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Seabiscuit comes up lame
BY PETER KEOUGH
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Seabiscuit
Directed by Gary Ross. Written by Gary Ross based on the book Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand. With Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, William H. Macy, and Gary Stevens. A Universal Pictures release (134 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle/Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.
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The real story?
Movies about actual people, or for that matter actual horses, hardly ever give you the unvarnished truth. That’s the case in 2003, and it was even more so back in 1949, when The Story of Seabiscuit came out. Directed by David Butler, who did the Walter Brennan horse-racing films Kentucky and Glory, it starred Barry Fitzgerald as trainer Shawn O’Hara, Shirley Temple as his niece Margaret, and Lon McCallister as jockey Ted Knowles. Shawn is the stand-in for Tom Smith, and Ted for Red Pollard; Margaret is there because Hollywood didn’t think Seabiscuit without Shirley would draw audiences. Shawn and Margaret are just off the boat from Ireland to help out at the stable in Kentucky where Seabiscuit’s a yearling and Ted is the contract rider; later Shawn goes to California to work for Charles Howard, and he persuades Charles to buy Seabiscuit and Ted’s contract. Ted falls for Margaret, but she won’t marry a jockey because her brother died when his horse fell at the last fence in the Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree, so Shawn has to bring the two lovebirds together by arranging for Margaret, who’s a nurse, to be the one to take care of Ted when he’s hospitalized after a fall. In most respects, The Story of Seabiscuit makes Gary Ross’s film look like a documentary. The story is as hoky as Margaret’s Irish accent when she tells Ted that her uncle is fey and gets his information about horses from the little people. Black and Chinese as well as Irish stereotypes are flaunted. And the Biscuit himself seems almost an afterthought (the movie was released in England as Pride of Kentucky). Red Pollard did, however, marry the woman who was his nurse when he was hospitalized after his second accident, so in that respect Butler’s film is truer than the no-sex-please Seabiscuit. But the real merit of The Story of Seabiscuit is that it incorporates actual footage of the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap (which Seabiscuit lost by a nose to Stagehand), the War Admiral match race, and the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap (the Biscuit’s victorious last bow). For the run-up to the first two races, the movie cuts into black-and-white to match the footage. It’s a small price to pay for authenticity: nothing in Seabiscuit matches the frisson of seeing Charley Kurtsinger hit War Admiral repeatedly in an attempt to stay with the Biscuit as the horses turned for home. In general, Seabiscuit compacts and simplifies — and sometimes falsifies — the story as told in Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend (which to this veteran of 50 years of racewatching has a bad case of hero worship, but the facts are mostly there). In the movie, Seabiscuit becomes the best in the West, whereupon Charles Howard persuades the folks at Santa Anita to up the purse of the Big Cap to $100,000 in hopes of attracting War Admiral. Sam Riddle says no, so after Rosemont beats the Biscuit by a nose, Howard heads East, drumming up public support for a match race along the way. Riddle finally gives in; Pollard gets hurt and can’t ride in the big race, so George Woolf takes over and wins. Seabiscuit goes lame in his next race and has to wait a year before he can try for the Big Cap again, but by that time Pollard is back in the saddle, and the two of them finish out winners. The facts are a little different. The Big Cap was a hundred grander from its inception, in 1935. Seabiscuit lost it by a nose to Rosemont in 1937, at which time War Admiral (whom I seem to recall the movie’s describing as 18 hands, or at least as big, whereas in fact he was just a couple inches taller than Seabiscuit and probably lighter) had just turned three, after a promising but not outstanding two-year-old season. A few weeks after War Admiral won the Triple Crown, Seabiscuit took the Brooklyn Handicap at Aqueduct, the beginning of a series of Eastern wins that included the Massachusetts Handicap at Suffolk Downs, so Sam Riddle would have had no reason to call him a Western plater, as he does in the movie. On the two occasions when Seabiscuit might have met War Admiral in the fall, the track was sloppy and he was scratched. Early the following year, Pollard was injured at Santa Anita, and the great George Woolf rode Seabiscuit in the Big Cap, losing by a nose to the lightly weighted (100 pounds to the Biscuit’s 130) three-year-old Stagehand. The Biscuit went East once more. Twice he was set to meet War Admiral, in a match race at Belmont and in the Mass Cap; both times he came up lame. Meanwhile Pollard suffered the horrific leg injury that’s shown in the film; he didn’t ride Seabiscuit again till 1940. The match race came off the way the film shows it, but Woolf had been the Biscuit’s rider all year. And though Riddle said he was willing to meet Seabiscuit in the Rhode Island Handicap at Narragansett 11 days later, Howard took his horse back to California. The film tells us that no horse could look Seabiscuit in the eye; in fact, in 10 photo finishes, he won five and lost four, with one dead heat. There’s no mention of the controversy surrounding his final race, when the Howard-owned Kayak II ran second and rumors abounded that jockey Buddy Haas was under orders to let the Biscuit win (The Story of Seabiscuit shows Haas sitting chilly while Pollard whips his horse home). Or of the match race between Seabiscuit and Bing Crosby’s Lingaroti, when Woolf and Spec Richardson did their WWF thing down the stretch and racing got a black eye. The real Seabiscuit did consistently beat the best horses in training while carrying top weight and often setting track records. That’s what Seabiscuit might have given us more of. He was a true American legend. Just not a sanitized one. BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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For those who suffered through the Great Depression, Seabiscuit, the scrappy racehorse, offered hope in the ultimate triumph of the underdog. For those suffering through this grim summer at the movies, Seabiscuit, Gary Ross’s adaptation of the splendid Laura Hillenbrand bestseller, offered hope that there might be something worth seeing. I hate to be a neighsayer, but unlike the thoroughbred, the movie proves a poor bet. Not that Ross didn’t have a rough track to run. As Hillenbrand suggests in her book, the legend of Seabiscuit isn’t just about a talented quadruped — it’s also the tale of three representative heroes and an allegory of America in transition from an era of individualism to a culture of mass production and consumption. Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges, reprising the genial capitalist from Tucker: The Man and His Dream), Seabiscuit’s owner, stars as an optimistic entrepreneur (his invocation of "the future" is one of the film’s many catch phrases) who adapted well to the transition, making a fortune selling Buicks; but he turns from horseless carriages to horseflesh after a personal tragedy. This avocation brings him in touch with two others less blessed by progress, "Red" Pollard (Tobey Maguire, vague and sleepy where he should be pungent and precise), a half-blind, Bard-quoting journeyman jockey down on his luck, and Tom Smith (Chris Cooper, putting in the film’s best performance), a horsewhispering, plainsdrifting "crackpot" and brilliant trainer. Bringing them together is the runty, gimpy-legged former loser of the title, an also-ran given a "second chance" (another one of those phrases) when Howard bought him for peanuts in 1936 as an overraced three-year-old with meager prospects. Trainer and jockey turned Seabiscuit into a winner, and Howard’s prescient knack for PR turned him into a sensation. The horse so captured the public’s imagination that millions listened to his races on the radio. By 1938, at a time when the world was plummeting into totalitarianism and war, Seabiscuit (so Hillenbrand notes) got more newspaper copy than either Roosevelt or Hitler. Of all these stories, the one Ross seems to have taken most to is Howard’s success as a huckster; the film is largely a compendium of soundbites and platitudes illustrated by montages, all of which make Seabiscuit seem like its own 134-minute trailer. Worse, Ross at times ventures into Ken Burns territory, reining in his narrative, such as it is, for archival footage of soup lines or sepia-tinged stills of Detroit factories backed by the twangy Randy Newman soundtrack and the namby-pamby bromides of perennial Burns collaborator David McCullough. At times Seabiscuit almost breaks free of these self-imposed handicaps to achieve the kind of excitement and emotional satisfaction it deserves. Central to the ’Biscuit legend is his rivalry with War Admiral, a magnificent animal who was the pride of the Eastern elite of horseracing while Seabiscuit was the champion of the upstart West. Adding to the drama and irony is Pollard’s astonishing bad luck — an accident before the match race could be set up nearly took off his leg and ended his career. And Ross touches on the intensity between Howard and War Admiral’s owner, Sam Riddle, as Howard tries to use the media to get Riddle to agree to have their horses square off. But instead of developing these charged narrative lines, the director depicts the race as a one-sided battle between the common horse and the entitled aristocrat (though the two thoroughbreds were both descended from Man o’ War, War Admiral being Seabiscuit’s uncle). He cuts from the race’s bit-chomping pre-start to those damned sepia stills again — folks across America listening on the radio. And the remainder is, like almost all the racing footage in the film, chopped up and pasted together into an inert and ersatz heap, like a dance number in Chicago. The only time Seabiscuit springs to life is when it makes fun of its own wrongheaded sensibilities. Representing the media of the late 1930s, William H. Macy’s radio host Tick Tock McGlaughlin orchestrates his bells and whistles and salty one-liners with far more verve and hilarity than the film does its own vapid gimmickry. Seabiscuit sells short the extraordinary lives it purports to celebrate, and in the end I couldn’t recall a single vivid image of its hero (who’s portrayed by a half-dozen different horses) running free.
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