Just Remember the Title!

Rating: Null/10 (12 October 2000)

Two coaches, one black, one white, compete to direct the fortunes of the T. C. Edwards High School football team facing integration in 1971 Virginia. An enormous 300 pound plus blonde good old boy modelled on the late Chris Farley, is the first player character. He seems to have arrived on the Titans with none of the polarized racial animousities of the other players. His ready wit softens some of the early conflicts. SPOILER ALERT Two leaders emerge immediately. One is a beefy white guy with a lot of fairly racist attitudes. Interestingly, he and another black guy become good friends before school starts as the team works out at a nearby college. Some of the tensions subside as the players get to know one another. Back on opening day at T.C. Edwards High, however, the brotherhood evaporates quickly. The Team reenters the real world. Girlfriends are lost, friendships become tentative, the race problem persists.
A Sports alumni group wants to help white defensive coach Will Patton recover his head coaching job by seeing to it that black head Coach Denzel Washington loses the first game and his job. Will Patton's acting is neutral and opaque for the first third of the movie. He gives Coach Washington all the rope he can manage, to hang himself as head coach. But since Patton also represents our moral perspective, his character is not allowed to actively do battle with Denzel Washington. No problem. The white Coach has a five year old daughter with loads of attitude, a temper, and football know-how to boot. Her character is absolutely unbelievable but her credible temper manages to represent Patton's feelings perfectly. The Defensive Coach's daughter keeps the battle over team strategy hot in the absence of her symbol-ridden father.
Somehow, despite the racial divisions on the team and in the community, the Titans win the first game. Now it will be a battle to win all the games and the State Championship, a ridiculous expectation, given the divided community. But, see, this is an opportunity for the various players to bury their animosities and pull for the common good.
Meanwhile, a blonde army brat with a perfect quarterback throwing arm arrives to join the team. He's from California, has long hair, no race attitudes, and he looks like Kris Kristofferson before he was 35, but after Kristofferson's right and left jawbones were surgically broken to give him that high cheekbone look. Oh yaeh, while the girls look on from a window at the school, the California "hippy" practices Zen on the lawn. Coach Washington has reservations. The Quarterback Adonis is given a minor haircut that only makes him look even more appealing. Then there is also a LeVar-Burton-like black guy who starts to show Coach Patton what a winner he is on defense.
The two coaches have an uneasy truce. Eventually, an effort is made to have the daughters of the two men play together. Another uneasy stand-off. Washington's daughter plays with dolls. Patton's daughter wants to shoot some hoops.
The Titans roll through a series of games, each of which presents a new set of obstacles for the Titans, and especially Coach Patton. Each opposing team has a White Cracker Coach, and typically there is another conspiracy to put Coach Patton back in charge of the Titans if he will only accept complicity in the plot against Coach Denzel Washington. But Patton resists these overtures and the Titans winning streak continues.
By now, the film is playing race cards as a substitute for drama. The little playlets always end with a moral that is at least some way toward a position for racial harmony. And sometimes you get the feeling this movie is made with a moral cookie-cutter.
But by two thirds of the way through the movie, each Coach begins to develop some respect for the others coaching abilities. There is a racial incident when Patton's daughter is endangered after someone throws a brick through "Coach Coon's" window while the two daughters are playing. One coach contributes a set of plays that vastly improves the chances of the team. The two rival Coaches bond, smile, occasionally slap one another on the back.
Now the movie is starting to roll. It is no longer necessary to balance every race incident that makes the whites look good, with another incident that makes the blacks look good. The players are starting to pull together. The soundtrack is staging a battle of musical tastes since the first practices at the religious college. The black players try to bug the whites by singing Motown harmonies. But eventually we are hearing the best of Cat Stevens and other white Seventies Music to help balance the musical equation. The Team astounds by doing a Don Cornelius Soul Train Pimp Roll onto the field at the beginning of each game. Its as if this movie has collided with the cheer-leading Bring It On.
You can guess where this is all headed. To the Big Game. This time there is no problem with crooked officiating. The other team and its coach are not riddled with the varieties of cracker corruption we have seen from coaches and teams up to now. The Titans are going to have to pull together despite their problems, because this time they are facing a real team with no particularly grating stereotypes.
I was fairly disappointed with the films efforts to strike its own racial balance. The way to get the movie mechanism working is to get Coach Patton to relax and smile. When the film does that, the audience relaxes too. As it does, Remember the Titans gets good. And when it does it becomes, uh.., memorable.
Finally, there is the inevitable postscript. Ten years later the Titans gather at the funeral of one among them who has fallen. The roughly 28 year old actors playing these roles need only don suits, mustaches and slightly different hairstyles to play their real ages for the funeral scene. Meanwhile, the two little girls have been replaced by older actresses and Washington and Patton look exactly as they did earlier.
Of course, this story was based on a real high school team. The mandatory short profiles of Team members reveal that most of the white guys go on to professional careers. Despite euphemisms, the heroic black players spend their working years in menial jobs, mostly around the old home town. Its amazing the filmmakers risked letting old eternal truths like that one break through.