Review of The Horse Whisperer (1998) by Bridgetwalters — 16 Aug 2019

In my early days I worked for one of the top Quarter Horse trainers in America, and for all intensive purposes of horsemanship, he was the essence of the trainer in the book. It was my favorite book for the longest time, and I was very excited when I heard that it was being made into a film. Not only was it being made into a film, but it would also star Robert Redford who I thought embodied everything the cowboy Tom Booker should look and act like. My initial disappointment came in the first moments we see Tom Booker in the film, and even in the trailer. He walks up with new gloves, clean hat, clean chaps, and a shirt with creases still in the collar. This man is a born horseman who has been consistently working 20 colts in a day, and his gloves are new? This alone was enough to immediately tell me that whoever directed the film did not have a real connection with the content of the literature, and definitely did not have a connection with the lives of the people the literature represented. Nicholas Evans wrote: In the middle of the arena stood a small corral some thirty feet across and it was here that Tom and Rimrock were working. The sweat was starting to streak the dust on Tom’s face and he wiped it on the sleeve of his faded blue snap-button shirt. His legs felt hot under the old leather chaps he wore over his jeans. He’d done eleven colts already and now this was his twelfth, a beautiful black thoroughbred.” This was a small detail that probably would have been ignored had it not been for the next huge stray from the text at the end of the film. Nicolas Evans wrote: Then the terrible sound, sufficient alone to ratify the passage of his life, the hooves came down upon his head and struck him like a crumbled icon on the ground. (Pg. 394).

Annie looked at it a long time before she opened it. She thought how strange it was that never till now had she seen Tom’s handwriting. Inside, folded in a sheet of plain white paper, was the loop of cord he’d taken back from her on that last night they spent together in the creek house. On the paper, all he’d written was, In case you forgot.” (Pg. 404) What actually happened on film was Tom having thwarted off the stallion rather than being killed. He goes back to the ranch, and in the final scene Annie drives away reaching over to the passenger seat to pick up the length of cord and cry as she heads back to New York and away from the still very much living Tom. This wildly drastic change probably came from the difference in what a visual audience would want to see on a Sunday matinee, and what a reader experiencing a raw human story would expect. When I love a piece of literature, I feel like a director or screenwriter can get away with a lot in the middle. They can change dialogue and setting. They can negate the little details that give a different feel. However, if the end doesn’t tie back together the central theme of the text, it almost seems like I were tricked into watching something I didn’t agree with. It’s like buying Coca-cola only to open the can and find water.