Review of Dreamer: Inspired By a True Story (2005) by Markb. — 04 Jan 2006

What's with that title, anyway? Besides its obvious structural ungainliness (I doubt that many theater employees bothered to put more than the first word on the marquee anyway), it places the movie's goings-on under immediate suspicion: even relatively unsophisticated patrons know that the difference between "based on a true story" and "inspired by a true story" is the difference between a waterproof watch and a water-resistant one.

(And the final seconds of the closing credits bear this out.) This is an extremely tried-and-not-so-true story of a little girl who Beats Innumerable Odds to enter her beloved underdog horse in The Big Race; the plot details and outcome are crystal-clear from the first 5 minutes on to anyone over the age of 3 and/or who has seen more than twenty movies in his or her lifetime.

(The only thing remotely resembling a surprise is how the young heroine manages to feed "Dreamer" so many cherry popsicles without giving him a brain freeze.) It's essentially harmless, I guess: the horse and the Kentucky scenery are lovely to look at; it's nice to see the adorable Dakota Fanning in a film that doesn't require her to be tormented either by aliens or Robert DeNiro; the rest of the cast performs adequately, even though Kurt Russell was more effective in the equally inspirational but far more imaginative 2004 hockey film Miracle and Elisabeth Shue needs to add a cheeseburger or two to her diet.

Major debits include one of those all-encompassing, instruct-the-audience-exactly-how-to-feel music scores (by the usually capable John Debney, who also did The Passion of the Christ) that does nothing more than reiterate how numbingly predictable the rest of the movie is.