Review: McFarland, USA

Set in 1987, Kevin Costner stars as Jim White, a high school football coach who is on his last chance after getting booted from his previous gig back in Idaho, for being overly aggressive towards the quarterback for insubordination. Now he relocates his family (wife Maria Bello, daughters Morgan Saylor and Elsie Fisher) to the rural Californian town of McFarland, which has a large Hispanic population. The kids question whether they’ve suddenly stepped foot in another country, possibly a third world one. White’s new gig is at the seriously underfunded local high school where he is to teach a couple of subjects (including PE of course), as well as being appointed assistant football coach. He immediately butts heads with jerk head football coach Chris Ellis, and doesn’t get much respect from his all-Mexican group of students. However, after noticing that a couple of the kids can run pretty fast, and pretty soon he’s convinced the principal to let him train a team of track athletes. He wants these kids to eventually compete for the State Championships. However, in addition to having one rather portly athlete Danny Diaz (Ramiro Rodriguez), he has to also take into account the fact that these kids (especially Danny and his brothers) come from hard-working labourer families who require the kids to help out their families in the fields. In fact, the parents are largely not understanding of Coach wanting to waste these kids time with high-falutin’ ideas of sports and education when they should be out in the fields and helping put food on the table.

But Coach White really believes in these kids, and as they manage to perform well in a couple of races (despite Coach White never having any experience in coaching long distance running before), he even manages to get the attention of rival, better-paying schools like Palo Alto. This has the team worried that the aptly named White is gonna leave ‘po town for a better offer for himself and his family. I guess they’ve never seen a sports movie before, eh?

Although it’s corny as hell and very clichéd, this 2015 true story from Disney and Kiwi director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider”) is pretty irresistible ‘true sports story’ stuff. A mixture of “Stand and Deliver” and “Cool Runnings” (minus the humour), it’s somewhat old-fashioned, and early scenes of Costner and his whiter-than-white family experiencing a bit of culture shock in the highly Hispanic populated title town is a bit of an eye-roller (And apparently a little bit made-up!). However, Costner is ideally cast in the lead (perhaps a bit too ideally cast for some people, I guess) as the kind of broken down old cowboy, or in this case, school sports coach on his last chance. Most importantly, it works. Yes, the story of the token ‘fatty’ on the team seems completely improbable, but as much as I’m sure the casting has been slightly exaggerated, the fact is it really did happen, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a spur of the moment allergic reaction that inexplicably produced tears from my eyes. And it’ll get you, too.

There’s also serious issues involved here, and Costner clearly saw something of value in this story of misfit Mexican kids from hard-working labourer families. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola probably enjoyed getting the most blatant product placement in a movie since “The Internship” supposedly set itself at Google HQ. Aside from the sheer predictability of it, the only real issue for me was that co-star Carlos Pratts’ physical build looked far more like that of an amateur wrestler than runner, to me. That’s a pretty minor (and possibly irrelevant) criticism, however.

It’s a nice movie. You’ll like it. It’s almost impossible not to like it. Earnest, well-intentioned ‘true story’ sports drama with an excellent lead performance from Costner. It’s cornball, but it does what it sets out to do, even if you’ve seen this type of thing a billion times before (and you have), you’ll find yourself rooting for these guys. It works, not spectacularly, but works just the same. Somehow the clichéd screenplay required three writers: Bettina Gilois (another corny sports movie “Glory Road”), Chris Cleveland (“Glory Road”), and Grant Thompson (an actor who previously scripted a couple of shorts).

Rating: B-