Spoiler Alert: I basically tell you the whole plot, but it’s definitely still worth watching and/or reading!
As the resident horse boy growing up it was simply logical that I consume any kind of horse-related content that crossed my path. It was while perusing the bargain section, of either Blockbuster or Walmart, that I came across “The Horse Whisperer.” To be quite frank, it was absolutely life-altering, and my most recent reading of the original book, by Nicholas Evans, has left me doubly astounded.
The first minutes of the film and book, introduces us to Grace and Judith, along with their respective horses, Pilgrim and Gulliver. In a winter wonderland, they embark on an early morning trail ride, one of which only Grace and Pilgrim will survive.
With absolutely no context, we watch as a patch of ice causes Gulliver to slip and fall, sending him careening down a hill into Pilgrim. They spill out onto a road, and we watch painstakingly as Grace tries to rescue the horses and a semiconscious Judith as a tractor-trailer appears out of nowhere. In the book, it’s later discussed how horses, sensing real, imminent danger will turn to face their predator. Pilgrim, in a fit of fight or flight, finds himself in a losing battle against the truck, with his front hooves going straight through the windshield. Miraculously, he still manages to get out alive—running off into the woods. We learn that Judith and Gulliver die on the scene, while Grace, though spared, has been left without a leg. With something so visible, her traumatic experience is a loss she will carry with her forever. However, perhaps more devastating, is the invisible pain, the phantom ache in her limb, and the crushing guilt that there may have been more that she could’ve done to save her friend and their horses.
It’s in this first, of many acts, that I find truths that went way over my once much younger skull.
We don’t train for loss in the way we strategize for marathons or Iron Mans. Perhaps because there is no real way to prepare oneself for the unimaginable. Grief and loss are feelings, or better yet experiences, we can’t run away from. Furthermore, to grieve without forgiveness, particularly for oneself, is to be iteratively crushed by the world, your thoughts, and then your own humanity. Like layers of sediment, your memories struggle to resurface, becoming fossilized fragments of what they once were.
We see Grace sink into herself, and her parents and friends, in their misguided attempts to pretend like all is normal, are ensuring she never finds her way back to the surface.
Meanwhile, Pilgrim is a literal mess and has had a complete psychotic break. Aside from the physical damage of the accident, his entire understanding of life has been derailed. As a four-year-old, inexperienced horse, he’s no longer trustworthy of people or even other horses. It doesn’t help that to get handled now, malicious tricks and heavy sedation must be utilized; only further ostracizing Pilgrim.
Grace’s mom, Annie, feeling some kind of link between the horse, her daughter, and herself tracks down a cowboy in Montana to help the horse. This cowboy, Tom, lives on a ranch with his brother’s family. His own family, a wife and son, left him years ago when it became apparent that Tom was incapable of loving his wife, at least to the degree that she needed. As a horse whisperer, Tom has spent years helping people with their horses, but Pilgrim and his owners were a very special case. Weeks go by and progress is slowly made not only on Pilgrim, but also on getting Grace to open up again. Meanwhile, Annie is fighting to maintain relevance at her draining editorial job back in New York City, a sharp contrast to her life on a huge cattle ranch. Over time, she finds herself getting back to what she cares about, writing, and sub combing to the temptation of Tom.
As a child, who probably should not have been watching this film, perhaps the greatest message I originally took away was that love is far from happily ever after. For once, I felt I saw a very realistic sense of the ways love can manifest in our lives. We see it in a family struggling after tragedy. They are all they have and they will do whatever it takes to make things better. Love also screams in the forbidden passion discussed between Annie and Tom, a married woman and her cowboy hero. It’s the kind of feeling that I was far too young to grasp then. This story shows us the ways bright and flaming love, presented at an inopportune moment, can become crystallized in a state of limbo. The feelings don’t necessarily dissipate, it’s just that our love for others, time, circumstances, and ultimately ourselves takes precedence.
In the book, however, we see a different ending play out than the movie, with Tom dying, possibly even committing suicide. In Tom’s absence, the tone of hope that Evans apparently aimed for in his writing is lost completely on the audience, or at least me. I’m left wondering who is supposed to be hopeful in the aftermath of an honestly traumatizing experience.
Evans tries desperately to paint a picture of a happy family after they return home from living out west. Aside from the many impracticalities of the story’s ending, I’m left with an overall bad taste in my mouth. The lesson here seems to be that money and replacements, of humans and horses, will right all wrongs, even in the event of absolutely devastating loss. Annie has another baby, whom we don’t know the father of. Grace, though Pilgrim has joined them back East, is training a foal on the family’s new farm, but just on the weekends. Most surprisingly, Annie and her husband seem to have reconciled with no plan to address the questionable paternity of the child. How is this hopeful? What does this all mean for Tom’s son, who has now lost his father, a man who years ago seems to have chosen himself over his family? Can we safely say that he’s done that again, just more permanently?
In Evans’ original text, I see a man [Tom] so far detached from his emotions, that this tantalizing experience with an equally emotionally stunted woman, ultimately leads him to his death. Annie, still reeling from the news of her father’s death at ten years old, spent much of her adult life searching for a father figure and stability. Subconsciously, she found it in her husband, the father of Grace, a man who after kissing Tom, she couldn’t bear to make love to any longer. In Tom, she finally finds mutual adoration, a spark that hasn’t yet manifested in either of their previous relationships. In the movie we see this story play out, but the book provides a certain callousness to the characters one can’t help but grow to both resent and root for.
In fact, the author makes a point of showing how natural and guilt-free their love between one another is. For both of them, the subject of Annie’s marriage seems irrelevant. In all their sneaking around, the one thing that kept them from staying together long term was Annie’s daughter. They were so consumed with the idea of hurting her by telling her, that they didn’t think of the harm that had already been done. At the same time that Annie and Tom are falling in love, we see Grace open up to Tom, finally sharing the complete story of what happened the morning of her accident. Tom even pushes her to finally get back on Pilgrim, something she vowed to never do again. In uncovering her mom’s affair, she is completely blindsided.
We can unpack why Grace’s lack of horsemanship, especially near the end of the book, is insufferable later, but her feelings of betrayal are more than valid. As the book is coming to a close, all the trust that Grace had built up with the adults in her life comes tumbling down. She even begins to suspect that the affair is why they came to Montana in the first place, and we, the readers, know all too well that Tom most definitely is the reason they’ve stayed for so long.
Though I’m glad they changed the ending for the movie, a piece of me wishes Grace’s betrayal had stayed in the film. There’s a clear lesson in how our actions and impulses affect those around us, something perhaps overshadowed in the film by Annie and Tom’s loss of each other.
The one that seems to have gotten the worst lot in this story is Pilgrim. A young horse, at the beginning of the story, is placed in the care of incompetent caretakers, an experienced child, and indirectly in the middle of a toxic relationship [Tom and Annie] that was destined to fail. Pilgrim’s maiming has essentially left him in a constant fear of living, and countless professionals advise the family to finally put him out of his misery. The book’s ending has one redeeming quality in that we finally do see Pilgrim get rescued. After Grace takes off with Pilgrim to exact revenge on Tom and her mother, something goes awry and they wind up head to head with the stallion of a wild herd of Mustangs. Tom arrives just in time, as teeth and hooves are being hurled. Recklessly, he steps in, grabbing Pilgrim by the bridle and sends him off. Tom, standing head-on with the violent stallion, right in front of Grace, performs some form of demented sacrifice, letting the horse’s hooves strike him in the head with his palms facing upward to the sky.
Tom, the man that pulled Pilgrim, Grace, and Annie out of despair throughout the course of the book couldn’t seem to save himself. We can be all too quick to martyr ourselves in the name of love, an experience that like grief, we have very limited means to prepare for. I believe Tom’s years of evading emotional attachment caught up to him. While in the movie ending, we pain for this man, who has to willingly let go of Annie and what felt like a world of possibilities. In the book, we see an overgrown boy who has allowed an experience to eclipse his entire being. In realizing Grace knew about their affair, Tom decided to sell the unknown for something definitive. Tom left hints of his plan: making arrangements to have Grace take his newest foal and leaving a poignant note for Annie. In seeing these endings side-by-side, I see how the line between the two, in the heat of the moment, can seem so thin.
When we love a lot, we lose a lot.
Today, I’m less and less convinced that what Annie and Tom share in this book is true love. His acts of generosity and the intensity of what they share leave me hankering for each page. Still, I think we see true, true love without the need to martyr oneself. Love ruined by forces out of our control is not love lost, but stories that no longer serve us, a message so brilliantly captured in the movie’s disparate ending.
Some might say that in the book Tom’s last act of love was to sacrifice himself, knowing there was no way they could go on pretending forever. This would honestly make sense, seeing as it was a white horse—often a literary symbol for death. It still just leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, especially as I think about the everyday ways this story can play out in real-life relationships.
This false narrative of love and death needing to commingle so freely should finally be put to rest. I will not be sacrificing myself for love anytime soon. Though I struggle like everyone else to make sense of my feelings, I really cannot conceptualize a love that makes life without it seem unbearable. Would their true love for you not inherently wish you continued happiness? Would any pain or suffering inflicted on themselves, or heaven forbid yourself, not instantly mar what once felt so sacred between the two of you? Finally, who holds custody of that love once shared, and now lost between here and your forever?
Nonetheless, this story also further cemented within me the idea that our best healers and lovers are systematically those most in need of exactly what they dole out so beautifully. Perhaps Tom was never a martyr but he was certainly a healer. A healer who so clearly had so much within himself that needed to heal as well.
Regardless of the ending, Tom and Annie had their moment together. I can’t lie, their story, one of bliss and doom, moves me. They might have been even luckier than most, in their embrace of the here and now (which is honestly so toxic but ugh we love to see it). In thinking so focused on the present, we forget we ever once imagined a future, not just one where this incredible person may or may not be with us, but one where we lose sight of ourselves. A quote from Tom stands out to me, “Forever is a trail of nows and the best a man can do is live each one fully in its own.” Would it not make sense to momentarily plan ahead for future “nows” and does it not serve us to look back at the “nows” of the past that we have survived? Either way, I would just add to not purposely get stomped out by a wild horse on your own trail.