BEFORE: From boxing over to horse racing - hey, if I see an opportunity to link my schedule to current events, I'm going to take it. The sports world is abuzz right now with a Triple Crown contender, and the Belmont Stakes are tomorrow, so I'm perfectly positioned. Anyway, seeing Mickey Rooney last night made me think of the film "The Black Stallion", so it put me in a horse-racing mood - for the actual acting link, though, it's good to note that Rooney was in this year's film "The Muppets", co-starring with Chris Cooper (last heard in "Where the Wild Things Are"), who plays Seabiscuit's trainer in tonight's film.
THE PLOT: True story of the undersized Depression-era racehorse whose victories lifted not only the spirits of the team behind it but also those of their nation.
AFTER: I've heard good things about this film over the last few years, and for the most part it did deliver. Maybe the metaphors were a bit heavy-handed, but how else do you tell a story about the Great Depression? (Or any giant topic, such as World War II) You do it by focusing on a small number of individuals, and you let the audience extrapolate from their experiences. (Another story-telling problem - how do you get inside the mind of a horse? You can't, so the next best thing is to get inside the heads of the people around him.)
Here we have three men (oh, yeah, and a horse) at different stages in life, who had financial or personal setbacks (or both) and needed a second chance. The implication is that their problems were everyone's problems, even if that isn't technically true. The country was hurting, and everyone was looking for a way out, some kind of redemption, and the metaphors here (and there's no shortage of them) suggest that Seabiscuit and the men around him were seen as a symbol of hope and rebirth.
Take one wealthy car-dealer/horse owner who's mourning the death of his son, a crusty unorthodox horse trainer who rescues unwanted racehorses, and a reckless jockey abandoned by his parents who's got anger issues, and link them to an undersized horse who's been mistreated and injured but still has the competitive spirit, if someone can just take the time to learn how he thinks and treat him the right way. You can almost see in advance the way the pieces are going to fit together - the voids in each character's life that need to be filled, and the way the other characters might be able to do just that.
Maybe it's because I approach these things from a filmmaker's point of view - but I sometimes say that the seams of a film are showing, I can see the way that the pieces were stitched together. Certain things that happen because the screenplay NEEDED them to happen. This film is a whole bunch of seams, as you might expect when you stitch together the life-stories of three men (oh, yeah, and a horse). The opening half-hour is a study in parallel editing as the three men's experiences are shown - the rules of parallel editing demand that their stories are going to intersect and influence each other, so by the time it does, it's almost a fait accompli.
As with auto racing and boxing, I admit that I know jack squat about horse racing, outside of what I've seen in the movies. But at least this film gives us a good deal of race footage, and a fair amount of racing strategy. That's good, I'm here to learn - why else am I still watching movies every night - but the question with any historical drama then becomes, did it happen exactly this way? The first thing I learned was that Seabiscuit never ran in a Triple Crown race. Before this film, I thought he was a Triple Crown winner, but nope - he was a West Coast horse, mostly racing at Santa Anita, and he was the leading money-winner in the U.S.
I did some research on Seabiscuit and his owner, Charles Howard, and found out a few things that the movie left out. First off, Howard had 4 sons - not just the one depicted in this film. I understand why the film left out the other three, to heighten the tragedy of the youngest one's death, but it still seems like an odd omission. Especially when his oldest son, Lindsay, was also in horse racing, and co-owned a stable with Bing Crosby, with horses that often competed against Seabiscuit. Why was this left out? A father vs. son rivalry seems tailor-made for a movie, though obviously it would have made the film longer and possibly too complex.
Secondly, Howard is seen meeting his second wife, Marcella Zabala, behind the scenes at a racetrack. Wait, his son Lindsay was married to someone named Anita Zabala - any connection? Yep, Charles Howard married his daughter-in-law's older sister. Nothing wrong with that, but again it seems like an odd bit of information to leave out, and it means he probably didn't just meet her randomly in the bleachers.
For that matter, Seabiscuit's grandfather, Man o' War, was also the father of War Admiral. So in the famous match between the two horses, Seabiscuit was racing against his uncle. I'm sure this kind of thing goes on all the time, and Man o' War sired a large number of championship horses, but I'm wondering why it wasn't mentioned. It would have heightened the rivalry, but might also have confused viewers. Plus, it shoots down the argument that War Admiral's owner had about "superior breeding" - if the two horses shared a common lineage, how could one have been perceived as bred better?
The metaphors of the film are made more powerful by these omissions, however, so in a way they're justified. But obvious powerful metaphors are still obvious metaphors - and then the film makes them even more obvious by repeating them in the dialogue. Pointing out that the three men sort of fixed each other, and in helping the horse, the horse helped them. Yeah, thanks for that, but I was already there. I guess in a way I beat the film to the ending by a couple of lengths.
My other problem concerns the character of the radio guy who comments on the world of horse-racing, complete with all kinds of old-timey phrases like "the cat's pajamas" and "the bees' knees" and a bunch of wacky sound effects. He's like a one-man morning zoo crew before there was a need for such things. Yeah, maybe some people used to talk that way - but the film's setting shouldn't excuse it. Corny dialogue is still corny, and advancing the film's plot through "tell" rather than "show" is still a cop-out, even if it's slightly goofy.
If you're playing along at home, you can probably guess what movie is next in the chain...
Also starring Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Tron: Legacy"), Tobey Maguire (last heard in "Cats & Dogs"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "W."), William H. Macy (last seen in "Marmaduke"), with a cameo from my buddy Peter Jason (last seen in "Red Heat"), playing (what else?) a reporter.
RATING: 7 out of 10 slide-whistles
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