Seabiscuit (Full Screen)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Chris Cooper, Jeff Bridges, Sam Bottoms, Tobey Maguire, William H. MacyBrand: Universal
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 140 minutes
Published: 2003-12-01
DVD Release Date: 2003-12-16
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
Product features:
- DVD Special Features
Movie Reviews of Seabiscuit (Full Screen)
Movie Review: Subtle Elegance--Masterpiece. Great Cast!
Summary: 5 Stars
Seabiscuit
1-liner: The lives of three men intersect as they take a huge chance on a broken horse, destined for victory, fated to fix all of them.
The nature of the film can be summed up by one phrase: you win some, and you lose some--and yes, bathos and tears are mandatory. It starts in the decades before the Great Crash to precede the 1930s, when one could go from 21 cents to riches. Everyone seems to be winning. Charles Howard goes from rags to riches, the Pollard family is affluent and is blessed with well-educated children, the farrier Tom Smith still has free land and wild horses to run with. The onslaught of the 1930s changes things for everyone, stealing the precious.
Charles Howard is shown working at a factory as a manual laborer fixing spokes, and then he decides to start his own bike shop. The film shows his first encountering of an automobile, his realization that it's cars that's the future. He becomes a star salesperson and eventually the owner (or one in charge of lay-off's) of Buick. He wrestles happily with his baby son, as his wife reads the latest Buick press release in the paper.
Mr. and Mrs. Pollard, Red Pollard's parents, are shown admiring their son on a horse. "He looks so perfect on it--that's the poetry of it," Mr. Pollard epithets his son while he rides. They are reasonably affluent and their children are well-educated, quoting Dickinson off memory.
Tom Smith, the farrier, rides in the vast open space, unclaimed land, and rounds up the fastest wild horse. He has it in him to tame a crazy horse. A horse, which anyone else would have given up on and shot.
The Great Crash comes along, and the narrator admits that the suicides are myths history would later spin up. The effects are gradual, and they take hold differently for all, but there is a common element to each tragedy. Howard's son dies in a freak accident, which his wife blames him for. The Pollards decide it is better to leave their son -- Red Pollard -- to a man affiliated with the local racetracks. The boy is sixteen.
Six years later, Red races. However, he is fouled--distracted by the cheating racer who attempts to push him off the horse--and he loses on his sponsor's best horse. He loses his job and ego, and he becomes a drifter, like the millions of others.
The farrier Tom Smith is seen to be a crazy man who puts hope and care on crazy horses.
Charles' wife has abandoned him, and he goes to TJ--at the time, the only place where alcohol and gambling are allowed.
The three men are lost. But, losing always comes with winning.
Charles meets Tom, and he decides to invest in him as a farrier--despite his age and crazy reputation according to the other farriers. Charles asks Tom why he puts in so much care into the wounded white horse with the fractured leg he had saved from the bullet. Tom claims although the horse can't race, he's good for other things. "You don't throw a whole life away, just because he's banged up a little."
Thus goes the prevalent motif in the story - that of second chances.
Charles hires Tom to find a good race horse for him to invest in. Seabiscuit just happens to trot by, as Red takes on the cheapest paying lowest job ever, warming-up the horse. Tom sees it in his eyes, the spirit of the horse--he claims the secret to a winning horse isn't in his heart, but that it is in-grained in its soul.
Seabiscuit, however, is a horse no one wants. Although he comes from good breeding, he is too gentle, too small. The odds are against him. Moreover, the trainers who took him broke him, using him as a losing horse to train the other horse ego. When Tom finds him, Seabiscuit is something of a crazy horse, taking several men just to partially handle him. Tom knows that there is winning engraved in that horse's destiny, but he just had to find the man to settle him.
Beautiful deux ex machina: Meanwhile, across the street, Red just happens to be involved in a brawl--the parallel between Seabiscuit attempting to take on a whole team of farriers and Red attempting to take on a whole gang of antagonists is elegantly portrayed.
The boy and his horse--they win against all odds. A rider who is half blind and a horse abandoned. The common background shared by both boy and horse is subtle, but tear-rendingly elegant--both come from prided heritage, yet they are separated from their family (cute young Seabiscuit shown wrenched from his father), forced into the real world far too young, and then shattered and lost by the slings of life.
The second chance given and accepted. Seabiscuit and Red's victories are shown in conjunction with FDR's New Deal, how it up'ed the low of many men.
The film starts out as if a documentary with b/w photos; the "documentary feel" is interlaced throughout the story. While this may seem to distance the viewer, the scenes carrying the plot of the story are strikingly real, amazingly, tearfully heartful--such that one feels as if one is "living history." This effect is flaunted when a b/w photo is made real into a motion scene, the b/w fading into color gradually.
Casting: probably the most perfect cast ever. Charles looks kind of like the dopey sort of guy who would get lucky by his sheer faith in people--the way his mouth always does that. Tom looks old, yet haggard and wise and very sane, despite what the other farriers see of him prior to this discovery by Charles. And, Red... he just has to be Peter Parker--or Peter just has to be Red.
(I was actually a bit fazed the first time I watched it through, the screen was a bit blurry, and I actually thought that both fathers and the farrier were the same man--thus, I was a bit confused for a while. However, after re-watching the beginning, things made much more sense..)
Summary of Seabiscuit (Full Screen)
The true story of a legendary race horse that overcome all the odds to win the triple crown. The owner trainer and jockey were all underdogs that shined at the moment our country needed it the most. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 05/23/2006 Starring: Tobey Maguire Elizabeth Banks Run time: 141 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Gary RossProving that truth is often greater than fiction, the handsome production of Seabiscuit offers a healthy alternative to Hollywood's staple diet of mayhem. With superior production values at his disposal, writer-director Gary Ross (Pleasantville) is a bit too reverent toward Laura Hillenbrand's captivating bestseller, unnecessarily using archival material--and David McCullough's familiar PBS-styled narration--to pay Ken Burns-like tribute to Hillenbrand's acclaimed history of Seabiscuit, the knobby-kneed thoroughbred who "came from behind" in the late 1930s to win the hearts of Depression-weary Americans. That caveat aside, Ross's adaptation retains much of the horse-and-human heroism that Hillenbrand so effectively conveyed; this is a classically styled "legend" movie like The Natural, which was also heightened by a lushly sentimental Randy Newman score. Led by Tobey Maguire as Seabiscuit's hard-luck jockey, the film's first-rate cast is uniformly excellent, including William H. Macy as a wacky trackside announcer who fills this earnest film with a much-needed spirit of fun. --Jeff Shannon
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