Kevin Costner has carved out a nice little niche for himself as a sports has-been.
The actor has played an ancient baseball pitcher (For the Love of the Game), a washed-up golf pro (Tin Cup), an on-his-way-out baseballer again (Bull Durham), and a baseball fan who never turned pro, but who nonetheless ploughs perfectly good cornfields for the love of the sport (Field of Dreams).
Costner’s got both the aging-high-school-jock good looks and the authoritative confidence to convince us that a comeback is always right around the corner.
In Disney’s latest sports drama McFarland, Costner plays real-life high school coach Jim White, whose football coaching career has stalled thanks to an altercation with a mouthy teenaged player. Out of better options, Jim moves his family to the impoverished town of McFarland, Calif.
McFarland is one of the poorest towns in America, in California’s Central Valley, almost exclusively Latino and with a prison conveniently located right next door to the high school. No one gets out of McFarland. “Are we in Mexico?” his younger daughter asks in earnest.
Jim starts out coaching the Bad News Osos of high school football, whose players have neither the size nor the strength to crush any of their competition. What they do have is speed and stamina and resilience against the punishing Cali heat, thanks to years spent picking fruit in the fields before and after school.
So rather than lose his post, Jim talks the school administration into putting together a cross-country team. It’s a brand-new sport in 1987, a rich-kids’ sport, the principal points out. Jim has never coached cross-country, but the free uniforms seal the deal. Â
His eventual team of seven includes a few decent runners (played by Rafael Martinez, Ramiro Rodriguez, Michael Aguero, Hector Duran, Sergio Avelar), one potential star (Carlos Pratts, TV’s The Bridge) and one chubby leftover (Johnny Ortiz) to round out the numbers, the underdog on an underdog team.
Coach is White, all right, down to the white-bread sandwiches he packs for lunch. The requisite culture-clashes ensue, alongside Jim’s conflicting responsibilities to his runners and the needs of his family (Maria Bello plays his wife; Homeland’s Morgan Saylor is his teen daughter).
While Jim is a fish out of water in McFarland, his students are unwelcome in the new, WASP-ish cross-county arena; the boys face racial slurs at the starting line. Jim isn’t much better, wielding a kitchen timer instead of a stopwatch to log the boys’ progress.
Once the team finds success, Jim’s coaching ability piques the competition’s interest: cue the usual lure of something better versus the moral imperative to do the right thing. It’s an underdog sports movie and ticks all the requisite boxes of its genre, although it feels somewhat novel because of its almost exclusively Latino cast. Unfortunately, any gains made in onscreen equality are lost in inadequate scripting (Jim’s wife’s assertion that nowhere has ever felt more like “home” than McFarland, with nothing convincing to back her up) or heaped-on Americana (Latinos can sing the national anthem, too, we get it).
Ultimately it’s the little moments that hit home, like the fact that the boys live in California but have never seen the ocean. (One of the film’s new actors had that experience for the first time during filming.)
No, it’s not as savvy as Costner’s Draft Day, last year; however, there are plenty of clap-out-loud moments to be had, and the high-schoolers at the promo screening I attended whooped and applauded on cue, an excellent testimonial for Disney. Stay tuned for the amazing stats at the end, featuring many of the real characters portrayed in the film.Â
McFarland opens Friday at International Village.
