Kris Kristofferson's withered saddle-bag of a horse whisperer Pop Crane materializes out of a backlit, fog-enshrouded doorway like a mystical piece of beef jerky in what must be the hardest-to-watch moment in the most desperate Oscar grab of a schmaltz-heavy season. The hyphenate debut of John Gatins, the writer behind such American classics as Summer Catch (wherein a dimwit (Freddie Prinze Jr.) plays baseball with a lovable band of misfits), Hard Ball (wherein a dimwit played by Keanu Reeves teaches baseball to a lovable band of misfits), and Coach Carter (wherein a fascist played by Samuel L. Jackson teaches basketball to a lovable band of misfits), Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (hereafter Dreamer) is, and I won't be the first or last to say this, exactly like Seabiscuit, except in place of Tobey Maguire is Dakota Fanning--and in place of the Great Depression is my own mounting depression.

Dreamer is the story of Cale (Fanning), a little alien girl who has a tetchy relationship with her workaholic dad Ben (Kurt Russell), who works for a dimwit fascist (David Morse) in charge of raising a stable of racehorses for a cipher of an Arabian prince. One day horse Soñador (Sonya for short) tells Ben she doesn't feel so hot; forced to race anyway, she breaks her leg and then...oh hell, who cares: Ben adopts the crippled mare for his daughter, and his insipid wife played by Elisabeth Shue (the only Oscar-nominee in the cast, she's saddled with the most thankless, most perfunctory role) declares that ever since Sonya came into their lives, they're a family again. Eventually, they race in the Breeder's Cup as the longest of long shots, and then, badda-bing, badda-boom, a bunch of DreamWorks executives wonder why it is that Dreamer--a film so transparent and desperate that it actually puts the "true story" hook in its title--is getting the shaft like Cinderella Man. Yeah, it's a freaking mystery.

Sonya's name means "dreamer" in Spanish (which does nothing to ease the discomfort of the soon-to-be-defunct DreamWorks going the Big Country route and recording, as it were, a signature song), more like "dream granter" Gene Shalitites will say, as the horse of course saves the Cranes from financial ruin and emotional divorce. Cale feeds her spirit guide a bunch of strawberry popsicles, sticking the sticks in the ground like a picket fence, the imagery of which is squandered to mark the passage of time during one of those Rocky training montages. Narrating every scene with a nice gush of weeping bassoons, piquant piano tinkles, and swooping violins, John Debney's excruciating score is almost exactly like getting worked over for a couple of hours by a big sloppy tongue. Even the scant silence is just a lead-up to another bassoon-piano-violin sequence, so that a lot of the film is a matter of waiting for the next opportunity to get that retard-tingle ripped out of your better judgment. In other words, even when Dreamer shuts up for a minute, you're still really tense--like having a mute proctologist, say.

What troubles me the most about Dreamer is that I don't honestly understand how its inevitable defenders (the ones whose argument doesn't involve how I must hate horses) could possibly defend it. Like the moment where the nails-chewing villain tells Ben to "take your Mexicans with you" and Ben nobly interjects with, "They're men! With names!"--at which point these men with names promptly become window-dressing to an underdog sports uplift weeper about that most class-unconscious of pastimes: horseracing. Giving at the office, a favourite middlebrow diversion, Dreamer is again the kind of film that has a certain kind of audience patting itself on the back for being discriminating filmgoers--it marks the third film they'll champion this year after Paul Haggis' Crash and that penguin picture. A miasma of mixed messages and exhausted clichés shot like a retirement home commercial and scored with an anvil, Dreamer is the prestige, A-list (sort of) update of Racing Stripes, and the sort of thing that should be put down because it just can't be fixed. Trying would only cause that much more suffering.-Walter Chaw

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the critic

Published: October 21, 2005