It Whispers to Me

As I was saying yesterday, my initial impressions of Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998) were pretty negative. The movie seemed too emotional, trying a bit too hard to make us break down and cry, and contained so many unnecessary scenes that consisted mainly of the beautiful Montana countryside.

So I was kind of dreading finishing the movie.

But then my wife commented that she thought the film was formulaic: a character is hurt and must overcome adversity, and we’ve seen that a million times, according to her. Yeah, she’s right. We have seen it a million times, because overcoming adversity is the basic story of all human life, or at least all human storytelling. So I couldn’t say that that generalization made the film formulaic. Every movie, novel, play, and short story follows that formula. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this film was NOT formulaic.

As a side note, let me say, that is generally how my mind works. Someone like my wife (and it usually is my wife) says something, and I have to disagree with it. It’s in my nature to disagree with people’s assertions. I am argumentative, I know. But thinking about people’s assertions is what allows me to come up with my own ideas, you see? I tend to begin by disagreeing and then try to come up with why. It pisses people off, but it helps me understand things.

So the plot of The Horse Whisperer, I decided, was completely non-formulaic. It isn’t just about a person overcoming adversity. Where does the horse fit into that? So I thought that maybe we see the horse overcome adversity, as well, but Redford doesn’t try to get into the horse’s thoughts. Sometimes he shows us what the horse sees, but it’s almost always just a blurred shot of Scarlett Johanson. The horse is important to the story, but it’s not really a character. I even began to see that Scarlett Johanson’s character isn’t the main focus. Nope, it’s Kristen Scott Thomas, who I had not seen since The English Patient (1996).

And this person has no adversity, at least not outwardly! She’s a highly successful writer (yea!) who has everything, except, well, a good relationship with her daughter and husband. The entire film seems to boil down to her making choices about ways to make her life more complete. Yes, she has everything, but she eventually realizes that she has nothing (yeah, yeah), and so she has to choose between going back to her life in New York or staying on a ranch in Montana.

It's an idea that could so easily fail miserably. Put a little too much emotion into this part, make it too obvious, and I would hate it. But the emotion I talked about earlier isn't about Thomas--it's about Johanson.

The film doesn’t hit us over the head with Thomas's plight, and I appreciated that. While it’s not exactly subtle, it’s not boneheaded, either. Scarlett Johanson’s accident becomes a catalyst for the end of Thomas’s character’s life as she knew it. As she struggles to help her daughter, she eventually learns who she is and what she wants from life. Could be terrible, yes, but the film's strangeness works.

The horse, for example, is a really odd element. It becomes a metaphor, I think, for the scarring of the people. Yes, it’s traumatized, just like Thomas, Johanson, and Redford are all scarred and must make choices. Redford even goes to the horse and tells it something like, “you have something to do tomorrow.” That’s the day before it “chooses” whether to be well or not. People keep asking Redford, “when will Pilgrim [the horse] be better,” and he always replies, “That’s really up to Pilgrim.”

Yeah, that’s right, Mr. Redford. We make choices about “overcoming our adversity.” Sometimes we don’t even know we have adversity, and we just feel miserable. Redford gets it right when he says it’s up to us to choose when we’re ready to be happy. I don’t want to get into any complex psychological theories about depression, and I don’t think this film tries to do that. It ends up making a profound statement, however, about how one deals with tragedy.

And I appreciated the way it did it. Sure, it was a bit too emotionally tugging, but it turned out to be pretty good, after all.

Grade: 7 out of 10. Definitely fresh.