If you've seen Pleasantville--the story of teenagers who are magically transported from 1990s reality into 1950s television--you know that its writer-director, Gary Ross, has a sly respect for nostalgia, especially when it's felt for a past you didn't live. Pleasantville's protagonists, the not-yet-famous Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, inhabited their vision of a pristine world and then slowly learned to distance themselves from it. The more disillusioned they became, the less rancor they felt about the present day--which may help to explain the film's middling box-office career. Audiences today don't have much feeling for unembittered irony.

Ross's new film, his first since Pleasantville, draws on the same gentle mode; and yet this picture will surely bring him great rewards. The movie is Seabiscuit: a success story in the self-consciously American vein, based on a bestselling book by Laura Hillenbrand about a great race horse of the 1930s and the troubled people who drew together around him. On the handsome face of it, this is a presold property, and not just because it features the now-stellar Maguire. Seabiscuit is literally and insistently about beating the odds, coming from behind, running free.

Almost inevitably, the movie begins and ends with evocations of America's ultimate symbol of opportunity, the open road. Not so inevitably, these images are melancholy.

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