(USA, 128 min.)
Dir. Niki Caro, Writ. Christopher
Cleveland, Bettina Gilois, Grant Thompson
Starring: Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Morgan
Saylor, Carlos Pratts, Ramiro Rodriguez, Eloy Casados
The Inspirational Disney Sports Movie is a
becoming an annual affair that offers a wholesome, perfectly inoffensive sports
movie. One approaches said Disney sports movie (ex: Miracle, Million Dollar Arm) expecting exactly these
ingredients (plus a reliable male lead) and one gets nothing more and nothing
less than one anticipates. McFarland,
though, runs the extra mile.
McFarland, titled McFarland, USA in, well, the USA, follows the Inspirational Disney Movie Formula right down to a title that begins with the letter M, but it competently meets the average bar set by its predecessors and raises it a little higher whenever it can. Carrying the bar through every minute of McFarland is the strong performance by Kevin Costner, who takes the true story of Coach Jim White and runs with it as grand star vehicle. Costner, fresh off a great performance in the similarly feel good Black or White, looks to be on the verge of his own Disney-ish McConnaissance as he offers a one-two punch of solid dramatic work. His wise, scraggly, and hearty coach is the stuff of Hoosiers lore, and he’s bound to be everyone’s dad’s hero of the year. He doesn’t waste a frame of the film.
Costner gives a very lean performance, too,
and appropriately keeps White humble and down-to-earth as the coach moves his
family to McFarland, California after he commits a major no-no worthy of Whiplash’s conductor Fletcher and gets
himself fired. Jim moves with his wife Cheryl (a nice turn by Maria Bello) and
their two daughters (Morgan Saylor and Elsie Fisher) to a neighbourhood that’s
in a much lower income bracket than where they lived before. “Are we in
Mexico?” Jim’s youngest daughter, Jamie, asks when she awakens in the car, and McFarland sets itself up to throw the
sports movie into fish out of water territory a la Million Dollar Arm and Cool
Runnings. Thankfully, though, the coach doesn’t play the White Knight.
White’s ironic name doesn’t help his
outsider status at McFarland high school where the student population is almost
entirely Latino. White, who teaches PE, sees his students run laps after
picking in the fields all morning before school and for hours after class so
that they can help put food on the table for the family that moved to America
from Mexico so that the kids could have a better life. The students (and their
parents) call their teacher “White” (or “Blanco”) with a bit of endearment and
defiance, but the coach sees that their energy and endurance needs a proper
outlet. He therefore proposes the school’s first running team.
These sons of Mexican immigrants can’t even
afford proper shoes, so the odds of trumping the over-privileged students at the
top-level schools at which White formerly coached seems daunting. It doesn’t
help, either, that McFarland High sits across the street from a jail and the
students run laps around some of their fathers and family members doing time. Fortunately,
though, White sees the work ethic and family values in his students that was
lacking in his former teams. Unsurprisingly, running provides a positive channel
for their energy and empowers the runners.
McFarland zooms in on one runner, Thomas (Carlos Pratts) who carries his
family because his abusive father is currently in jail, and the film develops
his relationship with the coach to reveal how the team provides structure and
goals for the students.
McFarland, however, does more than suggest that running puts the wind in the
hair of White’s athletes and affords them a sense of power and freedom. The
film takes audiences inside the homes of the students—the film makes a
significant leap for a major studio film with a predominantly Latino cast—and sits
Coach White down at the table for enchiladas. There’s a hint of the inevitable
outsider comedy as Momma Diaz piles spoonful after spoonful of rice onto the
coach’s plate, but McFarland uses the
family gatherings as opportunity to draw the coach into the community and to
let him observe the values that unite the town, his team, and, eventually, his
own family.
Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) also takes the audience into the fields with Coach
White as he picks alongside his students. She and Costner don’t play these
scenes for comic relief; rather, the take a matter-of-fact and respectful
approach to the physical energy one devotes to working in the fields. McFarland uses this sense of community and
this salt of the earth work ethic to put White’s own values for work and life
into perspective as he reshapes his approach for the team. Caro’s well-crafted
races and running sequences put the skills of these students to the test as McFarland celebrates their drive and
endurance with a terrific Latino-infused score by Antonio Pinto and warm cinematography
by Adam Arkapaw and Terry Stacey, which evokes the heat of the fields and the
McFarland community spirit alike, expands the horizon for the McFarland runners
as they move up the ranks. McFarland never
patronizes its subject, so even if the film wholly abides by the Inspirational
Sports Movie formula as it runs towards its rousing ending, it feels very
refreshing in this regard.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
McFarland is now playing in wide release.
