HEALING: Our suffering nation needs healing now!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025

A deeply humane feature film: At some point, some years ago, the following thought had occurred to us. If we could ask one question of one public figure, we'd ask this question of Robert Redford:

What made you decide to film that same story twice?

We refer to the story Redford explored in the first film he ever directed, then again eighteen years later. The films in question were these

Ordinary People (1980)
The Horse Whisperer (1998)

Ordinary People won Oscars for Best Picture and also for Best Director. The Horse Whisperer was less successful in such ways. But in our view, it may have explored the story in question in a way which was even more deeply empathetic.

At any rate, it was a twice-told tale! Each film explores the process by which a suffering, tormented teenage child is retrieved on behalf of the world. 

In our view, The Horse Whisperer is a dreamscape version of the much more literal earlier film. Example:

In Ordinary People, the suffering child is saved through the intervention of a psychiatrist. In the second film, the suffering, 13-year-old girl is saved by the empathy of a regular person who's gifted with wisdom. 

The girl is saved by a person with a unusual form of sight.

Even before we meet that character, we're told this, in a voice-over, about his unusual powers. Fairly early in the film, the child's mother reads this text about people who know how to see into the souls of horses:

A million years before man, they grazed the vast and empty plains, living by voices only they could hear. 

They first came to know man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he used horses for his labors, he killed them for meat. The alliance with man would forever be fragile, for the fear he had struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged. 

Since that Neolithic moment when a horse was first haltered, there were those among men who understood this. They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. 

For secrets uttered softly into troubled ears, these men were known as the whisperers.

So we're told about the character Redford plays in the film. He has the ability to see into another being's soul and soothe the wounds found there. 

When he finally appears in the film, he's been asked to save a badly wounded, deeply traumatized horse. But he's able to see, out of the corner of his eye, that it's the suffering, traumatized teenage girl who's most directly in need of help.

Ordinary People tells the same story in a much more literal way. In each film, the trauma of the teenage child begins with a tragic, accidental death. In the first film, the trauma of the surviving child begins with the accidental death of her older brother. 

In the second film, the suffering begins with the accidental death of the child's best friend. 

In each film, we end up learning that the child's trauma involves a feeling of parental pressure, connected to life as an only child. The similarities continue from there, disguised by a vastly different pair of cultural settings.

Why did Redford explore that story? Eighteen years later, why did he make it a twice-told tale? 

In last week's obituary in the New York Times, we finally thought we saw the hints of a possible explanation. But as we watched the second film again this weekend, we wondered if we've ever seen another film so drenched with the power of empathy and with the glory of healing.

That said, good God—our struggling is badly in need of healing now! We flashed on where we once might have seen that word, and sure enough, there it was, near the end of our favorite passage from Sandburg's two-volume poetic biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.

Sandburg is describing Lincon's last trip, as president-elect, out to deeply rural Coles County, Illinois to say goodbye to his beloved stepmother, Sally Bush Lincoln. 

According to Sandburg, she had seen into his soul when he was still just a child, and she had seen something unusual there. Decades later, the scene in question unfolds like this: 

Sally Bush and he put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats. They held hands and talked; they talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him.

He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.

She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags or cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles County, Illinois.

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.

So ends Chapter 162 (sic) of Sandburg's two-volume effort. And sure enough, there it was, the mysterious reference to healing. 

It's hard to parse the exact meaning of Sandburg's passage. But the nation Lincoln served as president badly needs healing now.

In our view, The Horse Whisperer does go on too long. It ends up telling two stories—the story of the Redford character and the girl, but also the story of the Redford character and the girl's mother.

In our view, that ends up being one story too many. But as the week proceeds at this site, we'll be exploring our faltering nation's need for healing now—along with the afflictions, Blue as well as Red, from which we need to be saved.

Meanwhile, have we ever seen a film which was more humane? The story telling is brisk and beautiful in the first half of that second film.

We'll never get to ask Redford the question we had in mind. But Robert Redford, eighteen years later, had the decency and the humanity to explore that important story again.

Once again, he explored the mysterious pathway toward the "soothing of wounds." It's something we badly need now.

Tomorrow: What do we need healing from?