# Horse Whisperer, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Wallace Baine

    by Wallace Baine
    Film writer
    Santa Cruz Sentinel

To understand a horse, believes Tom Booker the title character in `The Horse Whisperer,' you gotta know a thing or two about its past. Same goes for directors. While director and star Robert Redford keeps hearing comparisons to Clint Eastwood -- who also sought to redeem a questionable piece of heartland fiction as director and star of `Bridges of Madison County' -- the more appropriate jumping off point to assess this nicely burnished cowboy romance would be Redford's own career as director. Set in the same vast Big Sky landscape as his elegaic `A River Runs Through It,' `The Horse Whisperer' is, oddly, reminiscent of Redford's first film as director, 1980's `Ordinary People.' Both are concerned with the drama of transcending family trauma, what we might today call `healing.' Only, in this picture, the psychotherapy involves lariats. Kristin Scott Thomas of `The English Patient' stars as Annie MacLean, a rigidly ambitious magazine editor in New York City whose brittle emotional distance could be a direct impersonation of Mary Tyler Moore in `Ordinary People.' Annie's 13-year-old daughter Grace (a nicely poised Scarlett Johansson) is involved in a horrific riding accident with her beloved horse Pilgrim that kills a friend and causes Grace to lose a portion of her leg. Pilgrim emerges from the accident deeply traumatized as well and though his physical injuries eventually heal, his psychic ones lead the horse's doctor to advise euthanasia. Desperate to soothe the tormented horse's soul and to bring her daughter out of the depths of self-pity, Annie looks up Tom Booker, a so-called `horse whisperer' in Montana. Leaving behind her sweet-tempered but ineffectual husband (Sam Neill), Annie drags a passive-aggressive Grace and the demented horse across the country to convince a wary Booker to take a look at Pilgrim. What follows is the dude-ranch vacation of a lifetime for the two MacLean women and a bracing break in the monotony of ranch life for Booker's family, including his brother (Chris Cooper) and sister-in-law (a matronly Dianne Wiest). Longer than a Montana winter (actually, just short of three hours), `The Horse Whisperer' moseys along establishing the gradual but striking transformation of woman, girl and horse. Kristin Scott Thomas is especially bewitching, morphing from pinched, bottled-up New Yorker to vibrant beauty in blue jeans, her sharp features softening in the generous Montana light. That old Western magic allows the relationship between mother and daughter, heretofore charged with resentment and exasperation, to reach catharsis. It does wonders for poor Pilgrim, whose post-traumatic stress syndrome begins to ebb under Booker's quiet, firm guidance. And, predictably, it brings out the sexual heat between the gentlemanly cowboy and the thin-lipped editor. The love story is surprisingly chaste by today's standards (sorry, no steamy sex). It's difficult to judge whether Annie is in love with Tom, a divorced former Chicagoan with a yen for chamber music, or his image as part of an intoxicating landscape of open spaces, campfires and simple work. What's more compelling is Booker's role in putting back together the wounded relationship between Grace and her horse. The long lead-in eventually comes to a powerful emotional payoff, particularly for anyone who has experienced a bond with an animal. It's too easy to dismiss `The Horse Whisperer' as soft-focus glop (though admittedly, the camera keeps a respectful distance from the now craggy Redford). This film finds a kind of awe for the majesty of horses, and in the deep, spooked eyes of Pilgrim, you see a convincing glow of an animal emerging from pain. The humans are OK, but that horse becomes the emotional fulcrum of the whole movie. While Redford croaks out lines like `I didn't choose to love you, Annie. I just do,' Pilgrim's eyes just whisper.

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