Annie's search for a horse psychiatrist leads her to Tom Booker, a horse whisperer, so called because he can see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds he finds there. Though, refusing to take on Pilgrim initially, Booker finds it hard to say no again when Annie drives all the way to his ranch in Montana on the Rocky Mountain Front with both Pilgrim and Grace.
What follows is a period of recovery for both. Booker puts Pilgrim through his paces and to know what's going on in his head he makes Grace reconstruct for him the truck hit as it happened, something which Grace has kept bottled inside her entirely and the unloading of which makes her deal with it better.
She also has to come to terms with her own sexuality and her relationship with her mother whom she thinks cares only for her job as editor of a New York-based magazine and her big-shot friends. Annie herself is going through a tremendous self-examination. Facing antagonism from her daughter, her own job pressures and, most of all, a building of a bond with Booker which develops into something deep.
The whisperer though after helping in healing, not only Pilgrim, but Grace and Annie, becomes the tragic figure in the end. Intervening to save Grace and Pilgrim from a fight with a stallion, Booker offers himself to the stallion's hooves. Melodramatic stuff but high on visual content which is what perhaps led Robert Redford to buy the filming rights for the book for $3 million.
