Nearly a third of the movie is devoted to the life of the three main human characters, before they ever met, so you don’t see the Biscuit for a goodish part of the movie. However I didn’t regret it as I found the evocations of the advent of the car, of the Great Depression, and of the universe of jockeys, absolutely gripping: I’d recommend the beginning of the movie to pupils studying that period of the history of the United States in History class: it gives a much better insight into the life of common people than traditionnal textbook stuff.

The races are a spectacular achievement, and feature genuine thoroughbreds and jocks. Gary Ross also put his actors on top equisizers to make the close-ups more realistic, so that it gives you the illusion that you’re aboard a horse in the middle of that closely packed field, trying to wheedle your way to the first place! It’s the closest thing to riding I’ve ever seen on screen!

The actors, both horses and humans, did a splendid job. Special mention to:

Gary Stevens (very “natural” on screen, and I think his being used to be the center of attraction as a jockey helped him),

Chris Cooper (his little wry smile as he leads “Pumpkin” into the man-eating Seabiscuit’s “den”)

Jeff Bridges (in the middle of the night, sitting despondedly with his chin in his hand, and the various parts of the car engine he’s agreed to repair spread out all over the floor),

and William H. Macy (the radio announcer, also a secondary character in “The Black Stallion”).

This true story really needs told in our age where you need a degree for every job, and where people and animals get thrown away like tissues. Seabiscuit was a horse who needed time to mature, he wasn’t the precocious type like Triple-Crown Winner War Admiral, and he wouldn’t have had time to show his potential in our racing system where horses are raced very early and retired at age 3 or 4. Also he had his idiosyncrasies, and as the film rightly shows, as long as he felt antagonised by people, he turned his fighting spirit against them, instead of against other horses. Just humouring him, making his life a happy one, changing his schedule so as to stop antagonising him all the time, worked marvels (fancy being kicked out of bed at five every morning in order to go and run outside in the cold...). Once he had mellowed and thrived under Tom Smith’s care, Seabiscuit became an altogether different horse: Mr Gary Ross reports he had to use about a dozen horses to portray Seabiscuit at the various times of his eventful life, because it was as if that horse had had “a multipersonality disorder”, he led so many many lives! When Mr Howard retired him from the racefield, and saw that he needed an occupation to be happy, he even trained him as a cow-pony, and the horse loved bullying cattle!

Product Details/Specifications