July 24, 2003

I have now seen the first serious contender for the next Academy Awards.  Bill Murray in Lost In Translation.  Oh… you thought it was that other movie…

The story of Seabiscuit is a great one.  The movie of Seabiscuit is a bad one.  The trouble is the jockey.

I don’t mean Tobey Maguire.  He’s fine as the scruffy librarian/boxer/jockey that has been made of Red Pollard.  I’m speaking of Gary Ross, whose heavy hand constantly demands that we look at his film as an epic instead of as a simply great story.  Remembering back, I would say that he cut his own throat on Pleasantville in very much the same way.  Ross is a good screenwriter.  And he might be one of the best producers in the business.  The casting choices he has made have been flawless.  The ideas he has pursued have been excellent.  And his crews have been top notch.  But as a director, he manages to be short on some skills, and try way too hard at the same time.  I want to love everything he does.  But I can’t.

I especially wanted to love Seabiscuit, already well accepted as the first mature movie of the summer.  I can put up with the Bad Boys and the fast cars, but a good serious studio drama is a great change of pace.  It doesn’t really help that Miramax is waving two truly great dramas, Dirty Pretty Things and The Magdalene Sisters, under our noses during the same time.  But Seabiscuit offered the promise of size, rich sepia-tone imagery and three great performances by three great actors. 

The first 40 minutes of Seabiscuit rank right up there with dental surgery for me.  Let’s forget about “the moment you first see The Horse.”  (You will hear that phrase a lot in the next weeks, following or preceding the words “It took an hour before…”)  It was a full forty minutes before the three main human characters achieve the same orbit around this story.  Now, I believe in taking your time to set up characters.  But there is a critical awareness that is necessary to survive backstory… it can never feel like backstory. 

Let’s work backwards from the greatest epic period drama, The Godfathers, Pts. I & II.  Obviously, this is not the standard to which I hold any film.  It is too high.  But like all great films, it offers lessons for future filmmakers to understand.  In retrospect, it is wonderful to have Vito Corleone’s journey to and early days in America on film.  But the lack of that storyline did not hurt The Godfather when we first saw it.  The first images of The Godfather told us everything we needed to know about Vito Corleone.  Even before seeing his face, we felt his power, we knew he had an army behind him and we knew that he had the humanity of a man who likes animals. 

Cut to Seabiscuit.  The character of Charles Howard, played by Jeff Bridges, is the most iconic of the group.  He is a wealthy man who became wealthy by pulling himself up by his bootstraps, working hard and having a better idea.  When we get to the real story here, he is on his second wife and the losses of his past haunt him. 

Now, seriously… is this character a cipher to any of you?  To know who this guy is, do you need to see him in the bicycle shop?  To feel his world-weariness, do you need to see how his life’s greatest tragedy occurs?  Is there some sense of surprise about who this man is because of how he got a trophy wife half his age or has put his past behind him? 

There is a scene in the movie, where Mr. Howard meets Chris Cooper’s Tom Smith.  Howard, a rich guy who is at the track to buy racehorses, notices Smith working a horse quietly, away from everyone.  Later, he shows up at Smith’s isolated campsite, walking through a bush to get there.  The moment he walks through the bush, you know Howard is a little nutty and that Smith is a loner with a giant heart (this is where we first hear the line “You don't throw a whole life away just 'cause it's banged up a little“) and the relationship between the two men starts building.  This is where the movie really begins.

The same thing is true for Tobey Maguire’s Red Pollard.  Forget about the number of unanswered questions that the backstory of this character opens up.  Does a movie underdog -  who we know is too big to be a jockey and blind in one eye from the trailers and commercials (not to mention history) -  really become more sympathetic if we know how The Depression affected his family?  There is a scene in the movie, shortly before Red meets John Smith, that tells us everything about this guy and the hard times in seconds.  He is pleading with a trainer for a job, devaluing himself from jockey to sidekick to low-level groom just to get a job.

Chris Cooper’s Tom Smith, gets spared a lot of the excessive screen time, presumably because he was a loner who had a less interesting backstory.  Even so, every time we see the stoic Smith – whose threadbare name is never commented on by the movie, when the irony of its plainness is obvious – there are too many shots to too little effect.  This includes one of the worst edits I have ever seen in a movie.  Smith is on the range, chasing down some wild horses.  He lassoes one and we jump cut to Smith at night with a fire that has something cooking on a spit.  It is not, I assume, meant to be horse.  Maybe it is and they were trying to make him rugged and instantly hated by every animal lover in the theater.  I think not.

I am not suggesting that the entire first 40 minutes of the film should be disappeared.  I would keep Pollard’s first race and Howard meeting his second wife in Mexico and Smith riding with wild horses.  I would even keep a few moments of the Depression-era photography that sets the scene.  But I would lose the Ken Burns voice over that is great in a Ken Burns movie and like watching an elementary school filmstrip in an epic dramatic feature. 

But my point is not to tell Gary Ross how the details of his movie should be.  My point is that we spend 40 minutes waiting to get to the real story for absolutely no reason.  In fact, the 40 minutes is such a distraction that the film, which has problems of heavy handedness from beginning to end, has a hard time recovering. 

Going back to my original point of reference… knowing the Vito Corleone story enhances our appreciation of the entire Godfather saga.  It underscores the tragedy of Michael Corleone and brilliantly demonstrates the difference between building an empire and maintaining an empire.  But the backstory of Vito’s youth holds up as a story on its own.  Ross is trying to tell so much story that we the 40 minutes of backstory gives us very little, except for DVD extra level representational drama. 

Okay… once we get past the dental chair 40 and start the real movie that we all paid (or didn’t) to see…

Gary Ross was faced with a really difficult piece of storytelling.  Seabiscuit, a true story, does not lend itself to a classic three-act structure and Hollywood hero making.  These are classic underdogs, but “achieve the goal/fail/re-achieve” is not the road to perdition that these three are on.  Part of this is because each of the three characters does not necessarily need to succeed for the other two to succeed.  (Explaining more would require spoilers, which I’m not going to indulge in here.)  There are movies, like The Hours, where I felt that the filmmakers would have improved their dramatic flow had they focused on one character ahead of the others.  Not so here.  This is not even a triad… it is a dramatic parallelogram when you include the horse.  Very difficult. 

That said, Ross just couldn’t resist milking the emotion.  The connection to The Depression should be in the resonance of the movie, not in the foreground.  And while Ross is so busy trying to be the mythmaker, he forgets to give us the simple bricks of storytelling.  After shooting the first 40 minutes like a silent movie with lots of voiceover, he spends the next hour and a half unable to shut up and show us things. 

The second worse moment in the film is when the one really perfect movie character in the movie, William H. Macy’s Tick Tock McGlaughlin, tells Howard to look at the infield because the “real people” are turning out to support Seabiscuit.  Howard looks and gets a “wow” look on his face… and Ross never shows us what the amazing view they are looking at.  What is that?!?!  

Ross keeps creating metaphorical images that do not seem to be connected to any specific story point.  Why does one of the characters stay at the stables for one of the biggest races of Seabiscuit’s career?  It leads to a nearly-dramatic story beat, but we get no information about what led to that moment.  It’s like watching a movie designed to be a trailer instead of a movie sometimes. 

There is a comic roundelay that makes sense on its face, but if you think about it for a second, you realize how forced and unreal it is.  The punchline is that a character resumes a diet, which tells us without words what is on their mind.  The problem is, to set up the joke Ross has the character eating like they have never eaten before just a few minutes before the austerity.  It is a subtle distinction, but it is the difference between real and false.  And even in a big summer epic, reality matters.  Especially when in the end, the movie is an epic of the heart.  (Now, that’s a great pull quote!)

I do love one sequence of the film which brings Pollard and Seabiscuit together, sharing their recuperations.  (Trying to be unclear here…)  But again, Ross almost ruins this gentle and lovely sequence by milking the metaphor to within an inch of its life, by repeating a certain visual more than the one time it took us to get the idea. 

I am truly sorry to find myself unable to like Seabiscuit.  Most of the critics I know are doing their very best Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, acknowledging the problems and giving it a pass.  Of course, it is a very different pass.  Their expectations for Full Throttle were so low, the fact that they survived the screening without vomiting drew near applause.  Here, they desperately want a movie for adults to succeed in this season of teen-intended junk.  And that is a noble cause, I suppose, making summer safer for “real” movies. 

But I am here to let you know that it is safe to feel like Seabiscuit has kicked you in the privates four times.  The way Gary Ross directs, you can be sure that if you were kicked once, you’d be kicked four times.

READER OF THE DAY:  Auntie EM writes:  “After reading (Wednesday's) column, I'm seeing a whole new marketing opportunity for you & your "Passion" stance: little woven bracelets with the WWDD (What Would David Do?) logo.  You could send them to Mel & his production company, the Wiesenthal Center, AND to your buddy Rog... hee, hee!”

NOTE:  There is so much not-smart-aleck mail about The Passion that I am going to give it a day and lay it out properly tomorrow.

E ME:  What part of “glue factory” didn’t you understand?

Back to Top

The Matrix Reloaded. Reloaded.
Read Part One
Read Part Two