Starring: Tobey Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Elizabeth Banks (II), Chris Cooper (I)

If wishes were horses, then Seabiscuit would be an unimpeachable triumph that carries the summer and the year. It's not. What the film is, however, is a fine, noble, and laudable attempt to create a film that is a throwback to another era, a film that could have been made at any point in the last 50 years and not have changed appreciably. The movie, no matter what the film fashion, would have still been sturdy, still held its head high. In that it is a praiseworthy success.

Part of that is attributable to Seabiscuit's notable lack of satire or cynical posturing, so prevalent in films these days. It is a big slice of Americana whose arrival is like getting a new edition of The Saturday Evening Post with the latest cover from Norman Rockwell, or finding The Readers' Digest in your mailbox and discovering they've put their table of contents back on the front cover, instead of those annoying celebrities and "Lose Weight Now!" headlines. The movie has three fine leads and tells a story as compelling as the American experience itself.

Director Gary Ross has even added a little insurance to hammer home that fact; David McCullough narrates the film, giving historical perspective to Seabiscuit's run for glory. McCullough was previously the narrator on Ken Burns's epic Civil War series, as well as others. His sonorous, reassuring PBS tone lets us know that this happened, it had impact, it was important. Those who've read the book by Laura Hillenbrand already knew that. Seabiscuit is the account of the unlikely success of a undersized prize champion horse that captured national attention in the late `30s, and the trio of men responsible for his place in horseracing history.

Toby McGuire, the first of the three, is scrappy, even a bit feral, as Seabiscuit's principal jockey, Red Pollard. McGuire plays Pollard as a little man, too big really to be a jockey, too small to take on the problems the world handed him. But Pollard manages to connect to Seabiscuit, a vengeful, bitter creature trained to let other better, bigger horses beat him. `Biscuit, as he comes to be called, is bought by Charles Howard (played by Jeff Bridges), the wealthy owner/operator of the Buick franchise of San Francisco who has been buffeted by loss, both personal and financial. Howard enlists the help of Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a quiet misfit who is the last of a breed of frontiersmen, to train the horse to race.

Bridges brings a brashness to Howard that is unlike the ferocious salesmanship of his performance in Tucker. Bridges fits Howard with a confidence that comes with hard-earned money and success and gives him a quiet deliberation as well, that of a man who is too old, and has seen too much to stir his enthusiasm for anything but the unique, the special. Cooper's role is utterly unlike his last part, the oily genius John Larouche in Adaptation, that won him last year's Best Supporting Actor. Cooper's Smith is deliberate in his speech. He repeats things because he does not like conversing in the first place. Late in the film, trying to get Charles Howard's attention, a man he's gone through triumphs and disasters with, he addresses him as "Mr. Howard" and shifts his eyes to the ground. Cooper's Smith is man who knows his job and his place, much as one would during the great depression.

Gary Ross, whose previous directorial effort was the uneven but respected Pleasantville, knows his job and his place here too. He is both the agent of the film's success and its Achilles' heel, favoring the former. It's a beautiful film, well-shot, with racing scenes that are among the best in memory. His Seabiscuit is small, gamey, and you can't help but root for it. But oh, the stuff Ross has loaded on its back!

Seabiscuit handles the shifting of eras, from the very last of the Old West to the rise of a different machine; the horseless carriage. It manages to serve as the glue (sorry, no pun intended) for three broken characters. But where the old boy starts to stagger a bit is when they weigh him down with the label as the biggest metaphor to come down the pike since the Titanic. The Titanic, of course, was a symbol of man's hubris and mortality meeting the indomitable force of fate and nature, while Seabiscuit is Frank Capra's Everyman with a saddle on him. Perhaps Seabiscuit was the symbol for America of the downtrodden masses, whose determination and pluck bested the fat cats, but Ross is relentless in this point. In his film, it's a wonder one doesn't see a newspaper headline that says "SYMBOL OF DOWNTRODDEN MASSES BESTS FAT CATS AT PIMLICO!"

Ross also has a streak of the maudlin in him. When Howard loses a son early in the film it's not the fifteen-year old he lost in real life, Ross ratchets the boy's age down to about nine or ten, making it more difficult to believe (how'd he reach the pedals?) while gaining a more cherubic face and attempting to eek out more sympathy (there's even an overturned toy car in the real overturned car—geesh). He turns Seabiscuit's stable of supporters into an unbelievable quartet (including Howard's wife, Marcela, played with semi-gloss appeal by Elizabeth Banks). It's as if Ross has appeared magically in the past and keeps throwing his arms around them and hugging them close to get them all in the picture. Meanwhile Randy Newman seems to borrow liberally from himself and his score for The Natural.

Despite these failings, though, Seabiscuit comes through, as if from the same fog that he first appears to Tom Smith in the film. There's pleasant comic relief from William H. Macy as a reprobate track announcer and a can't lose story. If wishes were horses, Seabiscuit would be the best film of the year. As it is, it's just one of them.