|
Generally speaking, if your film is about the Great Depression,
you are going to have to show poor people to get your point
across. And yet Seabiscuit, the new megastar feel-good
movie, attempts to omit just that detail. Director Gary
Ross tries to finesse this absence with a few tasteful,
historical photos of poor people in cars going west, poor
people with new jobs created by Roosevelt, and then,
Roosevelt himself smiling and shaking hands with the poor.
It’s all so bourgeoisie. Despite the narrator’s (David
McCullough) obvious attempts to connect Seabiscuit to
the hopes and dreams of the millions of downtrodden, they
are relegated to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind status. But
then again the rest of the film is hardly a vast improvement.
Seabiscuit is the story of a racehorse that won an
important match race and the Santa Anita during the 1930s,
but you wouldn’t know that from the introduction. The first
30 minutes deserve to be completely cut. A parade of montages
slowly and painfully tell the stories of the three major characters’
lives while employing a storybook narrator to keep it all
historical perspective. Tom Smith (Cooper) is
the Cormac McCarthy-type cowboy; Red Pollard
(Maguire) is the failed wreck of a jockey; and Richard
Howard (Bridges) is the rich philanthropist who
has buried his son. None of the information conveyed in any
of these scenes feels genuine, partly because they’re poorly
acted and shot, and partly because the whole half hour is
a series of brief—but not brief enough—cutaways. Howard’s
son suddenly appears dead on screen. Pollard’s parents abandon
him in a 30-second cliché. Smith has no backstory but the
director feels inclined to waste our time by showing his character
in dramatic scenery, repeatedly. And then, another 15 minutes
pass before the three characters even meet. The movie might
have been much more rewarding had it begun with the characters
and then conveyed their stories through, you know, acting.
Instead, characters are restricted from interacting with each
other as much as possible. They stand around and deliver lines
out to the audience like a high school play while trying desperately
to avoid eye contact with the others. Perhaps Maguire, Cooper,
and Bridges are just indicating the shame they feel from the
work turned in here. Despite past accolades, all of them sleepwalk
through their roles.
What’s interesting is that Gary Ross’s last movie, Pleasantville,
featured a cast and crew with enough similarities to call
the two films stepsisters. Ross directed and wrote both; Randy
Newman scored both; Tobey Maguire and William H. Macy
starred in both. However, while Pleasantville gets
to be Cinderella, Seabiscuit is both of her snotty,
older sisters combined. That movie had a variety of tonal
and thematic similarities but was carried out with all the
grace and charm that this film lacks. With voiceovers from
both a narrator and Tobey Maguire, Seabiscuit feels
insecure about communicating its important redemption message,
and so we are mercilessly beaten over the skull by dialogue
that explicitly tells us that the horse is here to save us
from poverty and economic crisis.
There are small touches of genuine filmmaking that go a little
way towards, ahem, redeeming the movie. Macy revels in his
role as the radio announcer, Tick Tock McGlaughlin, and manages
to move the plot while making the audience chuckle. Maguire
and real-life horse jockey Gary Stevens make an interesting
pair of competitors and friends. Newman’s score and John
Schwartzmann’s cinematography, both loud and obvious,
stir the heart nonetheless. And every once in a while, one
of the main stars delivers a line that reminds you why he’s
a star, but then has to duck his head so someone can belt
out a one-liner made for the trailer.
—Zack Schenkkan
|
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
