Seabiscuit is too long and risk losing its audience!

Seabiscuit is the first major Hollywood film that is being pushed for consideration of next year’s Academy Awards and it’s a worthy choice. Nevertheless, I do wish a lot of the travelogue and Ken Burns’s type historical photos were cut out because this film would be a tight little gem if it were under two hours. Instead, Seabiscuit spends too much time explaining what it was like to live during the Depression and why the telling of this story is necessary.

Director Gary Ross has cast three terrific actors – Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges and Oscar winner Chris Copper (Adaptation) – as three troubled and broken men whose joy of life is revived by a small horse who becomes a winner. Maguire plays jockey Red Pollard who grew up in a prosperous family that abandoned him after the 1929 crash destroyed their life. From his early teens, Red has drifted from one job to another usually riding as a jockey but often performing in bare-knuckle fights that eventually cost him his sight in one eye. Chris Cooper is Tom Smith, a loner who is most at home sleeping under the stars and communing with animals especially horses. His way of life is vanishing as modern things like automobiles and fences crowd the landscape. And, lastly, Jeff Bridges plays Charles Howard, a prosperous automobile manufacturer whose life is wrecked by the devastating loss of his son. Although his second marriage to Marcela (Elizabeth Banks) has begun the healing process, it is his meeting with Smith that gives him the best outlook on life in the terrible times that they live in. “Every horse is good for something,” Smith tells Howard. “You don’t throw a life away just because it’s a little banged up.”

Howard, Smith and Red Pollard meet in Mexico, the only place that Americans could go to have fun, i.e., gamble, drink alcohol, etc. because the Americans had shot themselves in the foot by imposing Prohibition over the nation. The film tells us that the Mexican “border towns” were born and these were living places for mischief back in the early Twentieth Century. Seabiscuit illustrates this era in a fascinating, colorful way and it is the only part of the travelogue that is truly necessary.

Once Seabiscuit recognizes that his present owners are kinder folks who surround him with family – a beautiful mare and even a dog – and the three men team up together to win races, the story focuses on Howard’s challenge to the fast horse in America – the triple Crown winner of the day, War Admiral. It’s truly fascinating stuff and to reinforce how strong Seabiscuit was, the director moves the film beyond the big race and presents a second comeback story for the horse and jockey.

Seabiscuit has some wonderful moments but I wish I knew more about Tom Smith’s background – the vanishing world of the cowboy – and less about the soup lines of the Depression. The performances are fantastic. Jeff Bridges has bulked up and looks like a well-fed rich guy and Chris Cooper, with white hair, is lean and stoic. Toby Maguire, who starred in Spiderman last summer, is wiry and angry. He makes Red Pollard's grit in the face of a tough life heart-warming. Pro Jockey Gary Stevens is good as George "The Iceman" Woolf and William H. Macy (Fargo) delivers a hilarious portrait of radio racing journalist Tick-Tock McGlaughlin.

The voice narration by David McCullough proved to be annoying, made the audience restless in spots and felt like a lecture. Audiences are smart enough to glean historical background if it is presented right. In the end, the narrator seems to underscore the filmmaker’s attitude that this is a serious movie. The actually racing scenes and the horse’s training scenes are terrific, however, I think the Seabiscuit is too long and risks losing some of its audience.

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