McFarland, USA (5 out of 10) – Directed by Niki Caro; Written by Christopher Cleveland, Bettina Gilois and Grant Thompson; Starring Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Morgan Saylor, Martha Higareda, Michael Aguero, Sergio Avelar, Hector Duran, Rafael Martinez, Johnny Ortiz, Carlos Pratts, Ramiro Rodriguez, Danny Mora, Valente Rodriguez, Vanessa Martinez, Chris Ellis, Diana Maria Riva; Rated PG for thematic material, some violence and language; 128 minutes.
Disney, along with animated kids movies, really knows how to make inspirational sports dramas. But compared to some of their previous forays into the genre, “McFarland, USA” falls a little flat and seems more paint-by-numbers than it needed to be. In short, this is the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” of sports movies, not “The Lion King.”
By that I mean that it’s not bad, per se, but it all seems a little formulaic. And the themes it builds on, specifically around race and class, are far better explored in previous Disney sports movies like “Remember the Titans” and “Glory Road.”
The story revolves around Coach Jim White (Costner, who is actually pretty great in this), a football coach with a troubled history, who moves to McFarland, CA, a primarilly Latino city whose main employment is working in the fields in the nearby farms. And he finds that while the high school kids don’t make particularly good football players, the years of working in the fields make them born endurance runners.
Let me repeat that — years of picking in the fields has made them born endurance runners. These are high school kids. I’ll come back to this later.
And so he starts a cross-country team, despite cross-country being seen as a “private school” sport. And so we get a fairly predictable underdog-triumphs-despite-obstacles sports story with a twinge of class struggle underneath it. Seriously, the teams they competed against may as well have sported monocles and top hats and spat out their caviar and fine wine at disbelief of being beaten by these upstart Mexicans!
But despite some sense of “been there, done that,” the films offers some genuine charms and. . . and, oh, the “feels.” For instance, you are never going to go wrong trying to get me to root for the cute fat kid who has lots of heart. But, like I said, a little formulaic.
How formulaic? Well. . .
[MINOR SPOILER WARNING]
In an attempt to show you how Coach White has his priorities all mixed up, he accidentally forgets his daughter’s 15th birthday. At this point I said to myself, “If the town comes together to throw his daughter a quinceañera, I am walking out of this theater. . . “
And they totally do. And I didn’t, luckily. Because this movie is, unfortunately, better than a lot of these hackneyed, predictable plot points they decided to include here.
[END MINOR SPOILERS]
So what else is good? Both the acting and directing are really excellent. The kids who play the running team are incredibly charismatic, even if their characters are written more thinly than the cultivated image of a popular boy band (This one’s the bad boy, you’re the talent, you’re the smart one, etc.) There’s also an amazing supporting cast, including Maria Bello as Coach White’s cliche of a long-suffering wife, who does more with the role than she should’ve been able to, and Diana Maria Riva, who plays the mother of three of the boys, who manages to basically steal the movie away from everyone else.
Credit should be given to Niki Caro, the director of “McFarland, USA.” She grabs so much of the essence of what it is like to be in towns like McFarland, the beauty, the struggle, and the culture. She also manages to make a running course look ominous and dangerous, just in the shots she chooses of the mountain-weaving track.
Unfortunately, she is hampered by this cliche-laden script and story.
What this film only scrapes the surface of are the real issues facing places like McFarland. As I mentioned before, these kids have been working in the fields since childhood. And, unfortunately, by setting this movie in the late 80’s, it makes it feel like this sort of exploitation doesn’t continue today. It absolutely does.
And with no mention of the forces that feed on places like McFarland, who thrive because they can exploit a permanent underclass of Latino fieldworkers, it lets us off the hook. And so when some of the runners’ parents don’t want them to practice so they can go work in the fields, or to forget about college because their family will always work in the fields, this is presented in a way as to paint those parents as being unsupportive or getting in the way of their kids’ dreams, rather than the simple reality that this is what survival looks like for these families.
And no mention of the real issues of privilege that allow high school kids in rich schools to run for fun and sport, while these kids do it simply because that’s how they get to and from work. It’s hinted at very obliquely, but more just to lampoon upper class white kids, not make us have some thoughts about our own privilege that allows us to go see movies, blog, etc, while multi-generational families are out in the fields picking the vegetables we are going to eat for dinner.
Meanwhile, Kevin Costner gets to play White Savior for a bunch of Mexican kids. He gives them self-worth and a town something to believe in. . .because surely the culture that existed there before “Coach Blanco” showed up wasn’t giving it to them. It was already a cliche when Michelle Pfieffer did it in “Dangerous Minds” 20 years ago, and it reached its apotheosis/self-parody when Keanu Reeves taught black kids how to play baseball in 2001’s “Hardball.”
Meanwhile, the issues of race and class that are discussed are far-better dealt with in previous Disney sports movies.
It’s unfortunate, because this story, these actors, this director, deserve better, less hackneyed material. A couple of passes at this script by someone with a decent social conscience and to get rid of all the cliches would’ve vastly improved this and made it a great film. Regardless, bravo to director Niko Caro, to Costner, the main kids, and especially Diana Maria Riva as actors, and to the city of McFarland and the real people this is based on. You all deserve a better movie than we got.
5 out of 10