Playwriting stud Sam Shepard has sired some champion dramas that have in turn spawned memorable movies, the best being Altman's Fool for Love and the simple filmed version of the Malkovich/Sinise stage performance of True West. But the play Simpatico is Shepard Lite from the get-go and first-time director Matthew Warchus doesn't add much to the mix. The cast tries gamely to emit/emote Meaning, but neither Nick Nolte nor Jeff Bridges nor Sharon Stone completely succeed in convincing you to forget that they are Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, and Sharon Stone. Albert Finney does better as the comfortably sleazy exiled racing commissioner Simms, who was once entangled in a race-fixing scandal with the above trio when they were young and carefree and played by relative unknowns. And Catherine Keener gradually disappears fully into Cecilia, a sweet straightforward unsassy supermarket check-out clerk with a Kentucky Derby fetish who gets tangled into the plans of hairy loser Vinnie (Nolte) and slick thoroughbred trader Carter (Bridges) to prevent each other from spilling the beans about their shared shady past. In addition to his trademark theme of the struggle by characters and playgoers to make sense of the past, Shepard's subject seems to be how originally simpatico relationships, whether between friends, lovers, or racehorse and owner, are eventually dissolved by self-interest and mistrust. At any rate the great stallion Simpatico, which is central to Carter's current misdealings, is loaded by Warchus with too much unwieldy symbolic weight to keep the picture from stumbling.