Movie Review: Seabiscuit

You buy 60 race horses, retrain them and teach six to "become" Seabiscuit. Then you run them around a track at 45 mph with cameras and microphones in their faces and hope nobody and no critter gets hurt! That was a tall and dangerous order but filmmakers pulled it off!

In Seabiscuit, Tobey Maguire plays Johnny "Red" Pollard, a kid who loves horses and whose family loses everything in the Great Depression of the 1930's. Mom and Pop leave Red at a race track because they can no longer afford to take care of him. The boy grows up without a real home riding in rough "bug boy" races and boxing to stay alive.

Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a cowboy who sees progress changing the way he makes a living, finds work in Wild West shows and at race tracks because he has a great ability to calm horses down. Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) is a wealthy car dealer who also loses big in the stock market crash. When his son dies in an auto accident, he's devastated. Eventually he marries rich Latina Marcela (Elizabeth Banks) and goes shopping for a horse. He hooks up with Tom Smith who convinces him that Seabiscuit, a bow-legged, smaller than average thoroughbred racehorse who has been trained to lose (to help train other horses) is the horsie for him and Tom becomes the horse's trainer.

When owner, trainer, horse and down-on-his-luck jockey come together, magic happens. Seabiscuit starts to win...bigtime. Although accidents, injuries and other disasters strike, the gang goes on to run one last winning race.

Overall, this is a film about the triumph of the underdog or, in this case, the underpony. Everyone (including Seabiscuit) in the film is a loser in search of a break. Together, they overcome all odds and are the heroic symbol for the little guy, the down-and-out American who has no job and no heroes left. You root right along with the crowd for "the biscuit" and Tobey to win! Horserace sequences are exciting and give you a jockey's eye-view of the track. It's refreshing to see a good film that doesn't involve special effects action and stuff blowing up every two minutes. Although little time is given to character development, acting is very good. William H. Macy is really funny as an old-time radio announcer who reports on the horse races with wacky sound effects and great style.

What I didn't need was the Documentary-style historical footage explaining all about the mindset of the country at the time of the Depression and why we so needed a hero. All this with a PBS-style narrator to boot. This pulled me out of the action and I thought I was in a history class...a more entertaining and interesting class, yes, but still I didn't see the need to "set the scene" so much. Storywise, there is just so much in the book about the three main characters that the filmmakers had trouble combining the stories and not coming up short. I would have liked to have seen more about Tobey's character ...why didn't his parents ever contact him? Did he ever have a girlfriend? We know that the real Red Pollard fell for a nurse but...not in this version. However, the film is based upon a 400 page book so something had to go.

Even with its flaws, Seabiscuit will probably win your heart and make you wanna stand up and cheer when he noses past the finish line and I always love a film about underdog winners!