Ain't What He Used To Be

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

In the movie's emblematic sequence, a horse named Pilgrim and an actor-director named Robert Redford stare at each other--the former nervously, the latter reassuringly. They're both handsome creatures, and the high Montana plain where this confrontation takes place is pretty too. But really, folks--endless minutes of screen time devoted to this silent, essentially motionless sequence? You get the feeling that someone is indulging himself and that his name isn't Pilgrim.

Not that one doubts the purity of purpose that led Redford to The Horse Whisperer, based on Nicholas Evans' best-selling, critically dissed novel about an uncannily simpatico wrangler. His patient ministrations are needed to restore psychological wholeness to Pilgrim and, more important, to Grace (Scarlett Johansson), the horse's adolescent rider, after a bloody confrontation with a truck on an icy road.

Redford the director has long been drawn to stories of young people whose innocence has been soiled by cruel circumstance, starting with Ordinary People, later in A River Runs Through It (and even, stretching a point, Quiz Show).

In these films there's usually an adult whose failures of understanding are a big part of the problem. In The Horse Whisperer, that's the damaged girl's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). She has her virtues, most notably a determination not to let either Grace, who has lost a leg in the accident, or her mount succumb to despair. But she's a driven, unforgiving sort of woman--chic, brittle, chilly, not at all ideal-mom material. To put the point bluntly, we know what she needs, which is a good horse whisping.

Redford's Tom Booker is up for that as well. Not anything so vulgar as a raw sexual encounter, mind you--nothing that would interfere with our contemplation of the simple, natural life that this movie is determined to idealize. But some soulful slow dancing, some rides into the sunset--the saintly Tom, all rueful smiles and gentle wisdom, can winsomely manage that. The question is, can we manage nearly three hours in the company of so perfect a male animal, a figure from whom, in fact, everything animalistic--for that matter, anything jaggedly human--has been blanched? There comes a time when you'd give anything if Tom would yell at the kid, swat the horse on the nose or maybe just tell some dumb, dirty joke by the campfire.

Doubtless Redford believes in the ideals that animate this movie--as who among us does not? But the very fact that he is so well known and widely applauded for his many good, politically and artistically correct works offscreen helps make the movie seem self-regarding, self-righteous, even smug. There was once something of the wicked kid in Redford's screen character, and one fondly imagined that he would someday grow up to be, if not a dirty old man, then a subversive and obstreperous one. Certainly we never guessed he'd end up a rustic bore like Tom Booker.

--By Richard Schickel