Moving and surreal

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2006)

This is a good film, but it's especially poignant, moving, and even surreal for those of us who attended Marhall University. I graduated from Marshall in 1983, which means I wasn't there during the year of the tragic plane crash or the subsequent year that's the focus of this movie. But no one can attend MU and not be aware of, and affected by the legacy of that team. There are annual memorials, and the landscape of the campus is itself a memorial to those fallen athletes and their associates. And the Marshall football team achieved such stellar success in the 90's, just two decades after having been decimated, that the story of the Thundering Herd demanded to be brought to the silver screen. In fact, over the past few years, as I relate to friends the amazing comeback of the Marshall football program, I have often said that it seems like something out of a movie. So it's about time somebody made a movie about it. The film's final line, "from the ashes, we rose" is perfectly appropriate. During my freshman year at Marshall, the Herd won the first game of the season--and lost all the rest. That was typical Marshall football. In 1984, the whole city was delirious over the team's first winning season. So when the team went on to win two Division IAA national championships, then dominate the MAC in division IA and win several bowl games, producing back-to-back Heismann trophy candidates, (Randy Moss and Chad Pennington) in the process, it just seemed like something out of fairy tale. Something from a movie.
And that brings me to the surreal aspect of watching this film. I've never seen a movie before that was filmed entire on location in a town in which I had lived. From the first sequence showing the steel mill adjacent to the campus to the epilogue including a closeup of Keith Morehouse (with whom I worked at WSAZ TV for three years), the entire film just felt surreal. I kept noticing familiar scenes and names. Places I'd been, walked, studied, lounged, and loved. The scene between Nate and Tom where Tom tells him about his misgivings was filmed on the seventh floor of Harris Hall, right above the art department where I spent most of my time obtaining my B.F.A. in commercial art. The floodwall is a place I've walked on sunny days. I've played on the basketball court outside the Twin Towers where the wide receiver was recruited. I watched the movie with my family and it was difficult for us to see it without constantly acknowledging these points of contact. I kept shushing my wife, as she pointed out to our children places we'd been and people we know. But by the end of the film, I was doing it too.
Besides being hauntingly familiar, the movie was emotionally powerful. The performances of McConughey,(as Coach Lengyel) Straitharn (as Dr. Dedmon), and Anthonie Mackie (as Nate Ruffin) were so intense I came close to sobbing more than once. To say this film is a tearjerker is an understatement. I cannot imagine the impact it will have on those who lived through it.
And based on being true to fact, I do have one nitpick. The "We are Marshall chant" for which the film is named, was not done properly. The chant is a tradition from the football stadium in which Herd fans on one side of the stadium will chant "We Are..." and the fans on the opposite side will respond "MARSHALL!". It is not done in rapid-fire succession as shown in the crowd scene in the film. It has a slow and powerful cadence that reverberates from one side of the field to the other inspiring the fans and the team and intimidating visitors. The impact of that chant is dredged up from the double inferiority complex that underlies Marhall's communal identity. It's a small university in a state that nobody respects where it plays second fiddle to the state's only well known university, WVU. This "red-headed stepchild" status was alluded to in the film but it couldn't really be communicated that well in the overall scheme of the film's agenda. It's hard to fully understand the resonance of that chant unless you've grown up in WEST (by God) Virginia, which most Americans don't recognize as a separate state and attended a university that continually gets passed over for funding and recognition (WVU is the only West Virginia university with a law school. Therefore, the state legislature continues to award it a disproportionate share of state revenue and resources). In short, America doesn't respect West Virginia and West Virginia doesn't respect Marshall University. That double underdog mentality is what makes Marshall fans' chant so powerful and binding. It's a chant of identity and defiance. We are NOT a bunch of ignorant hillbillies. We are NOT an insignificant school lost in the shadow of WVU. We are...MARSHALL!
So, as a Marshall alum, and a 20 year resident of Huntington, WV, I obviously cannot offer an objective review of this film. But I can say that if you want to see an honest portrayal of one of college football's most amazing stories, go see We Are Marshall.