A sob story about a white teacher coaching a cross-country running team of Mexican American schoolchildren narrowly avoids being condescending
What’s the Spanish word for schmaltz? Whatever it is, it flows from the screen like the Rio Grande during McFarland, USA, a feelgood underdog sports tale starring Kevin Costner, a bunch of kids who will not quit and a Walt Disney Company logo.
Based on a true story (so states a tear-duct-priming title card) and set in the late 1980s, Kevin Costner plays a football coach of entitled snots. In the locker room he hurls a shoe at his whiny quarterback which accidentally bounces and hits the kid in the face, spike-first. Unemployable at any respectable school, Coach White (yes, that is his name) ends up in the poorest town in California – McFarland.
Populated entirely by Mexican Americans, McFarland is a town where the kids get up before dawn to pick produce with their families, go to school, and then it’s back to the fields before they collapse in a heap of socio-economic despair. At least, the good kids do – the ones that Coach White (soon to be dubbed Blanco) wants to join his cross-country running team.
Why cross-country running? Well, because White was drummed out of the football program due to his own bad attitude. And because these kids appear super-powered to him. Few have cars, so they rely on their own feet to get places, and “they naturally carbo-load on rice and beans!” (This being a solid example of McFarland, USA’s benevolent “white father” attitude that by the end of the picture, I swear, isn’t all that egregious.) What Coach Blanco and the kids soon realize is he needs them as much as they need him, and soon the training sequences and test meets against the rich schools commence.
The us-vs-them aspects of the film are scientifically manufactured to pull at the heartstrings. The team consists of seven kids. The key player is Thomas (Carlos Pratts), a natural athlete who recognises that a win in the state championship could mean a scholarship and a whole new life. His father, a “picker” with anger issues, warns him that books will do him no good in the field.
There are also the three Diaz brothers, whose jovial, boisterous home includes a Molly Goldberg version of the “wise Latina” stereotype. The none-too-physically fit third Diaz brother Danny (Ramiro Rodriguez) is on the team more as a mascot, but when they need him in the clutch to make it up the hill and he runs against those rich Palo Alto jerks with so much heart, good luck hearing any of the dialogue over the sound of your own sobbing.
McFarland, USA reminds one a bit of the 1979 coming-of-age/social class sports drama Breaking Away, whose team of stonemason “cutters” echo the day-labouring “pickers”. It has nothing resembling the depth of the older film (for which screenwriter Steve Tesich deservingly won an Oscar), but there’s more to this movie than sweeping music and celebrating in slow motion. It all stems from Costner’s remarkable, taciturn performance as Coach White.
Audiences may approach his first-act attitude differently. Is he truly xenophobic, or just angry at this unexpected (and unwarranted) downturn in his career? He later becomes obsessed with the team, to the point of forgetting his eldest daughter’s birthday. Which birthday? Why her 15th, of course, and when his Chicano neighbors learn of this, everyone gathers together for the greatest quinceañera the community has ever seen. For the Whites (and, perhaps, the whites in the audience) it’s a bit like the barn-raising scene in Witness, but with singing and dancing and speeches from the heart.
Coach Blanco doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, but this movie is set 25 years ago and he is a man of his era. To see him change from someone who peels out in fear from a team of low-riders in muscle cars to calling out the team’s cheer with an “uno, does, tres” is, again, our cue to grab the hankies.
Some critics will scoff at McFarland, USA for essentially saying: “Latinos – they’re just like us!” The movie is very much from the point of view of Dorothy visiting Oz. There are chickens running around the yard and everyone is eating tacos with their large, happy families. Are stereotypical signifiers like this a good thing, particularly at a time when the US Congress is rallying around immigration as a wedge issue? From the point of view of this New York City-based liberal media elite, I say that whatever nuance this film misses with its broad strokes are done with the best of all intentions.
The real underdog story is how this by-the-numbers film about cross-cultural friendship, tenacity and strong work managed to go the distance without my rolling my eyes too heavily. Coach Blanco did all right.
