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Film
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Glory Road
In trying to go back to the Remember the Titans well, producer Jerry Bruckheimer triggers nothing more than a Pearl Harbor-size rout.
Friday, January 13, 2006
By Todd Gilchrist
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Walt Disney Pictures
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Coaches Lucas, Voight
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Given the inexhaustible wealth of comeback-kid, nobody-believed-in-them triumph-of-the-underdog sports movies made throughout Hollywood history, it’s almost surprising that these cliché-laden, "feel good" ventures cannot always be done right. In just the past ten years, enough of them have been made that they seem to be mass-produced from the same script, but with different actors and-or sports.
Remember the Titans, Rebound, Kicking and Screaming, Mr. 3000, Dodgeball, Friday Night Lights, and the best of this recent spate, Miracle, all follow virtually identical formulas on their path to inevitable victory. All of which is why Glory Road proves to be that much more of a disappointment. Borrowing verse and chapter from sports movies past and present, debut feature director James Gartner acquiesces so readily to the conventions of underdog tales, much less race relations films, that it ultimately matters little that his particular tale is mostly true.
Starring Josh Lucas, last seen trading barbs with a goth-rock loving sentient plane in Stealth, plays Don Haskins, a former women’s basketball coach (is there any more dubious profession?) hired by Texas Western University to coach their foundering men’s team. With few monetary resources available for recruiting, Haskins targets talent, not color, and procures a starting line-up comprised almost entirely of black players.
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Walt Disney Pictures
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Civilians Luke, Ali
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Needless to say, this is a no-no in rural Texas b-ball, much less the rest of the NCAA in the 1960s, but when the team unexpectedly emerges victorious from one game after another, this new "strategy" promises to change the face of basketball forever. That is, if Haskins and his players can overcome the University of Kentucky, led by Adolph Rupp, one of the winningest and most respected coaches in the history of the game.
Just like Bond films or romantic comedies, sports movies more or less direct themselves: as long as the camera is on the action both on and off the court, then the director is doing his or her job. As such, the least one can hope for is a solidly professional effort behind the camera that does appropriate justice to the subject matter, be it for comedic or dramatic effect.
But Gartner, working from a script by Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois (who show one writing credit on the IMDB - for Glory Road - despite the press kit contention they have written more than forty screenplays), pushes too hard on all levels. Every game in the film feels like "the big game," every role written represents an archetype or otherwise reductive representation of a character type, and every conversation functions on the same, insistent, sanctimonious pitch, rendering the collective dramatic weight of the piece to Michael Bay-level melodrama.
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Walt Disney Pictures
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Co-star Emily Deschanel
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Additionally, there are far too many "dramatic music" cues - you know, the Aaron Copland-influenced ones that creep in just as the actor is about to say something truly important - and far, far too many soundtrack choices from the likes of Berry Gordy-era Motown staples. Mind you, I never have a problem hearing old-school soul - I could listen to Stevie Wonder’s "Uptight (Everything’s Alright)" on a 24-hour continuous loop - but it’s about time that Tinseltown institutes a voluntary moratorium on that tune and about a dozen others from the era that always, inevitably signify the changing of the guard, as it were, when civil rights weren’t a history lesson but a living, breathing example of current social change.
The acting, meanwhile, is consistently serviceable, with the exception of Jon Voight - but I’ll get to him in a minute. Lucas brings many (if not all) of the right notes to Don Haskins, a trailblazing coach who saw himself not as a civil rights leader but a diehard basketball fan and pragmatic leader of Texas Western’s talented team. While he’s offered a real glut of emptily life-affirming platitudes to deliver, Lucas confirms his status among Hollywood’s more talented young actors and proves that he can shine even in material as cliche-laden as this.
Derek Luke, already too old for roles like this as of 2004 when he played a promising quarterback in Friday Night Lights, continues his own streak of solid if showy performances, and provides an actorly focal point for the remainder of the neophyte thespians who play his teammates. But Jon Voight’s overacting, particularly during the real "big game" sequence, should be a focal point for Kentucky fans who fear that Hollywood has compromised the deification of one of their most beloved coaches.
Having been raised on ACC basketball, which produced more than a few famous coaches, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a coach who showed such emotion on his face - by which I mean fear, concern or uncertainty. Anger, certainly. Rage, absolutely. But in the final moments of the game, when Rupp isn’t supposed to know what to do, Voight gives him the gravitas of, well, a women’s basketball coach, which undermines the climactic confrontation - despite the liberal use of David vs. Goliath-style metaphors - and suggests that one of the greatest coaches in basketball history maybe wasn’t so great.
That said, according to most reports, the majority of the information included in the film is indeed accurate, including the rote depictions of each player’s uniquely idiosyncratic personality and Haskins’ penchant for using phrases like. ‘You’ll blow out your knee faster than a twister will take your socks off.’ But that only further confirms that Glory Road is an inglorious endeavor, indeed: in more capable hands, this familiar tale might not only have felt fresh, but believable. As it now stands, this by all accounts necessary tale of the change in NCAA history, and chronicle of one of the most important sports games ever played, only feels like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.
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