Be All That You Can Be.

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

I haven't read Laura Hillenbrand's book but have heard nothing but good things about it. What is it that goes on between women and horses? Well, let's stick with the movie.
Basically -- without repeating the story, which everyone already knows -- the movie shows four losers being brought together, by MacFate, and forming one winner. It's the depression in America and everyone is suffering. The owner (Jeff Bridges) has a high-need for achievement and has money, but has lost his son in an accident and his wife for reasons that got by me. The jockey too has tried several careers and failed. The trainer (Christ Cooper, in the Wilford Brimley/Richard Farnsworth role, and excellent)has run out of open range land as a horse wrangler. The horse is ugly, ungainly, and stunted. Basically, the weaknesses of all the participants -- or the bad luck, rather, since nobody seems to actually HAVE weaknesses -- are overcome and everyone wins.
A viewer feels good watching all this, and the period detail is nicely done.
The direction too has its moments -- if something dramatic does not need spelling out, the director and the editor do not spell it out. I did lose some of my suspension of disbelief when two jockeys in the midst of a race started exchanging greetings and bon mots.
That said, the movie is interesting for any number of reasons without being outstanding. I like David McCullough, his sympatico features and sonorous voice, distant but not unengaged, but his narration evokes PBS, especially Ken Burns' "Civil War." It's a little demeaning to hear his voice behind such a commercial enterprise, talking about "the forty-thousand hot dogs" sold at one of Seabiscuit's races. I had trouble with Randy Newman's score too. I like his score for "The Natural," derived from Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," and especially the interpolated rinky-tink contemporary tunes. But this music sounds positively generic. When something important is about to happen, the music cues our tension. When it DOES happen, the music takes off heavenward with triumphant trombones and chiliastic overtones.
The acting's pretty good. Jiff Bridges never fails. (His new wife is a pretty blank.) Gary Stevens, a famous jockey, has a neat face for movies. And Chris Cooper is fine -- a soft-spoken and candid rube, a bit of a mystic.
And it's always uplifting to see a Comeback Kid, even if the kid is a horse.
But a movie about overcoming flaws and bad luck is kind of easy to do. Everyone leaves the theater aglow with warmth. For every winner there are thousands of losers. I enjoyed the original "Rocky" because Rocky LOST THE MATCH! If this is a movie that's not about winning but about doing your best, then why does the damme horse WIN? There's nothing wrong with upliftingness. On the contrary, it feels good. That's why they're so easy to do, and so popular. And I don't mean to tout despair as the most suitable philosophical tonus for a flick. But I'm reminded of a professor of mine who gave his class an assignment and advised them to "do your very best." Then he paused for a moment and added, "Suppose you really did your very best and the results turned out to be pedestrian?" Never mind Seabiscuit, when are they going to make a movie about the rest of us who come in second?