This horse opera is a turkey

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2003)

WARNING!: POSSIBLE SPOILERS.
I see the comments posted here, like many of the early reviews, are already going into transports of ecstasy over Gary Ross's film. But don't be fooled: it stinks. There IS a great movie in Laura Hillenbrand's book, but this isn't it, not by a long shot. Ross falsifies the story at every turn, garbling and changing facts for no good reason.
A few examples (POSSIBLE SPOILERS if you don't know what happened in real life):
Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) was not a bicycle repairman in New York in 1910. He moved to San Francisco in 1903 and soon branched from bicycles to Buicks. He struck it rich in 1906 when the great earthquake left him with the city's only reliable transportation. By 1910 he was a wealthy San Francisco automobile dealer.
Tijuana was a mecca for Prohibition Era racing fans in the 1920s, but not in 1933; by that time, Prohibition was on its way out and racing had been banned in Mexico.
Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire) was not kicked out of the house by his poverty-stricken parents.
Charles Howard and his first wife had five children, not one.
Howard's son Frankie died in 1926, not 1931. He was 15, not 10. He was with two friends, not alone. He swerved to avoid a rock in the road, not another truck.
Howard did not pick up his second wife, Marcela, at a Tijuana racetrack in 1933; they were introduced in San Francisco by his son Lin, who was married to Marcela's sister.
Pollard lost the vision in his right eye in a riding mishap, not in the boxing ring. He kept it a secret from everyone, except possibly his wife, all his life. He knew that if word got out he would be banned from racing. He certainly would never have shouted it out to Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) in the jockeys' locker room.
Tom Smith did not see Seabiscuit for the first time at five o'clock on a foggy morning; it was on a `sweltering' June afternoon.
The fictitious Tick-Tock McLaughlin (William H. Macy) describes Seabiscuit as `the hottest thing on four legs since Hope and Crosby' presumably sometime in 1937. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made their first movie together, "Road to Singapore," in 1940, after Seabiscuit retired.
McLaughlin, again, refers to jockey George `Iceman' Woolf by saying, `The Iceman cometh'  a clear reference to Eugene O'Neill's play. This is in 1938; "The Iceman Cometh" didn't appear until 1946.
Pollard suffered two near-fatal spills from a horse, not one. The first, not shown in the film, was during a race and was by far the worst.

There was never any question of Seabiscuit being put down over a ruptured ligament; no one with any knowledge of horses will buy this scene. At worst he would have been retired from racing and put out to stud.

Tom Smith, not Red Pollard, took charge of Seabiscuit's recovery.

END OF SPOILER ALERT
All of these points (with the possible exception of Pollard's first spill) could just as easily have been correctly filmed, at no greater expense or trouble. Instead, Ross shows a complete disregard for the letter AND spirit of Seabiscuit's story. What one commenter here called the film's "eye for detail" is, in fact, nonexistent.
(And spare me the "dramatic license" lecture. By using historian David McCullough as narrator, Ross is clearly -- and fraudulently -- pretending to be as accurate as a documentary.)
All of this MIGHT have been acceptable -- or at least forgiveable -- if the movie simply MOVED. But it lumbers, for two-and-a-half endless hours. Ross lingers over scenes with hushed reverence, as if they were stations of the cross.
And the racing scenes are almost totally botched. Ross resorts to slow-mo too often, for too long, and at the worst possible times. In the great match race with War Admiral, Ross inexplicably cuts away from the start of the race to show a succession of anonymous Americans huddled around radios; the race is half over before he comes back (to be fair, the film does justice to the wonderful "So long, Charlie" moment as Seabiscuit pulls away in the stretch). Worst and most inexcusable of all, in Seabiscuit's other great triumph, the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, Ross ENDS THE FILM AND DISSOLVES TO THE CREDITS BEFORE SEABISCUIT EVEN CROSSES THE FINISH LINE!!! What kind of idiocy is this? The man must be mad. (And let me chortle, just in passing, at those ridiculous patched-in closeups of Tobey Maguire on his darling little bobble-head hobby horse. They don't even match the horse in the long shots.)
Laura Hillenbrand called the 1946 THE STORY OF SEABISCUIT "unforgiveably bad." This one may not be as bad, but it's even more unforgiveable. Don't bother with this bloated, leaden travesty. Read Hillenbrand's great book instead -- or see the PBS "American Experience" documentary, which gives you more of the story, gets it straight, and is less than half as long.