Horse Whisperer, The

The Horse Whisperer, directed by and starring Robert Redford, should
come with a disclaimer: “Includes no actual whispering.” Or rather, there is one
moment near the end when the alleged whisperer, Tom Booker (Mr Redford) does
whisper to the horse: “There’s something you have to do, tomorrow, boy,” but it
seems a long time to wait for such a pedestrian sort of whispering as that,
which any of us might have thought of for ourselves without having a movie made
about it. In fact, for most of this picture’s slow two hours and forty minutes
we feel a bit like Tom would have felt in the scene where he sits motionless in
a field for a whole day, looking at the scenery and waiting for the skittish
horse to come to him, if the horse had never come. Like Mr Redford himself, the
scenery (filmed on location in Montana and Wyoming) is very pretty but not that
pretty.

But then one supposes that there are lots of soccer moms in the land whose
idea of a good time is to spend langorous minutes watching Robert Redford
staring soulfully into the eyes first of a horse and then of a woman. And there
are men, of whom I confess I am one, who will at least put up with it when the
woman is the amazingly gorgeous Kristen Scott Thomas. She plays Annie McLean, a
hard charging editor of a New York fashion magazine, whose daughter Grace
(Scarlett Johansson) is badly injured in a riding accident. Somehow we are meant
to suppose that Grace’s psychological and physical healing, her troubled
relationship with her mother, her parents’ marriage and life, the universe and
everything are bound up with getting the horse over its trauma. And Tom
Booker, a weatherbeaten but very sensitive cowpoke from Montana and putative
horse- whisperer, is just the man to do it.

Even if you buy this extremely shaky premiss, there is a further problem,
which is that the central dichotomy of the film between the artificial life of
the sophisticated city and the slower, more authentic existence of the cowboy
family, is built on sandy foundations. For it is the presumably lavish
compensation earned by Annie, surrounded by back-stabbing colleagues at her
magazine, which pays for her to play at being a cowgirl for several months while
her bloody horse undergoes a course of horse therapy. The cow-people, including
Chris Cooper as Tom’s brother, Frank, and Dianne Wiest as Frank’s wife, Diane,
can afford to be indulgent and open-hearted to Annie and her horse and daughter
because they are being well-paid; Annie and her horse and daughter can afford
their yuppie illusion of their own supreme importance in the scheme of things
because they have the money to pay.

Still, it must be said that the main characters, especially Annie, are well
drawn and that, rather shockingly, the picture does not quite take the standard
Hollywood view that marriages, families, friendships and all manner of
obligations in the world are but as the grass of the field before the scythe of
“feeling.” Nor is Annie’s compulsion to boss people around and make everything
right viewed without humor and irony. After the accident, in which Grace’s best
friend is killed and she loses part of a leg, Annie gets particularly wound up
as—typically, we gather—she takes charge of everything and everybody. Finally
her loving and much nicer husband, Robert (Sam Neill), tells her: “You know,
Annie, this didn’t just happen to you.”

Later, in a moment of weakness as she is falling in love with him, Annie says
to Tom: “The more I try to fix things, the more they fall apart.”

“Maybe you should let ’em fall,” says the old cowboy.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

The question is never answered, but she is right. It makes a refreshing
change from Hollywood’s usual close adherence to the maxim of William Blake:
“curse braces, bless relaxes.” Nor is her restraint seen as merely pathological.
Instead it bespeaks a life apart and before which cannot simply be dismissed. We
are as surprised as she is when Robert, always a dark horse, refuses to be the
bad guy. It’s almost enough to make me recommend the film, at least to those in
need of a popcorn fix. But somehow I can’t quite get over Tom’s description of
his job: “I don’t break horses; I try to get them gentle. . .I try to help
horses with people problems.” Isn’t he just too tweet for words?