Writer-director Gary Ross runs through the storied career of the too-small racehorse with the too-big jockey, blind in one eye to boot. In this treatment -- a simple horse story amplified into a social history -- the nag must lug the additional weight of the aggregate Little Guy and the collective American Dream. Although these sentimentalities are to a large extent true to the horse's press clippings at the time, the practical result is that the filmmaker picks up the story too far back -- it will be nearly an hour before the title figure makes his grand entrance from a fog bank -- and goes to inordinate lengths to explain to the modern-day viewer the meaning of such things as the Triumph of Industry, the Closing of the Frontier, Prohibition, the Stock Market Crash, and the Great Depression: "A great national migration began," blah blah. (The authoritative voice of the narrator, complete with PBS credentials, is that of historian David McCullough.) At the more intimate level, Ross feels obliged to point out repeatedly in the dialogue, lest anyone miss it, how this mishandled and discarded horse mirrors and symbolizes the three damaged men -- owner, trainer, rider -- who turned him into a winner. The viewer, in particular the old-fashioned viewer to whom the film caters, could be forgiven for feeling a little less enlightened than insulted. And when he reminds himself that Ross's prior credit was Pleasantville, he could be forgiven again for wondering whether the filmmaker, in his bland nostalgia and bottled optimism, is not somehow a prisoner of the antiseptic fantasyland he therein satirized. The races, despite an overdose of slow-motion and of blustery billowy Randy Newman music in the mode of The Natural, are varied and exciting. And the principals -- Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, Tobey Maguire as the aforesaid owner, trainer, rider -- are uniformly sympathetic in their openly, operatically anguished way. But it is left to real-life jockey Gary Stevens to teach the less-is-more lesson (from the Richard Conte School of Acting), a tight-lipped, square-jawed oasis of professional cool and personal dignity. With William H. Macy. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd