Robert Redford's film adaptation of Nicholas Evan's wildly popular bestseller "The Horse Whisperer" should have been released under a different title: "As Slow as It Gets." The film serves as a guide to the actor/director's obsessions -- all things western, all things sluggishly paced and himself.
The story, which unfolds over a couple of weeks, feels like it evolves on-screen in real time. Easily the most self-indulgent film released this year, "The Horse Whisperer" is a bloated melodrama that wastes the talents of its leading lady, Kristen Scott Thomas ("The English Patient"), and overdoses on shots of the Montana mountains and Redford's similarly weathered facial features.
For those unfamiliar with Evan's novel, it will suffice to say that Redford did not have great source material. Why he thought such an unexceptional story should be turned into a nearly-three-hour horse epic is a question that only he knows the answer to and everyone who sees this film will probably be asking themselves at regular five-minute intervals.
The story goes as follows: Grace MacLean (Scarlett Johansson), a young girl from a wealthy family, goes horseback riding with a gal-pal one icy morning and gets into a freak accident which leaves her legs paralyzed, her best friend dead and her horse Pilgrim crazed.
Her mother, Annie (Scott Thomas), senses that healing Pilgrim is necessary for her daughter's rehabilitation, so she decides that she must take her child over to Montana to see Tom Booker (Redford), a cowboy who whispers into horses' ears and rids them of whatever inner turmoil they are experiencing.
The remainder of the film tracks the relationships between Tom, Annie, Grace and the horse, and it takes its sweet time going nowhere.
The fact that "The Horse Whisperer" actually has a marvelous beginning makes everything that follows it seem that much more belabored. The horse riding accident is stunningly and frighteningly shot, and it packs more emotional and visual impact than anything else in the film put together.
The tension between mother and daughter is interesting and well-executed in the scenes immediately following the accident, but as soon as Annie gets the straight-from-Mars idea to drag Grace and Pilgrim to Montana, the film loses all focus and starts lingering interminably on trees and fields.
A large part of the problem is with the characters. Annie is a cold fish that treats her husband miserably and barks at her subordinates in the work place, and she never really earns our sympathy. This self-absorbed and glacial Annie makes a miserable romantic heroine, and the role does not even come close to utilizing Scott Thomas' considerable charms.
Annie's coldness would be less difficult to tolerate if the film had actually called her on being inconsiderate to others and miserable in general, but instead we are supposed to buy her as a wounded soul. That makes Redford the man who saves her soul, God bless him, and his role is an example of how not to age gracefully on screen.
Grinning condescendingly and dispensing Montana-boy wisdom like Cotton Candy at an amusement park, Redford is cloying and delivers the same exact performance -- older man helping younger woman find herself -- that he gave us in 1996's equally awful "Up Close and Personal."
The Redford-Scott Thomas match-up is as unconvincing as the Redford-Pfeiffer one was, and one truly scary scene that focuses on the duo grinding hips on the dance-floor looks like "Dirty Dancing" for the geriatric set.
As frustrating as the characters and their relationships to each other are, to over-criticize the element of the picture that deals with actual people would be unfair since the movie is most annoying for its stubborn insistence on adopting a laid-back pace that borders on comatose.
After the first thousand or so shots of long highways viewed from far above, the novelty wears off. What is pretty at first gains absolutely nothing from delayed exposure.
Even more irksome are the numerous "me and my horsey" scenes with Redford and Pilgrim. Looking soulfully at Pilgrim with an "I feel your pain" expression that is supposed to be purity personified, Redford musters up all the phony passion he can to make these scenes fly and, in the process, expresses more interest in the horse than he does in Scott Thomas.
It's sad that a film that began so promisingly quickly devolves into a study on scenery and equestrianism. This one's for masochists only.
