The Baby/Horse Whisperer

I have a nine-month old girl, and a friend of ours leant us a video-tape a few months ago called The Baby Whisperer by a woman named Tracy Hogg. She died sometime this year, I think, and I feel bad talking her, because I’m sure she was a very nice person. From the video, I got the feeling that she is very caring and understanding and really loves kids and people.

Nevertheless, she was a bit of a freak.

One of the things she said was that she always asked the baby if she could change its diaper before she took it off. What? Ask the baby? The baby is crying its head off because it has a load of crap sagging down its behind, and you ASK it for its permission to change it? She didn’t say, you wait for a “sure, go ahead,” but it was implied that the baby will give you permission. Weird, indeed.

It was the first time I had ever heard of this “whispering” thing, which seems like a way to say, “communicates with things that speak another language.” Tracy Hogg is a baby whisperer because she is able to understand and communicates with babies (it makes her weird, too—she says she likes to create an “aura of respect” around the baby—sheesh).

And now I have finished watching Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). The movie came out before Tracy Hogg’s books, but I wonder about this term “whisperer.” The movie says at one point that Redford’s character is a “horse whisperer,” and he replies with something like, “is that what they say?” It’s almost as if they expect us to know what a horse whisperer is, and I certainly would not have if I had not seen The Baby Whisperer.

Anyway, I watched this movie over the course of a week, and my initial perception of the movie was that it needed a good editor. It took me a week to watch it because it was 2 hours and 48 minutes long! There’s really no need to for a movie like this to be that long. There are good ones, I know, but these are generally movies that are attempting something grand—like Gone with the Wind or any of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Horse Whisperer was NOT an epic film. In fact, its scope was very small. Besides an introduction that takes place in New York, the entire movie took place on a ranch in Montana (with a brief interlude in “town” at a hoe-down). There are only a few characters, too. That’s all fine, but this movie is not epic, so it doesn’t deserve nearly three hours.

Much of that nearly three hours is spent looking at scenery. It’s beautiful, of course, but I would rather turn on PBS to see shots of beautiful scenery devoid of people and plot. Redford displays his mastery of “the shot” in this film by giving us the majesty and awe of the untrammeled country, but it should have been a part of a nature special, not a movie like this.

So my initial reactions were negative, to say the least.

Next time, I will tell you why I think this is actually a decent movie. You will just have wait until then. In the meantime, if you want to know what it’s all about and you have three hours to kill, go rent it or get it from the library like I did. Just try to make it past the first half.