The first few minutes of Robert Redford's film are efficient and effective. It's early morning in Connecticut. Two obviously affluent girls meet to take their horses out for a ride over beautiful winter countryside, laughing sweetly and sharing news of their latest boarding school crushes. Near the top of a snowy hill, the horses start to slip. Close-up shots show the girls' faces going white and the horses' eyes rolling back; the editing gets rushed and anxious.

The ensuing accident takes up several minutes of screen time, involving an 18-wheeler truck and curvy back road, resulting in smashed bones and bloody flesh. It's creepy, illustrating the initial terror and lingering sense of trauma engendered by an accident, an event so fleeting, so beyond control and imagination that there can be no coherent response. The rest of the film traces the one survivor's painful recovery. (She loses a leg as well as her best friend.) But the rest of the film (which runs two hours and 44 minutes) is not nearly so arresting as these early moments: indeed, it changes gears drastically, adopting the deliberate pace and formidable symbolism that characterize Redford's previous work, from Ordinary People to the fishing movie to Quiz Show.

Also like these films, The Horse Whisperer is deeply respectful of its subject matter. This matter is ostensibly Nicholas Evans' best-selling novel, adapted by experienced gloppy-material adapters Eric Roth (who adapted Forrest Gump) and Richard LaGravanese (The Mirror Has Two Faces and The Bridges of Madison County). The story begins by exploring the relationship between the girl, Grace (Scarlett Johansson, of Manny & Lo), and her New York Citified, high-strung magazine editor mother Annie (Kristin Scott Thomas). Refusing to let Grace retreat into anger and depression, Annie loads child and the damaged horse (Pilgrim, played by six horses) into a trailer and—unbelievably—transports them to Montana to work with renowned disabled-horse trainer, Tom Booker (Redford, playing a variation on Clint Eastwood in Bridges, the weathered, reticent, unbearably seductive loner).

Tom's wondrous insight into Pilgrim's psyche transmutates into insight into the mother and daughter. Conveniently, Grace's lawyer dad (Sam Neill) stays behind to enable Annie's romantic re-awakening and the inevitable complications. Granted, the image of Redford squinting from under a cowboy hat is pretty irresistible, but this part of the plot leaves Thomas in the same tiresome spot she was in for The English Patient, in love with a glorious apparition (at least Tom's not a Nazi) while remaining excruciatingly loyal to her imperfect husband (or more precisely, to her family, as any more upset—say, divorce court—would clearly be too much for the daughter, whose fragility is underlined by many soft-lit face shots and images of her behind bars, shadows and barn door slats).

The healing process entails what you'd expect in a movie overtly enamored of Western landscapes and big skies. Tom wisely gets Grace to drive a pickup truck and hang with ranch hands. And Annie, initially edgy and rude, eventually abandons her cell phone long enough to get down with the clean air, campfires, cattle ranching (and branding: bighearted Tom gets everyone involved in the calf-torturing), and big beef-based meals.

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