Gary Ross – Movie Musings

Earnest and decent crowd-pleaser, that wears it’s emotional messages a little too heavily

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Tobey Maguire (John ‘Red’ Pollard), Jeff Bridges (Charles S Howard), Chris Cooper (Tom Smith), Elizabeth Banks (Marcela Zabala-Howard), Gary Stevens (George Woolf), William H. Macy (‘Tick Tock’ McLaughlin), Eddie Jones (Samuel Riddle), Michael O’Neil (Mr Pollard), David McCullough (Narrator)

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, so many people felt lost and powerless, that anything that gave them even a smidgen of hope had great power. Which is why perhaps, on 1 November 1938 40 million people tuned into the radio to listen to the ‘Race of the Century’, as Seabiscuit (the little horse that could) took on War Admiral (mighty champion of the track). This forms the background to a sentimental crowd-pleaser from Gary Ross, a people’s champ rather like the horse itself.

Seabiscuit is framed around the impact this plucky, temperamental but never-say-die horse had on three damaged men who pulled together as an unlikely trio to pull him towards success. First is his owner, automobile empire owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) who is mourning the loss of his son. Second, grizzled trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) whose purpose is vanishing with the Wild West. Third, jockey John ‘Red’ Pollard (Tobey Maguire), a never-say-die fighter himself (literally) who has never got over his resentment about being left by his bankrupt parents. All three will find the success they meet with Seabiscuit helps to re-build their lives.

This personal story does rather overwhelm the Depression-era background, with Seabiscuit playing the “we fixed him and he fixed us” card rather heavily. Much of the film’s dialogue plays up this link between man and beast and the context of the wider impact of this horse’s success doesn’t always come across – perhaps correctly Ross calculated that a personal story brings a greater emotional bond than a piece of social issue. As such, much of the social background is deposited into a Ken-Burns style series of stills and voiceover (so Ken Burns inspired, his old mucker David McCullough even narrates the thing), which never quite links up with the personal stories unfolding.

These stories are presented with mixed success. The death of Howard’s young son – the pre-teen driving a truck to the fishing point cutting to a toy truck lying sideways – is told with a level of restraint that tugs the heartstrings. Ross’ cut from the accident, to a toy car, its wheels spinning, carries impact. Bridges plays the quiet pain and hurt Howard carries with him throughout with an effective level of subtlety. He further gives a neat sense of a page heavily turning in his life, from this shining optimism of his early years as a prodigious car salesman to his quietly more reserved later life as a man who has carefully buttoned up his pain and found solace in a happy marriage (to Marcela, played with genuine warmth and charm by Elizabeth Banks).

It’s a shame the film feels the need to constantly take opportunities to relentless hammer home for us the surrogate parent feelings he starts to feel towards Red (in real life, Howard had several children, but that wouldn’t have made as good drama, would it?). It’s as if Ross worried we might not notice the possibility by ourselves. A relationship where there is more than enough on the page for us to work out for ourselves, is instead often pummelled into us, never allowing us to doubt for a moment than when Bridges worries about Maguire being injured, it is his own son he’s thinking about.

It’s a similar blight that affects even more Red’s resentment at being abandoned by his parents. It’s possible the quietly distraught performance of Michael O’Neil unbalances things here: it’s so painfully obvious his parents don’t want to leave him, you wonder why Red hasn’t worked that out. The film needs to hammer the point home for him, and insist his parents never wrote to him again (something that feels massively out-of-kilter with the emotional sympathy Ross frames them with early in the film). It feels like Seabiscuit didn’t want to lose any possible emotional moment, even if presenting his father as distant and uncaring may well have been far more effective for the story. As it is, Red’s inner pain is also relentlessly telegraphed to us.

Maguire looks the part of the jockey (he lost several bulky Spider-man muscles for the role), but the film keeps needing him to whack the button of anger and self-destructive aggression to re-enforce his broken nature. It’s a good performance, even if it’s hard to see the faultlessly polite Maguire as a rough-and-tumble wild-boy who never met a fight he doesn’t want to throw himself into. Like Bridges, Maguire has a lot of emotional heavy-lifting to carry (as well as parental abandonment, he gets blinded in one eye and goes through a crippling accident that threatens to end his career) and the burden of it eventually rather overwhelms a thinly written character.

More successful is Chris Cooper, who gives a fine performance of avuncular dedication as a horse trainer worried that fences and modern technology are rendering his old horse-whisperer skills increasingly obsolete. Perhaps it helps that Cooper isn’t given an overly forceful backstory to juggle, and that Cooper’s underplaying gives his gruff old-timer schtick real charm. Interestingly, for all the forceful attention paid to the other’s backstories, it’s Cooper’s gentle thawing to others, his kind attention to animals and his patient balancing of horse racing tactics actually involves the audience more. Just as William H. Macy, shorn of carrying any plot at all, leaves a delightful impression as he has a whale of a time with a quietly-drinking radio commentator, supplying his own audio effects in between breaks in his fast-paced patter.

The other most enjoyable note of the film is its capturing of the high-octane world of horse racing and the way it communicates the huge physical and tactical effort of actually being a jockey. From knowing the right time to break, to controlling a racing animal that wants to follow its instincts to chucking up before a weigh in to reduce your load, being a jockey is far from an easy-ride. The racing footage in Seabiscuit is well-filmed and, like the rest of its period detail, magnificently well-observed and its superb dramatic rendition of the thrills of racing makes these scenes genuinely engaging, as well as selling a lot of the ‘plucky underdog’ story the film flourishes in.

It’s also refreshing that the film resists the temptation to try and endow Seabiscuit himself with human qualities. For all our heroes delight in his company, he is always a horse to them (and to us) with just a horse’s instincts and understandings. It’s a winning note in this story of the “little horse that could”, certainly more so than the occasionally overly-insistent dialogue. It may let its attempt to link a personal story to a wider depression-era perspective fall at an early hurdle, but it’s still an effective crowd pleaser.

Jennifer Lawrence takes aim against a corrupt system in The Hunger Games

Director: Gary Ross

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen), Josh Hutcherson (Peeta Mellark), Liam Hemsworth (Gale Hawthorne), Woody Harrelson (Haymitch Abernathy), Elizabeth Banks (Effie Trinket), Lenny Kravitz (Cinna), Stanley Tucci (Caesar Flickerman), Donald Sutherland (President Coriolanus Snow), Wes Bentley (Seneca Crane), Toby Jones (Claudius Templesmith), Alexander Ludwig (Cato)

“May the odds be ever in your favour”. They certainly were for The Hunger Games, the first adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian YA trilogy. It was one of many franchises trying to ride the success of the Harry Potter series – and easily the best (it’s vastly superior to, say, Twilight or the woeful Divergent). Shepherded to the screen by a confident Gary Ross, it’s a film that doesn’t shy away from book’s social politics and darkness, while also balancing that with complex and engaging characters. It stands up well to repeated viewings and never lets you forget it’s a film about teenagers involved in a brutal series of murderous blood sports.

In the future, after disasters and wars, the nation of Panem has been built. Twelve colonies are ruled from the capital. As punishment for a past rebellion, each year each district sends two tributes to the capital. These tributes will be feted, celebrated – and then pushed into an area and made to fight to the death in “The Hunger Games”, all of it transmitted on TV across Panem. To the winner, a lifetime of fame and comfort. To the losers – well, death. In the poorest district, District 12, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers as tribute after her sister’s name is selected. Stubborn, surly, defiant and an expert archer, Katniss surprisingly finds herself capturing the public imagination – helped by a faked romance with her media-savvy fellow District 12 tribute (Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta). But in the ring will it be everybody for themselves? Or can Katniss keep hold of her soul?

The Hunger Games is rich material. Panem feels more and more like a mix between Gilead and Trumpian pomposity (the capital is a heavily stylised and artificial Rome-inspired centre of excess), in which life and death matters for very little. It’s a film that has astute things to say not only about how totalitarian regimes operate, but also how the oppressed often connive in their own suppression. So wrapped up is the population in the excitement of the Hunger Games, so invested in the results, that they’ve almost forgotten it is a tool of oppression. That the capital can only continue to exist if all the districts co-operate in following its orders and meekly supplying anything it asks – from food and resources, to teenagers for slaughter.

What this world needs is someone like Katniss. An individual who knows her own mind, who won’t play the game and will be herself. The film is brave in not softening the edges of this often prickly personality. Expertly played by Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss is compassionate and caring – but she’s also judgemental, untrusting, holds grudges and in person is often surly, resentful and impatient. But what makes her a hero, is her refusal to collaborate in softening the Hunger Games. She knows she is being manipulated to make a world feel better about itself – and she is repulsed by the idea of taking life needlessly and the slaughter of the weaker and more vulnerable tributes. Indeed, she will go to huge lengths to keep others alive in the games – something that helps to wake a population up to how they’ve been hoodwinked by bright lights to forget their own humanity. Her defiance is less about politics and more about simple human decency and being able to make her own choices – something a whole world has forgotten.

Even the people in the capital have forgotten that the Hunger Games exist to suppress not entertain. The film gets some delightful mileage out of its satire of blanket media coverage. The TV coverage is pure ESPN or Sky Sports, mixed with shallow chat shows. Stanley Tucci has a ball as a flamboyant anchor who lets no moral qualms even cross his mind as he banters with the tributes in interviews with the same excited ease as he will later commentate on their slaughter. Wes Bentley’s would-be Machiavel TV producer has been so drawn into the mechanics of his games, he’s stopped even seeing the combatants as human beings, just another set of ratings-tools he can use to advance his career.

It’s a neat commentary from the film on how we can be so beaten down and crushed by the everyday that we forget – or overlook – how it is both controlling our own lives and forcing us to rethink our own views on life. This is a world where people are being taught that life and death are not valuable, that murder can be entertainment and that everyday burdens are worth dealing with because you have a chance of being allowed to fight to the death for a shot at eternal comfort. It’s a deeply corrupt and savage system, and the film doesn’t flinch away from exploring it.

Alongside that, it’s an entertaining, gripping and involving film (if one that is a little overlong in places). The second half – which focuses on the games – is both exciting and terrifying in its (often implied – after all this is still a film that needs to be shown to kids) savagery. It encourages us to identify closely with Katniss, to experience the same terror she does as well as delight in her ingenuity and inventiveness to escape death and plan strikes against her brutal opponents. By the end of the film we’ve taken her to our hearts – for all we’ve seen how difficult a person she is – as much as the population of Panem have.

Ross’s film is a triumph of adaptation, and you don’t say that about many YA novels. Suzanne Collins’ adaptation of her own book captures its thematic richness, while compressing it effectively. There are a host of interesting actors giving eclectic performances, including Harrelson as Katinss and Peeta’s mentor, Banks and Kravitz as their support team, and Sutherland as the controlling dictator behind it all. The Hunger Games is prime entertainment, with some fascinating design work (the costumes and sets are spot on) and very well made. It’s a franchise to watch.