Uplifting True Story About An Unlikely Working-Class Kid Who Fights His Way to Notre Dame and Its Football Team

Rating: 9/10 (18 August 2014)

Part-way into the film, Daniel Ruettiger, Sr. (Ned Beatty), the father of "Rudy", tells the story of how his immigrant father, Rudy's grandfather, came to America and gave his family a new life. Later he decided to create a dairy farm out in the country. He bought land and about 200 cows, probably on credit. Unfortunately, according to Beatty, the cows died of disease after only a few months. Because it was the Depression, they couldn't sell the land. As a result, Rudy's grandfather disappeared, never to be seen again, and younger siblings were split up to live with other family members. We assume he left his family because of the shame of failure. Rudy's father then goes on to say that universities like Notre Dame just aren't in the cards for members of the Ruettiger family of laborers. Institutions like Notre Dame are for rich and connected people, not for those who don hard-hats at steel mills and factories.
The moral of Beatty's story: if you try and don't succeed, it would have been better if you hadn't tried at all. Rudy's father tells him this story at a bus station where Rudy is going to travel to South Bend, Indiana, hoping to not only enroll into Notre Dame University, but also play for their illustrious football team. Rudy decides not to take heed of his father's story and instead travels to South Bend anyway with nothing except a cheap traveling pack. Which is I think the point of "Rudy": that we must try and risk failure if we are to have any chance to succeed.
Rudy's chances of getting into Notre Dame as a student are slim at best and almost negligible in regards to joining the Fighting Irish football team. He has every disadvantage imaginable. But he has one thing in his favor: he has nothing to lose, and he knows he will have to put in 400% to achieve his goals. To give him an edge, Rudy thinks outside the box and does things other kids wouldn't have thought to do, such as befriending the grounds-keeper at the Notre Dame stadium and introducing himself to the Notre Dame coach even before he's a student. But his road is hard and arduous. In a very interesting shot about mid-way through the film, we see Rudy on the outside of the Notre Dame stadium while a game is in-progress. The shot is a bird's eye view with Rudy at ground-level to the right of the large wall of the stadium to the left. This is the seemingly impenetrable wall Rudy is trying to climb. Physically, he is right near the stadium yet he is still on the outside.
This is a remarkable film about a highly implausible story that is truly a great inspirational films. While the supporting cast is perfect for the film, it's the performance of Sean Astin as Rudy which takes us all the way. Every step of Astin as Rudy is completely believable. And the film never lapses into cliché sentiment but sticks with the facts of most of the true story, with one small change towards the end. If Astin and/or the script had ever once lapsed into idealistic fantasy it would have become almost satirical farce, but luckily it never does. It ranks as one of best sports films of all time.