The Horse Whisperer

In nearly three hours of relentless montages of horses roaming the lusciously photographed Montana Big Country in Robert Redford's enervating The Horse Whisperer, there's not one speck of manure to be seen. As one admiring colleague pointed out, this adaptation of the Nicholas Evans's bestseller combines Dances with Wolves with Bridges of Madison County (I'd throw in Redford's own Ordinary People as well) but does so with such ponderous manipulativeness and self-congratulatory good taste that some fine performances and genuine moments of feeling go to waste.

The disturbed teenager in this story is 13-year-old Grace MacLean (Scarlett Johansson), whose patrician parents -- Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas), a high-powered Manhattan magazine editor, and Robert (Sam Neill), a tony attorney -- provide her with such accessories as a Kentucky thoroughbred named Pilgrim but not much in the way of familial love. In a shocking accident reminiscent of a shorter and better horse movie, Lonely Are the Brave, both Grace and Pilgrim are severely injured, mentally and physically, and Annie takes them cross-country to the ranch of Tom Booker (Redford), a man blessed with a mystic gift for communicating with horses and other beasts.

It's a film of tiny moments inflated into climaxes, and very gradually does the scarred Pilgrim begin to respond to a human touch, the hobbled Grace cease being snotty and sullen, and the haughty Annie shed her career-woman pretenses and turn into Brandon de Wilde in Shane. Over it all shines the beatific, backlit grin of Redford trying his damnedest to turn this shit into shinola.

-- Peter Keough