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(2004)

Directed by Joe Johnston

Screenplay by John Fusco

Actors:

VIGGO MORTENSEN

OMAR SHARIF

LOUISE LOMBARD

SAÏD TAGHMAOUI

PETER MENSAH

J. K. SIMMONS

ZULEIKHA ROBINSON

SILAS CARSON

JOSHUA WOLF COLEMAN

ADAM ALEXI-MALLE

FLOYD RED CROW WESTERMAN

C. THOMAS HOWELL

MALCOLM MCDOWELL

When I interviewed director Joe Johnston after seeing Hidalgo, I couldn’t wait to ask him what films had influenced him most. I expected him to cite Lawrence of Arabia, not only because his movie involves a grueling horse race across the Arabian desert, but because he cast Lawrence’s Omar Sharif in a key supporting role. But when Johnston said Gunga Din, I broke into a big smile. I had a feeling he was trying to invoke that kind of entertainment and I was happy to learn I was right.

Hidalgo marks a rare return to a genre Hollywood used to own: high adventure. The term is probably meaningless to younger moviegoers. Some might say Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels would qualify, but Indiana Jones is a fantastic character with only one foot in reality and that’s not quite the idea. Exaggeration is acceptable in a high-adventure yarn but there is a limit.

For Hidalgo, screenwriter John Fusco turned to the little-known story of Frank T. Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen), a celebrated horseback rider who is working for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1890—and haunted by the memories of what he witnessed at Wounded Knee when he was working for the U.S. Army. A sheik invites Hopkins and his remarkable horse Hidalgo to participate in the Ocean of Fire, a three-thousand-mile race that few can endure, let alone hope to win. What’s more, Hidalgo is a mustang and will be pitted against the finest of purebred Arabian horses. Hopkins accepts the challenge but doesn’t know quite the extent of the adventure that awaits him.

Hopkins is a somewhat controversial character in real life, but Fusco and director Johnston are not out to teach us a history lesson. Their goal was to create a larger-than-life action-adventure yarn that could be called a Western—if it didn’t happen to take place halfway around the world. The screenplay is cleverly laced with subplots and colorful characters (including Hopkins’s rivals in the race and the independent-minded daughter of the sheik).

But the emphasis is on big-screen action and Hidalgo definitely delivers the goods. Johnston and his company traveled the world to make this movie. The director also realized that if he relied too much on CGI to “paint” the images, his film would have the same unrealistic look as an outer-space fantasy, so he built as many full-scale sets as possible and used as many stuntmen and extras as he could afford to give each scene visual credibility.

Viggo Mortensen, fresh from his triumphant work in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a perfect choice to play Hopkins. A horseman in real life, the actor conveys both the physicality and the emotional fragility of his character.

Hidalgo is the kind of movie that makes me feel like a twelve-year-old again. In fact, I know at least one father who took his adolescent son to see this movie as part of a birthday-party group, and the kids loved it. They also acknowledged that they’d never seen any other film quite like it. I only wish people could discover Hidalgo on a big screen, where it was meant to be seen…but in the best home theaters I’m sure it will come to life.

49. A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

(2004)

Directed by Michael Mayer

Screenplay by Michael Cunningham

Based on the novel by Michael Cunningham

Actors:

COLIN FARRELL

ROBIN WRIGHT PENN

DALLAS ROBERTS

SISSY SPACEK

MATT FREWER

ERIK SMITH

HARRIS ALLAN

ANDREW CHALMERS

RYAN DONOWHO

WENDY CREWSON

JOSHUA CLOSE

Some movies defy pigeonholing, and more often than not, they suffer for it. Audiences respond to pithy descriptions (“The Terminator meets When Harry Met Sally”) or punchy ad lines; the more complicated a film sounds, the warier people tend to be.

A Home at the End of the World can’t be boiled down to a simple sentence. As it is, Michael Cunningham had to condense