disturbed by the racist overtones

Rating: 5/10 (16 October 2005)

(I guess there's kind of a spoiler here, if you couldn't predict from the very beginning of the movie that the scrappy, small Permian team would end up facing the massive Dallas Carter team in the State Championships.)
First, I'll say the awful thing--the book was better. This is rarely a fair criticism of a movie, but in this case I have to mention it because I think the conversion of the book into this movie results in the racism that I will mention later. The book was a nuanced, often-surprising character study of nearly a dozen Permian players. But the movie, due to the constraints of the medium, becomes a superficial skim-over of a half-dozen Permian players. Where the book was a critique of Permian culture in Odessa (and, by extension of sports culture in the US), the movie is just another sports movie, and not a particularly good one at that.
Perhaps this is why the depiction of the Dallas Carter team is so disturbingly racist. In a book, you can deal with the racial conflict underlying the Permian-Dallas Carter game in some depth and subtlety. In the movie, not so much.
First of all, the meeting in which representatives of the football teams meet to negotiate a playing field, the black representatives of the Dallas Carter team are made to look ridiculous and paranoid in their concern that the site is fair to their team and that the officiating crew include black officials. Their paranoia is established in contrast to Billy Bob's sardonically "reasonable" suggestions that "zebras are black & white" and that "zebras have as many white stripes as black stripes." What does this even mean? Is he arguing for even racial composition of the officiating staff or that the ethnicity of the officials doesn't matter? Regardless, at the end of the meeting the Great White Negotiator comes up with the seemingly inspired suggestion that the game be held at the Astrodome. Obviously, if this coach had been around during the Civil Rights movement, so much violence and conflict could have been averted (that's sarcasm).
Second, and more important, the representation of the Dallas Carter team was appalling. They are not merely Permian's opponents in the State Championships--they are the force of EVIL incarnate, and, not coincidentally, they are ALL BLACK! Yes, yes, I know that the team really was all black in actual life, but the filmmakers are not content to leave that alone. They must also render the Dallas Carter players inhuman. Already, the race card has been played in the meeting I mention above, so the filmmakers have primed us to see race as an issue in the meeting between Permian and Dallas Carter. It could have been handled more interestingly by showing the kind of racial conflict the Carter players had to live through, the inequalities facing Carter students, etc. In other words, racial stereotypes could have been challenged. Instead, they are reinforced.
Throughout the film, we are repeatedly shown that the Carter players are huge. When they play Permian, we see that, certainly, in slow motion, low-angle shots designed to make the players look more fearsome. But we also get to see that they are brutally violent and beast-like in their aggression. Furthermore, they cheat. And, as any racist white person would have predicted, the black official makes the only bona-fide bad call in the game, and it goes in Carter's favor. Not only that, but the Carter players are not simply black--they are dark-skinned, and some of them sport long hair and hip-hop attitudes, as if to emphasize that these guys are not the innocuous, loud-mouth, jester (another long-standing stereotype of black males in film and literature), Booby Miles--they are really bad guys. I can't help but say that the Carter players embody the "black buck" stereotype of the violent, black male, as seen throughout the history of Hollywood.
It's sad to me that this is still the fall-back mode of racial representation in 2005. So much more could have been done here, but the filmmakers were too lazy, and in resorting to the "easy" path of racist representation, they reinforce age-old racist stereotypes of black people (and black athletes) in America.