Review of Black Beauty (1994) by Rebecca H — 14 Aug 2009

I apparently don't know much about Black Beauty. Watching the film I was expecting all sorts of derring-do, rescues and pluck. After a while I realised I was thinking of Lassie, Skippy or Flipper. Looking back, I would gladly have watched a film featuring any of them instead. There would probably have been a plot of some kind, and maybe a few characters. Just think of it!

It's not just that Black Beauty is boring. And since I brought it up, believe me, it's boring. A slow and slightly Dickensian dirge about the perils of being a horse, it's miserable, predictable and not at all well-written.

But the real problem is the way it's presented. Black Beauty himself narrates the story, voiced by Alan Cumming. This was arguably the only way to adapt a story written as such in book-form; it was either that or just have everybody else interpret what he was thinking, which you can't do because the whole point is that nobody seems to regard him as anything more than a horse. But by giving Black Beauty alone the ability to chatter to us, you instantly render all other animals dull and uninteresting.

The only way around this would presumably be to give them voices as well, but that probably wouldn't be true to the book, and might have resulted in a kind of Racing Stripes farce. Anyway, they're just horses that come and go without consequence; the same, oddly, goes for most of the humans Beauty meets. Everyone in this feels like an inconsequential bit part, and the story feels like it's summarising things at a dangerously careless gallop, leaving loads out.

Also, most of the stuff Beauty actually says is banal and presumably aimed at very young children. He tells us all sorts of things about the mistreatment of horses, and that's a worthy cause and everything, but it's rather patronisingly worded and obvious. Five minutes into the film, I was seriously doubting the logic of letting a horse narrate his own film, as horses are apparently quite uninteresting creatures. Oats are nice, apparently, and running is fun, but walking on cobbles is unpleasant and it's uncomfortable having your reins tightened. You don't say.

It all clip-clops along with predictable ups and downs, although they're mostly downs: Black Beauty's life starts off nicely, and it's all bad news from there. Pretty soon we grow accustomed to his sudden, unhappy changes of circumstance. For instance when he gets a surprisingly nice new owner (David Thewlis, in one of those shrug-inducing bit parts), we know he's probably not going to stick around. Sure enough, he gets the Ominous Cough of Doom, and you know what that means.

Young girls and other horse-enthusiasts will enjoy all the nice, loving shots of running and whinnying. In fact, if you're big on horses, there are probably a lot of things to love about this film. The story, the script and the characters are not among them, however, which means I won't be seeing it again. Bring me a movie where the horse either doesn't talk or has someone to talk to, and I'll think about it.