Word: rossing
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...black girl on a shoot, and she didn't speak to me for two weeks," he says. Resistance can be cloaked in euphemisms. "I've had a photographer's agent tell me, 'He doesn't know how to shoot black girls,'" he says. Sometimes things are more direct: Michael Ross, an agent with the modeling firm Marilyn, says that when he's asked to send models for a casting call, frequently "the client will specify 'No Asians' or 'Caucasians only...
...many good things about writer-director Gary Ross's captivating adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling history of the legendary horse is its refusal to anthropomorphize him. He's what all race horses are--a bundle of ganglia, to which intelligence and personality can be imputed but never proved. Luckily for Seabiscuit, he fell into the hands of three guys as buffeted by fate as he was, and in healing him they healed themselves--and incidentally turned this unlikely critter into a folk hero of Depression-era America...
...Ross is a filmmaker with a taste for inherently sentimental tales (he wrote Big and Dave, wrote and directed Pleasantville) but the discipline not to play mawkishly to our sentiments. You will be moved by Seabiscuit--but not to tears...
...Ross's other major gift is patience. He takes his good-natured time with this movie, filling out his principals' backstories before introducing the horse. He also adds documentary sequences (narrated by David McCullough) that lightly, effectively fill in the social history that shaped these lives. Finally, this is a man unwedded to the three-act structure, perhaps because history is rarely so neatly structured...
...rare--these days damn near impossible--to see a big-bucks, big-studio production take the kind of chances Ross unselfconsciously takes here. What eventually steals over you as Seabiscuit unfolds is that its New Deal America is a lot better than the one we inhabit--more generous and shyly exuberant, less noxiously self-centered and confident. Maybe that's just a movie illusion. But it wouldn't hurt us--politically, socially, humanly--if we began believing we could re-create that sweet, sustaining dream. --By Richard Schickel