Robert Redford's almost three-hour rendering of the Nicholas Evans best-seller, a gussied-up grade-A version of the staple triumph-over-adversity made-for-TV movie, with Nature Company greeting-card photography and a high-class cast (Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Dianne Wiest, Chris Cooper, in addition to Redford). The adversity arrives in a hurry: a more horrible horse-and-truck collision than the one at the close of Lonely Are the Brave, shot in slow-motion to prolong the agony, intercut with nostalgic flashbacks to remind us of a happier time (a few minutes earlier) when the two pubescent girlfriends were just setting off on their morning ride, and the carnage finally capped off with a clichéd amplified heartbeat on an otherwise silent soundtrack. Subsequent makeup effects set a new standard in equine gore, supplanting The Godfather. What emerges thereafter is a horse story for big girls, a slick-magazine romantic daydream about the fleeting flirtation of a type-A career girl with a kinder and gentler kind of cowpoke, a pastoral postcard of oneness between man and beast, of front porches and milk in a pitcher, of purple mountains' majesty and fruited plains, a women's Western in which a curious cultural shift has transformed the once Wild West into the place of permanence, tame and tranquil, nurturing and healing (but with the modern conveniences of cell phones and pasta sauce in a jar at the same time), while the civilized East has become unsettled and unsettling, the proverbial jungle. Redford, though a good deal older than the "horse doctor" of the book, brings with him the full mythical stature that the role demands, and brings also a soft-focus lens to smooth over any excess of wrinkles. When he can trouble himself to lift his face from the canned corn chowder, he can do some respectable directing, too, as witness the sequence of shots that records, inch by inch, the tightening clinch on the dance floor during a slow number. Scarlett Johansson, of the independent Manny and Lo, is agreeably sweet as the one-legged girl who needs as much mending as her horse, but the real heartbreaker is the even younger Ty Hillman, investing the horse doctor's white-hatted little nephew with the courtly gallantry of a knee-high Joel McCrea. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd