Sorry sports fans but sports movies are always better than watching the actual games. They whittle away the commercials and bantering between penalties and replace them with familial drama poppy training montages and the all-important winning goal.
Disney’s new feel-good “based on a true story” flick McFarland (shortening its American title McFarland USA for a Canadian release) is the quintessential sports movie showing a rag-tag gang of athletes and their disgraced coach as they find their game and go for the win. As one would expect with a Disney flick there are plenty of maudlin moments but to McFarland’s credit they’re largely deserved. This inspiring tale will melt the iciest of cynical filmgoers’ hearts.
Jim White (Kevin Costner in full-gruff mode) is a high school football coach whose career is on its last legs due to well-earned reputation as a contrarian grump. He his wife (Maria Bello) and two daughters end up in the small SoCal town of McFarland a dead-end place largely comprised of poor Latino fruit and vegetable pickers.
The football team sucks so White turns his eye to track and field. The school doesn’t have a track team but White notices that the local Latino kids in his class are fleet of foot. Like really really fast. They have to be – without a car there’s no other way to get around. They’re also tougher than any athletes White has ever met. Most of the boys are up at 4:30 a.m. each day to help their families in the vast California farm fields as pickers hunched over cabbage and strawberry patches.
McFarland sounds like it belongs to that awful tradition of white people and animals that save underprivileged people. (Never mind that it’s a true story.) Positive message movies that cower before the difficult realities of class race and privilege seem to always make a buck. Films like the pandering trash The Blind Side are a testament to audiences’ endless need for this sort of false comfort.
To Disney’s credit McFarland avoids this by confronting the realities of the town and its people. There’s a clear line between poverty a lack of opportunity and its consequences – there’s a prison across from the high school. We have cheap fruit and vegetables because poor people are paid pennies to grow and pick it for us. The film never blames nor panders to its characters and continually looks outward towards America with a wary eye. Even a late film recitation of the “Star Spangled Banner” feels muttered with a bitter tone.
The film looks great too with director Niki Caro (North Country Whale Rider) adding equal bits grit and gloss a lot like Peter Berg’s football flick Friday Night Lights. (The score even has an Explosions in the Sky vibe with a Latino twist.) The town looks alive with bright bits of colour from dresses and muscle cars popping against the empty roads and dust clouds. More important the races look appropriately grueling and lengthy particularly when set against the oppressive desert heat. Running looks like the most punishing and boring thing in real life and as the film shows its overwhelming tedium can only be alleviated with catchy musical montages and cheering.
Again McFarland is a Disney movie so it’s eye-rollingly sappy in places and I can see how some audiences won’t be able to handle the film’s middle-brow take on class issues (again way braver than I’d anticipated from the studio) and occasional gushiness. It’s clearly a movie designed to tug at the average moviegoers’ heart strings and at the preview screening I attended the old guy sitting beside me was crying like a little kid with a skinned knee. I get it. It’s not a classic but it’s genuine and for a big Hollywood flick that’s more than good enough.
