What is more important, the dream you have of the dirt you're in?

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2008)

A simple film about humanity, humaneness, just plain life and what it should be. The question here is about the place of a mentally disabled person in our society. Is he supposed to be pushed on the side and kept there in the margin or is he supposed to be helped to find a place inside where he could be useful to himself, to others, and happy too? I guess when stated like that the challenge would be accepted by anyone. Asking the question is answering it, as the saying has it. But if we move to the South in the early integration days and if the mentally disabled person is black, what can we do? And asking that second question reveals what it is all about then? Not about the retard as some are going to call him, but about the racial difference. And that is what the film shows with great emotion and subtlety. And the coach in the film is white and he is doing just what he feels is good and that creates some kind of a stir and the stir from some white parents will be solved essentially by the high school students themselves who adopt the boy and make him their mascot one said, but that was false. He was more a mirror into which they saw the challenge of sport, the challenge it is to live up to something you have never done and don't know yet how to do. And that mirror was teaching a lesson of courage and enthusiasm to the teens or young men and they learned that lesson with style, gusto and charm. They learned how to love the one who was pulling them up from the dirt into the sky. A model in life is not necessarily a Hollywood star, but he can be just someone who could be bitter and defeated and yet finds in himself the strength and the inspiration to accept and face his limits and then step over them and climb. Yes you can climb into a tree even if you have no legs or no arms. The climbing is first of all in your head and if it is not there, you will never climb the tree even if you have twenty legs. That's what the film is about and the bigots who resist that lesson are just off the point and out of focus.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines