper arena for his gifts.
The (big) difference is that Citizen Kane is all irony and disappointment while Seabiscuit is all rosy-colored triumph. Seabiscuit is actually much more in the tradition of Rocky and every other sports film ever made in which the plucky underdog rises up to dethrone the reigning champ, whose weakness is invariably his or her smug arrogance. People obviously like this story since it continues to be made over and over again and, indeed, people at the screening I attended applauded every time Seabiscuit won a race. I wanted to point out to them that a horse is pretty much unmoved by applause but, hey, I guess they were enjoying it.
I might have enjoyed it more myself, and maybe not even minded the tired sports story, if I had cared at all about these characters. The screenplay never really develops their inner lives or any meaningful relationships between them. They hang out together a lot, bonding over their love of the horse, I guess, but not seeming to have much else to say to one another.
The shallowness of the characters makes the actors come across a little shallow as well. Tobey Maguire tries hard to play fierce, but we never believe it from this naturally sensitive actor. Jeff Bridges, one of America's greatest and most underrated actors, has to play through a shovel-load of corny and cliched dialogue. And Chris Cooper, who recently won an Oscar for his witty performance in Adaptation, seems bland and disinterested. Only William H. Macy, as a rapid-talking radio personality, gets any juice into his role.
Some readers may argue with me that, because Seabiscuit is based on a non-fiction account, it does not necessarily need to follow the aforementioned first rule of fiction. But all films, if they are not documentaries, are fiction and they must operate by fiction's hard and fast rules. Seabiscuit doesn't and it is why the final voice-over speech by Tobey Maguire doesn't resonate. He has to tell us things about the character's lives that the movie should already have shown us.
Reach the reporter at michael.b.green@asu.edu.
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out of four
