SEABISCUIT (2003)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Gary Ross

SCREENWRITER: Gary Ross

FILM STARS: Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Gary Stevens, William H. Macy, Eddie Jones, Michael O’Neill, Michael Angarano

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Laura Hillenbrand

TYPE: Non Fiction

PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 2002

COUNTRY: USA

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1999

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: Seabiscuit: An American Legend

NOTES

GENRE: Sports Drama

WORDS: If I hadn’t seen the film and knew that Seabiscuit was a real horse I would have thought this was a remake of the Australian film, also about a real horse champion, Phar Lap (1983).

Maybe there were a lot of horses inspiring nations during the Great Depression, but it is uncanny ….

Wikipedia:

Seabiscuit (May 23, 1933 – May 17, 1947) was a champion thoroughbred racehorse in the United States … A small horse, at 15.2 hands high,[1] Seabiscuit had an inauspicious start to his racing career, winning only a quarter of his first 40 races, but became an unlikely champion and a symbol of hope to many Americans during the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabiscuit

Phar Lap (4 October 1926 – 5 April 1932) was a New Zealand-born champion Australian Thoroughbred racehorse. Achieving great success during his distinguished career, his initial underdog status gave people hope during the early years of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phar_Lap

Both films have the the usual adversity in sports tropes the only difference being the money spent on them.

Seabiscuit (as is Phar Lap) is full of those “we will lift you up” passages about underdog (sic) horses, and the plucky people that believe in them and in doing so change themselves into better people.

The only surprising thing about the films is that they are made in an era well after the Golden Years of Hollywood where this sort of film was prevalent (I don’t want to guess how many horseracing pictures were made).

Both stories are true but whatever “hope” they gave to the populace I don’t know. Sure racing enthusiasts would have been excited. Owners, handlers, and jockeys would have been ecstatic as the money rolled in. But the average person working for less than minimum wage? Both horses were both famous as a result of continually winning races, maybe that gave hope to keep on keeping on, though I’m convinced that the horses knew there was a depression going on.

Call it cynical but I have to look at this sort of mush with some cynicism

This film is based on a book magazine writer Laura Hillenbrand. It is well researched, though not something I would or will read but it (seems to) benefit from the fact that she is not a sports writer (or a historian). (After some spot reading) Her account of the participants, equine and human, are well written, and vivid in that putting you there magazine style. She won a ton of awards.

Without any big moral questions the book was a must for Hollywood. Adversity overcome always makes for feelgood entertainment.

What is real and what is mythologised in the book, I don’t know, but when coming to the screen, even if all is accurate, there is a tendency to write and condense stories making tropes stand out even more, as they do here.

The film has the feel of a prestige picture. You can tell more care was taken with it (there was an eye on the Oscars who lap this up) as it had the right art direction, updated period music (Randy Newman perfect for this), and a story script with some superlight philosophical asides written by the director Gary Ross. Ross would go on to write and direct The Hunger Games (2012) and Free State of Jones (2016) both different to Seabiscuit but both also superficial and glossy. His best film is the intentionally (but not really) superficial and glossy Pleasantville (1998) which co-starred Tobey Maguire. The script never gets any deeper than any number of animated films aimed at kids (Ratatouille (2007) in reverse even) but that’s what makes the bums on seats happy.

Tobey Maguire was still riding high in his career and he makes a better jockey than he does a Spiderman (I thought he was a miscast Spiderman … aren’t they all). The acting is otherwise fine. Jeff Bridges is in his “old man” career phase, the least interesting of his career phases, and then we have the always solid Chris Cooper, William H. Macy, Ed Lauter and Sam Bottoms. Elizabeth Banks is in it as well.

It’s a long movie, 141 minutes (in the Golden Years it would have clicked in at 90 mins), and it feels it. It’s pleasant to watch even if some of the cliches and dialogue are hard to swallow … I mean, McGuire’s closing monologue has something like,  “We didn’t fix Seabiscuit, Seabiscuit fixed us, and in a way we all fixed each other’.

Really? Yes, .. and we all made money whilst getting “fixed”.  Money is never central to the story even though it is (or rather the lack of it is) central to the Depression and central to horseracing. The question you have to ask is would horseracing exist if there wasn’t gambling. There is only one answer.

The direction, like the action, is okay. Though both sit below the look and sound of the film … the art direction, the recreation of the time, the music. Everything is done to evoke time and place. And it does, like an expensive version of the TV show The Waltons (1972-1981).

The Oscars love period films … and Seabiscuit was nominated for seven Oscars all reflecting that (Best Picture, Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing) … though, oddly it won nothing.

Seabiscuit’s story was filmed once before, The Story of Seabiscuit (1949) with (an older) Shirley Temple and Barry Fitzgerald.

I don’t need to see it again and I don need to read the book … if I need a dose of Depression era horseracing I will go to the greatest of them all, the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races (1937).

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