Seabiscuit (2003)

Seabiscuit: 2003, dir. Gary Ross. Seen on DVD (Jan. 30).
Welcome to yet another Prestigious, Important movie about the Triumph of the Human Spirit. Hope you brought some caffeine. And maybe a barf bag.
Seabiscuit is a trite, sappy movie composed entirely of cliches. The storyline is right out of a film-school textbook, except that the first act is far too long. You can predict exactly what is going to happen, and how. Every character is an archetype, and they never, ever go against type.

I’m told that I shouldn’t blame any of this on the book, although I haven’t read it. I have no idea how this rates as an adaptation. But as a movie, Seabiscuit is blandness personified, with swelling music and gorgeously filmed scenes that tell you exactly when to cry and when to smile through your tears and when to feel proud and happy to be watching these people who have overcome adversity and the odds in order to achieve what is in fact a very superficial brand of success if you think about it. You’re not supposed to think about it, though. You’re supposed to react entirely with basic emotions.
(Yes, I know Casablanca is a movie composed entirely of stereotypes with the most static and dull beginning you ever imagined, and so on, and so on. But … well, this ain’t no Casablanca. Might be closer to Havana.)
Both Chris Cooper and Jeff Bridges are entirely wasted here. Watching Cooper, you wonder how he would have fared if he’d been born 20 years earlier and been in a Sam Peckinpah film, and you absolutely don’t want to think about such a superior filmmaker while watching this crap, because it makes everything seem even worse. And the movie perpetrates a terrible misuse of Jeff Bridges. You keep thinking it’s Beau Bridges, and then you realize that no, Beau’s little brother is getting old. Jeff Bridges should not look old. Or if he does, he should look old and cool.
Plus, Bridges is wearing these dull costumes that make him indistinguishable from anyone else in the film. Seriously, I was confused for awhile because I thought Bridges was in one scene (where the boy’s parents send him off to live elsewhere) and it turned out to be a minor actor whom we never saw again.
Despite the high-budget look of the film, Seabiscuit is sometimes confusing in a low-budget, dumbass way. I already mentioned getting someone else mixed up with Bridges. In a later scene, after his son dies, he scoops up someone on the porch and hugs them … and I honestly didn’t realize until I saw the scene again in the “making of” extra that it wasn’t his wife he was embracing, it was his dead son. The shot was at an awkward angle. Maybe this stuff isn’t confusing if you watch it on a movie-theater-sized screen, but I was not watching it on that small of a TV so that seems like a poor excuse.
The first hour of the movie is terribly confusing about the passage of time. We get a date of 1918 (or whatever) at the beginning, but we can’t tell how much time has passed, and in fact it took me a minute during the “stock market is crumbling” sequence to realize that we were in fact up to 1929 and this wasn’t some minor earlier recession. It would not have been at all difficult to show us which year we were in at a given point, and it was terribly frustrating not to be able to tell exactly where and when we were, and how much time had passed.
In addition, the director keeps cutting away from the main action because, as he said in the aforementioned “making of” extra, that’s not what he thought was important. We don’t see the son die because Bridges’ reaction is more important than the death … but we see every damn bit of action leading up to the death, and then we are snatched away to the terribly cliched ringing phone in Bridges’ office to tell him about it. That’s memorable. Sure.
I liked writer/director Gary Ross and his movies (Big, Dave, Pleasantville) before now, and I am terribly sorry he has given us such a treacly bowl of porridge as this film. I am increasingly tired of Big Prestige Films that are full of beautiful photography and bravura acting and yet show us nothing new, nothing that we could care about, nothing to surprise or interest or entertain us. Seabiscuit is such a movie. It is a huge sucking waste of talent in the pursuit of a story that has been better told in dozens and dozens of better movies (my favorite possibly being the low-budget sleeper Breaking Away).
I don’t want to hear the excuse that you can’t change much when you’re filming a historical non-fiction event, either. You sure do have choices. You can choose not to spend an hour switching back and forth between characters before they meet, trying to get us to learn to love them, but actually boring the hell out of the audience because we want the damn movie to begin already, please. You can avoid such eye-rolling plot occurrences such as the horse and the jockey both getting leg injuries and both having to recuperate together for the Big Comeback Race. Yawn. Eyeroll. Even if you’d never heard of the horse Seabiscuit before this movie, you know how the damn thing is going to end. This movie is entirely lacking in suspense.
I was prepared to like this movie, because it had actors I liked in it (Cooper, Bridges, and William H. Macy) and I generally like seeing anything set in the 1930s. I was not automatically prejudiced against it. I was very sorry to be so disappointed. At least the horses were pretty, but I would have rather seen Jeff Bridges with a ponytail.