While I have made something of a life's work familiarizing myself with the varied genres of le cinema, movies about horses that aren't strictly westerns do not loom particularly large in my body of filmic knowledge. The only picture with "Velvet" in its title that looms really large in my consciousness is the one that also has "Blue" in it. The only stallion I'm well acquainted with is the Italian one. And so on. Therefore, I would not feel on the most secure footing if asked precisely where to place Flicka in the pantheon of movies about horses.

Of course, I understand that such movies aren't really about horses; well, they are, but they're more about persons and their relation to horses, how horses inspire and teach persons and vice versa. In this picture, directed by Michael Mayer from a script by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner and based on the novel My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara, the person is Katie McLaughlin (Alison Lohman), which is a major departure from both O'Hara's novel and the 1943 film, wherein the young protagonist was male. As any parent of a preadolescent female would tell you, the gender switch makes sense for a number of reasons that go beyond the contemporary moviemaker's compulsion to "modernize" presumably quaint stories. (I can report that the chatty gaggle of 10- to 13-year-old girls who attended the screening I did shut up but good from the opening credits until the very end.)

This adaptation has some substantial talent behind it: Mayer previously made a creditable film of Michael Cunningham's novel A Home at the End of the World; Lohman is an adventurous actress whose work is never less than committed; the supporting cast includes the always exceptional Maria Bello and the first-rate stage actor Dallas Roberts (who was also in A Home). One casting wild card is the country singer Tim McGraw, and he's very solid in the role of Katie's horse-rancher dad, the kind of guy whose hard-headedness can't mask the size of his heart. The movie chronicles the smart-but-distracted Katie finding focus in the form of a mustang who saves her from a mountain lion. She goes after the horse and brings her back to the ranch, where her dad fumes that the filly now named Flicka is untamable and that she'll create disorder among his quarter-horses. The dad is half-right, and part of the point of such stories is that untamability — of "spirit," at least — is to be celebrated; indeed, Katie and the movie both argue that such a quality is inherently American. And the movie argues pretty loud. As is also common in the modernization process, this picture takes too many lessons from the School of Cinematic Overstatement, as in the scene in which Flicka and Katie are temporarily separated. As if not trusting the action and the actors to get the job done, Mayer cues a rainstorm as the trailer holding Flicka pulls away, and blasts a song about running with wild horses on the soundtrack. In case you missed the point.