Football As Metaphor.

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2015)

This is a corny but still moving story of a football team becoming integrated in 1971, with the whites led by Will Patton and the blacks led by Denzel Washington. I know "blacks" and "whites" are obsolete terms but that's the way the movie pitches them.
The performances are pretty good. Denzel Washington is always reliable and Will Patton has done some superb turns on film. He was my supporting player in one of his lesser efforts, "Everybody Wins." The team members vary in chops, with some better than others, but nobody torpedoes the film, not even the lovable and pathetic football player with the build of a sumo wrestler, the kid so fat he can be seen from outer space.
The movie more or less divides itself into two halves. I found the first half more interesting than the second. The first half deals with bringing two mutually antagonistic groups together. The second half, a moral vacuum, deals with winning the Pan-Tidewater and Okefenokee High School Championship or something, and not an opportunity to stir the rabid enthusiasm of the crowd or to milk a tear out of the audience is missed.
It's hard to believe that the philosopher William James once described sports as "the moral equivalent of war." You know -- get that pent up anger out of your system in a peaceful and rule-bound manner? I don't think he'd make that argument today, not with riots so common after soccer games that England banned them, and not with a dispute over soccer -- what IS it about soccer? -- having provided a trigger for the so-called Football War between El Salvador and Guatamala. Three thousand people died.
I don't want to get too far off the gridiron here but let me add that Denzel Washington is the first black coach of the Titans, the high school football team, most of whose members look old enough to have been held back for four or five years. How does Washington run the team? Like Marine Corps boot camp, right out of "Full Metal Jacket." He's a real hard-ass. Color means nothing to him. He's pitiless. And his ruthlessness lends the story some meaning. Let me introduce some experimental evidence for that claim.
(1) The famous "Robber's Cave Experiment" by Muzafer Sheriff. Sheriff brought together two antagonistic groups of matched twelve-year-old boys, gangs that had been labeled the Eagles and the Rattlers. They hated each other. Then they were both faced with a difficult task that could only be achieved by cooperation. Sheriff called it a "superordinate goal." It resolved the antagonism. I'm simplifying this but it's easily Googled. And I refer you to Ronald Reagan's musing that if the earth were invaded by UFOs it would draw the disputatious nations of the world together.
(2) A 1959 study by Aronson and Mills that demonstrated that the tougher the initiation rite, the more group loyalty you get. By browbeating them so mercilessly Washington enhanced the solidarity of the Low-Country and Panhandle Titans, blacks and whites together. Basic training aims at the same end, and the harder the training, the greater the loyalty. Just being in the Armed Forces is not enough. You have to have your butt kicked. It's why you sometimes hear, "Once a Marine, always a Marine," but never, "Once a Coast Guardsman, always a Coast Guardsman."
There's an element missing from the story, though. We see a lot of white antagonism towards blacks but very little in the way of black solidarity. Many African-Americans have built a wall around themselves and punish each other for associating too closely with white people. A hint of that reality would have turned this into an edgy adult movie instead of something that resembles a Hallmark special.
The direction is okay. The football scenes are exciting and every impact of shield-clad body with shield-clad body is accompanied by an explosive WHOMP on the sound track. The same effect is applied recklessly to a football pass landing in a runner's arms. The musical score is loud and signals with reasonable precision exactly what emotion is expected of you during a given scene.