The Kevin Costner led sports movie is an American tradition just like apple pie and the Fourth of July. While most actors try to avoid being typecast into a certain role, the 60-year-old Costner has been the feature player in so many flicks (7 total) about the trials and tribulations of sports americana that one would think he could actually lead a team to the promised land in real life. And when it comes to drawing a viewership, when Costner builds it, they will come, and come in droves. Two of the biggest sports movies of all time, “Field of Dreams" and “Tin Cup", grossed a combined $138 million at the box office with Costner as the lead.
This brings us to the latest of Costner's triumphs, “McFarland, USA", the story of an inexperienced cross country coach who leads a team of impoverished Mexican-American high schoolers to the first ever CIF State meet in 1987. Costner plays Jim White, a man with an apparent quick temper that takes a coaching/teaching job in the central California town of McFarland after one too many outbursts as a high school football coach in Idaho. The film takes the artistic license of suggesting that White moves his family to McFarland immediately following this incident, when in reality White lived in McFarland for more than a decade before taking a job at the high school.
Spinning the plot in the interest of driving home the story is nothing new to a sports movie, so knowing that White didn't hitch up his truck on a moment's notice to coach a cross country team does not diminish the story. It does of course make White's arrival in McFarland more jarring, as Costner's character takes his family out to dinner on their first night in town only to find a group of gang-like men taunting his family as they rush to the car. This is after the family arrives at their new home and finds a giant mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe on their living room wall, so you understand quickly that the Whites are strangers in a strange land. A character named Jim White seems almost too good to be true in this story.
The Costner-as-White story leads us to the unlikely union of seven farmer's sons, known in the film as 'pickers', and White, who sees long-distance talent in these boys whose lives are consumed with early wake-up calls and not much else in terms of prospects for the future. White struggles to get the boys and their parents to buy-in to cross country, the latter of the two because time away from the fields threatens their livelihood.
The film does well to focus on the intersection of the boys' plight to spend time running with White while sacrificing their work, and White's growing appreciation for the difficulty of their lives. A memorable instance of comic relief shows White trying to communicate with a runner's father through translation, while the man clearly speaks English himself. "Tell him I said thanks," drew one of the louder laughs at my South Bend theater on Saturday night.
The bigger point, of course, is that White is more interested in understanding these boys and improving their lives than just training seven untapped talents into running champions. Credit goes to director Niki Caro for making "McFarland, USA" a story where the boys teach the coach more about life than he teaches them about running. You don't learn exactly what workouts and training methods led to the team's success, but that isn't what the story is about. Just like "Field of Dreams" was more about a son's relationship with his father rather than baseball, "McFarland" stays true to the idea that sports are more about the relationships that they foster than the results on a scoreboard.
This film executes on its design to bring first generation Mexican-American immigrant's struggles to the forefront of the discussion table by using cross country as its medium. Costner's White didn't have any previous knowledge about running before McFarland, but he knew even less about the struggles of these farmers who were just trying to get by. When the film comes to its climatic moment just before the CIF Finals, White has struck the perfect balance between training miles and empathetic hours spent in the boys' shoes. This fact isn't lost on his athletes, who invite their coach into the pre-race huddle for the first time. His cheer of "Uno, dos, tres, McFarland!", sends this group of unlikely heroes off in their last race, a battle that they've already won.
Flotrack Rating: 3 out of 4 stars
<p> <em>As McFarland, USA hits theaters this weekend, MileSplit takes a look back at the nation's best high school track and field stars in history. </em></p>