We Are Marshall
Directed by McG
Sports rabble-rousers have been a movie staple ever since the first Rocky flick when Hollywood discovered how easy it is to play on audiences’ emotions: appeal to their proletarian sense of justice and inspire ideas of virtue and, most of all, winning. This Jock Uplift (there really is no better term) was recently expanded into sure-fire democratic manipulation by Jerry Bruckheimer’s production Remember the Titans. After that multi-racial, history-referencing football pep rally, innumerable movies have replicated the formula. Though most of them are indistinguishable, not all have been terrible as the recent Invincible proved. But no movie in the Jock Uplift genre has been as ambitious, or as admirable, as the new We Are Marshall.
We Are Marshall proves that Jock Uplift can provide a pretty good template for dealing with social issues, showing how a person’s individual problems fit into a community model. In other words, demonstrating how ideology works—how people come to share and clarify basic ideas about day-to-day living.
More than a mere football game is at stake in We Are Marshall. It’s based on the 1970 news story in which most of Marshall University’s football and faculty from West Virginia were killed in a plane crash. Although the specifics of this tragedy describe a local community, there’s no escaping that the large-scale catastrophe parallels 9/11: Average people were forced to bear shock, grief, loss, death and a lingering depression. There’s no disrespect in the filmmakers hiking-up the significance of Marshall’s crisis. They are right to do so—making the audience members share the experience, apply it to their own lives and learn something.
It would be callously simple-minded to reject We Are Marshall as just another piece of Jock Uplift (The school’s soon-to-be-dead coach’s roar: “Winning is the only thing that matters!” gets rah-rah out of the way real quick). This movie does something special: It confronts the problem of America attempting to heal itself. Watching a bereft father (Ian McShane), disorientated girlfriend (Kate Mara), guilty, left-behind teammates (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty), a bewildered school president (David Strathairn) question themselves, the film becomes a fable about dealing with grief.
We Are Marshall formalizes the beginning of catharsis, but its style is not solemn, nor fake-serious like the blandly exploitative United 93. Director McG, best known for the Charlie’s Angels pop-fests, uses the colorful emotional shorthand of commercials and music videos—a new lingo. McG has gone from no real emotion to dealing with genuine tragedy, but who’s to say he is any less equipped than the rest of us? Even pop art must find analogies for 9/11 shock, loss, grief, fate (as did the astute but widely misunderstood Final Destination 3). McG doesn’t wallow in misery like Paul Greengrass; he seeks American energy—what Will Farrell in Talladega Nights called “big, hairy, American spirit.” McG find his exemplar in Matthew McConaughey as Jack Lengyel, the out-of-town coach who answers the high school team’s call for help.
McConaughey is steadily becoming one of the most reliable and surprising American actors. Where A-lister Leonard DiCaprio craps out in the fatuous political thriller Blood Diamond, it was McConaughey who made the fascinating B-movie exploration of African corruption, global politics and economic history in the unpretentious Sahara, a genuine political thriller. In We Are Marshall, McConaughey plays the outsider coach who comes to Marshall to revitalizes it. The role works a bit like Harold Hill in The Music Man, and there’s something of the snake-oil salesman about McConaughey, but he cannily uses his Texan roots to ground the role and make an audacious characterization.
Keeping his head bowed, leaning forward when he talks to people, McConaughey combines an egotist’s modesty with Midwestern bonhomie. He’s cadging, attentive and fumblingly seductive—not unlike George W. Bush. McConaughey channels Bush’s deliberateness and stubborn, foolhardy optimism. By offering this idiosyncratic portrait of a local commander-in-chief, We Are Marshall dares present the shell-shocked American public with an alternative idea of leadership. Which public leader myth is true: Giuliani as “America’s mayor” or Bush as America’s coach? And which is the post-9/11 audience willing to accept?
By proposing this option, We Are Marshall redefines the body politic in more substantive ways than its pop song soundtrack first suggests. Its restorative sense of nationhood may be unpopular among liberals, but We Are Marshall is good because it’s not propaganda; its regard of healing goes beyond 9/11 to the essence of American character. Listen at the way McConaghey urges a player to “Head-slap the shit” out of an opponent. Beneath its Jock Uplift formula, We Are Marshall is sly, hard-core Americana. It head-slaps the shit out of the divisive Borat.
