Word: seabiscuit
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...SEABISCUIT. Based on a true story, this film chronicles the trials and tribulations of horse Seabiscuit and his former prize-fighting jockey Red Pollard, played by Tobey Maguire. With the help of a millionaire portrayed by Jeff Bridges, Pollard turns the once losing Seabiscuit into a champion—and a symbol of hope in the process. Racing in the midst of the Great Depression, Seabiscuit becomes an inspiration to his fans. Seabiscuit screens...
...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...
...terminally taciturn Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), who had a flinty sympathy for damaged and derided horseflesh. His principal rider was Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), too big and too angry to be a great jockey, but a man who saw something of his unpromising yet ever striving self in Seabiscuit...
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...
...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