Cashing in on the public need for a hero who's a horse and a winning one at that

At the peak of his celebrity in the late 1930s, Seabiscuit, a runty, crooked-legged racehorse rescued from obscurity by a California car dealer, was the most famous mammal in America, surpassing even Franklin D. Roosevelt in media attention and popular esteem. In her best-selling book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, published two years ago, Laura Hillenbrand ascribed the horse's renown to several causes, including the marketing savvy of his owner, Charles Howard; the growth of a national mass culture fueled by rural electrification, photographic wire services and cheap radios; and the ardent identification of Depression-weary Americans with a scrappy, indomitable underdog.

The current wave of Seabiscuit mania, which crests today with the release of Gary Ross's film adaptation of Hillenbrand's book, may reflect a similar hunger for optimism and inspiration. It seems more likely, though, that Seabiscuit's 21st-century second act is primarily a result of Hillenbrand's skill as a historian and a storyteller. Her book, while saturated in fascinating, often arcane detail about the folkways of jockeys and the wisdom of trainers, is one of those rare chronicles of the past that manage to bridge the gap between the old days and the present, immersing the reader in the sounds and smells of the racetrack even as it illuminates a larger story of technological and social change.

Ross, whose interest in the subject was piqued long before the book's appearance, when he came across an article by Hillenbrand in American Heritage magazine, has done his best to preserve both the sweep of her narrative and its meticulousness. Inevitably, the story has been compressed to fit the dramatic conventions of a feature film; characters have been synthesized and subtle insights turned into neon signs.

But there can be no doubt that Ross, the writer of Big and Dave and the director of Pleasantville, has been faithful to his source. (What liberties he has taken are nothing compared with those in The Story of Seabiscuit, an engagingly fluffy picture from 1949, starring Shirley Temple, though not in the title role.) The main problem with Seabiscuit, indeed, is a surfeit of reverence. It turns the thrilling celebration of a collection of rambunctious, maverick characters into an exercise in high-minded, responsible sentimentality.

There has already been a documentary about Seabiscuit, but Ross has nonetheless chosen to punctuate his film with lofty voiceovers read by the popular historian David McCullough, whose sonorous disquisitions accompany black-and-white archival photographs of automobile assembly lines and dust bowl refugees. The words and images tie the lives of Seabiscuit and his human handlers to the rise of the automobile and the ascendancy of the New Deal, but they feel both ponderous and glib, weighing down the more intimate human and equine dramas and denying the characters time to emerge as individuals. This is a shame, since the human cast includes some of the finest actors working in movies today.

As Charles Howard, Jeff Bridges shows some of the raffish, entrepreneurial charm that made Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker better than it had a right to be and he rounds it off with a gentle melancholy. Howard, who made a fortune selling Buicks in post-earthquake San Francisco, lost a son in a car accident, a tragedy that hastened the collapse of his first marriage. (His second wife, Marcela, whom he met at a Tijuana racetrack, is played, with lovely Old Hollywood grace, by Elizabeth Banks.) The way Bridges carries Howard's grief in his eyes and shoulders makes the director's telegraphic reminders of his loss feel heavy-handed and superfluous. The score, a rare exercise in humorlessness by Randy Newman, has the same effect.