"Seabiscuit"

There are moments you can't help but be affected by, like the scene in which Pollard and Seabiscuit, both injured, are reunited and stumble toward each other like long-lost lovers. But that only highlights the discrepancy between what the movie wants you to feel (and what Hillenbrand makes you feel so effortlessly) and what you do feel. We see Howard and Smith and Pollard working together and eating together, but we never get a sense of the bond or community that developed between them.

The actor who comes off best isn't an actor at all. Real-life jockey Gary Stevens has been cast as George Woolf, the legendary jockey who took over from Pollard and rode Seabiscuit to some of his sweetest victories. Stevens, whose long face is strikingly handsome with eerily bright eyes, has the easy charm that some untrained actors are able to project in the movies. His slight awkwardness only serves to make him more appealing, and Stevens has apparently learned one of the most important things for any actor: the ability to listen. If Stevens isn't handicapped by the mythic weight that sits on the rest of the movie, it may be because as a jockey, he connects with the tangible reality of the story.

It must be a tremendous burden of responsibility for a jockey to take on the role of a figure as beloved in the sport as George Woolf. The son of a circus acrobat and a stagecoach driver, Woolf was the most famous and successful jockey of his time, known for his peacock dress and his unblushing candor. The movie doesn't allow Stevens any of that candor and only a flash of that style, but Stevens approaches the role respectfully, without being crippled by reverence. (Sick from diabetes and the cruel dieting jockeys engage in, Woolf slid unconscious from a horse during a 1942 race at Santa Anita and died. Gene Autry sang at his funeral.)

For a movie that wants to present itself as being in a classic Hollywood tradition of well-crafted storytelling, "Seabiscuit" feels in some basic way as truncated as a movie adopting music-video technique. The scenes are short, broken off, never staying in one place long enough to settle in or allow the actors to develop a rapport. When Maguire and Stevens get to trade some dialogue while they're standing side by side, working together to tear down a racetrack, you're grateful for a few snatched seconds of actual give and take. Charles Howard's courtship of his second wife Marcela (played by Elizabeth Banks -- she was the teller who let out a big goofy laugh when Leonardo DiCaprio came on to her in "Catch Me If You Can") is presented as a montage, at the end of which they marry. Couldn't Ross have been bothered to write a scene of dialogue showing the two of them falling in love?

The horse-racing scenes are similarly chopped up. There are a few shots from the rider's point of view that convey what you would never see watching a race: The danger of easing a huge animal through a narrow opening that opens up in front of you. But these shots never stay in one place long enough for us to settle into the rhythm of a race (which, to spectators, can appear steady and stable until one horse makes a move and suddenly you can't breathe), and they don't give a sense of the beauty and terror of a horse race, the way all the strength and speed of the animals lie in their most fragile parts, their legs. They aren't a patch on what Carroll Ballard and Caleb Deschanel achieved in the race sequence of "The Black Stallion" (1981), and they can't touch the racing scenes of Hillenbrand's book, which were so unbearably suspenseful they made me feel as if my heart would stop before the horses did.

Americans are never at our best when we're proclaiming the virtues of the American character. We do much more service to those virtues when we put them into action without the speechifying. In dramatic terms, that means show, don't tell. The inspirational speeches and swelling music that keep rearing their heads in "Seabiscuit" are tinny proclamations. The movie unintentionally undercuts all that when McCullough's voiceover informs us that, when Tom Smith first laid eyes on Seabiscuit, he felt the horse looking through him as if to say, "What the hell are you looking at?" There's more of our native feistiness, our disrespect for authority, our prickly individuality, our conviction that we can take whatever comes our way, in that one tossed-off line than in all the rest of "Seabiscuit." It's that combination of independence and confidence and casual arrogance that led Smith and Howard and Pollard to believe in this funny-looking horse.

Reporting that "Seabiscuit" is a botch is about as much fun as being sent behind the barn with a rifle to dispatch an injured colt. I wanted the movie to do what Hillenbrand's book did: I wanted it to break my heart. (Though I can't be the only racing fan whose heart has already been broken this year, when Funny Cide lost the Triple Crown at Belmont Park.) The movie is already getting rapturous reviews that accept it on the mythic terms in which it presents itself. But next to its source, it's a glorified show pony. Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit" is for the ages. Ross' version is designed to last only until the next Oscar season rolls around.

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