‘Seabiscuit’ More Show Than Win

There are horse trailers, and there are horse trailers, and the coming-attraction preview for “Seabiscuit” made the movie sound like classic summer Hollywood fare. Spider-Man goes horseback riding. Three men and a pony. You can’t get much more high-concept than that.

By the look of it, “Seabiscuit” appeared to be one long ride into the valley of darkness in pursuit of personal and spiritual redemption. Uh oh. You always hate to hear that. The trailer forced me to confront a few issues and conduct some soul-searching of my own.

Did I really want to watch Tobey Maguire impersonating a jockey in a Depression-era period piece?

Didn’t Jeff Bridges already cover the fast-talking, glad-handing huckster-with-a-dream bit in “Tucker”?

Wasn’t “Terminator 3” playing just down the street?

But then I began reading the advance press, and learned that this wasn’t just a star vehicle for Maguire, Bridges and Academy Award winner Chris Cooper or a cinematic cash-in on Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling book.

“Seabiscuit” is (Randy Newman, cue those triumphant-sounding bugles!) The Movie That Will Save Horse Racing.

Just as Seabiscuit the horse resurrected a nation’s sagging spirit during the tough 1930s, “Seabiscuit” the movie is supposed to revitalize a sport that has seen better days, sending happy viewers straight from the shopping mall cineplex to the betting windows at Del Mar, with racetracks across America instantly teeming again with wide-eyed hopefuls obsessed with scouting out the next little horse that could pay next month’s rent.

Let’s see Arnold Schwarzenegger do that.

If “Seabiscuit” could deliver on that promise, it’s more than a movie, it’s a miracle.

Clearly, this was an event that had to be seen, so it was off to the theater to settle in and catch a glimpse of the great horse.

Fifteen minutes pass. Seabiscuit is nowhere to be found.

Thirty minutes pass. Still no sighting of Seabiscuit.

Forty minutes pass. We have already criss-crossed the country and brushed up on 20th-century U.S. history, searching for deep meaning, and maybe a plot. We even ventured south of the border to Tijuana. theseDonde esta El Biscuit?

Finally, around the 45-minute mark, Seabiscuit makes his first appearance. At this point in the movie, he is restless, impatient and easily irritated. I know the feeling.

Maguire plays jockey Johnny (Red) Pollard, a grizzled ex-boxer who has been described as looking 50 when he was in his 20s. There are photographs from the period that support this. Evidently, this was lost in the casting of Maguire, who will probably look as if he’s in his 20s when he’s 50.

Maguire gets away with it until his scenes with Gary Stevens, the Hall of Fame jockey who plays George Woolf, Pollard’s friend and rival. Stevens’ face bears the lines and weathering of a man who has made his living fasting to make weight and wrestling with massive beasts in the sun and wind. In an instant, Maguire’s pale baby face is unmasked as an impostor’s.

Almost unwittingly, the movie stumbles onto the essence of horse racing’s current image problem. Horses get the hype, but it’s the jockeys, working behind the scenes, who make the show. Why hasn’t horse racing promoted its jockeys the way NASCAR markets its drivers? It seems a simple answer to a decades-old issue, as “Seabiscuit” acknowledges somewhat clumsily with its belabored character development of the humans in the story.

This is a jockeys’ movie. Or rather, it’s a movie that works best when the real jockeys are handed the whip. Chris McCarron served as race designer for the film -- he also appears as War Admiral’s jockey, Charley Kurtsinger -- and the racing scenes are impressive. The action is intense and in your face, conveying a sense of how skilled and courageous these small men in the saddle truly are.

But do they really engage in witty banter as they round the turn?

The filmmakers want you to think so, even though the mud is flying, the hoofs are pounding and, amid that break-neck chaos, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting much more than a grunt in edgewise.

The movie’s climactic race, the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, begins with Maguire as Pollard aboard Seabiscuit in the gate, looking stunned to see Stevens as Wolff aboard another ride, as if he hadn’t read that morning’s Racing Form or the program or possibly bumped into Woolf in the jockeys’ room.

Wolff rode Seabiscuit in the famous 1938 match race against War Admiral when Pollard was recovering from a broken leg. Before that race, Pollard had clued him in to the secret of riding Seabiscuit -- pull back to allow Seabiscuit a look into War Admiral’s eye, and then let him go.

As constructed in the film, Seabiscuit breaks slowly in the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap, trailing the pack by a good margin before Stevens/Woolf pulls up to allow Seabiscuit a look in his horse’s eye, grinning at Maguire/Pollard and announcing, “OK, Johnny, have a good ride.”

The great Seabiscuit comeback is off and running ... and will the sequel be subtitled, “So, Was the Big Race Fixed”?

William H. Macy, in a small role as a fictional radio announcer, steals the movie with a series of hysterical, hilarious “breaking news” bulletins and race re-creations. Horse racing might not be what it was in the 1930s, but neither is sports radio. Which has a better chance of making a comeback?

Put your money on the ponies.

I saw “Seabiscuit” with a friend who covers horse racing for a living. He liked the racing sequences and Stevens’ acting and said it was a movie “worth seeing.”

But will it save horse racing?

He laughed at the question.

“I didn’t know it had to be saved,” he said. “If this movie doesn’t hit, does that mean unless something else comes along, there will be no racing?

“To say that this movie is going to drive thousands of people to the racetrack is like saying that anybody who went to see ‘Spider-Man’ was going to become interested in either comic books or spiders. Or watching ‘The Godfather’ is going to make people become gangsters.”

“The Godfather” did have people going to bed dreaming about horses, but that wasn’t quite what the makers of “Seabiscuit” had in mind.