It feels like Kevin Costner is trying to achieve a Social Justice merit badge. With early 2015 releases McFarland, USA and Black or White, you’re showing us all what it is to play nice with a races and creeds. Awwwww.
1980s disgraced football coach Jim White (Costner), has come to the end of his world – McFarland High, situated in a poor immigrant town in the labored valley of California. The residents are almost entirely Hispanic, as is the student body. It takes him exactly one game as assistant football coach to lock horns with the head coach and he is subsequently removed from that position. Inspired by Half-assed Gym Teaching for Dummies, he commands “everybody take a lap,” and discovers that several of the boys can move it, move it; he then decides to make a Cross-Country team (a first for both he and the school).
The story is fairly paint-by-numbers – issues over the boys’ desire to participate, their personal blue-collar family issues, Jim’s family being uncomfortable as the only whites in the town, the team having the proper equipment, etc. (For two months, he uses a kitchen egg-timer to measure progress, which is pretty funny when he pulls it out and sets it during races). This could have been a disaster. It wasn’t.
The reason McFarland works has little to do with the cast or the players. In fact, unlike Spare Parts, the screenplay made very little effort to distinguish one Latino migrant teen from another. I’d name the kids, but it seems rather pointless – only a few were truly given distinguishable roles – the team’s best runner, Thomas (Carlos Pratts) and the team anchor, Danny (Ramiro Rodriguez) – and truth be told, I expect I’ll never see any of these gentlemen again, sad to say. Nor did it work because Costner was great; he wasn’t. And it wasn’t the little moments of connection – White’s refusal to put a player back in a football game who clearly needed a break, White taking responsibility for poor coaching following a bad meet, the team itself coming together and then protecting White’s daughter in a key moment of conflict. None of that made the movie for me – instead it was the scene in which Jim White doesn’t try to convince the father of three of his runners not to pull them from the team; instead, he takes a Saturday to live in their shoes – he gets up a 4:30 a.m., hops a pickup to a cabbage field and labors like a migrant all day in the hot sun. That goes beyond empathy or sympathy; that’s a true connection and one most “white” 
people are gonna miss. That’s why these runners were better than their peers; their lives were harder; it makes them tougher.
Now … that said, there’s a lot of fudging that goes into McFarland, USA. It wants to paint a picture that doesn’t quite fit facts. I mean, a Bad News Bears type-story needs a Yankees, right? Let’s derive antagonism from the suburban private school runners. Make them sneer and look down upon the farm laborers. No, really. I’m not kidding – yeah, Cross-Country is traditionally replete with kids who lack the size, body-type or temperament for projectile sports and yet we’re introducing intimidation and race-bating here. Wait a sec. Cross-Country is a snooty sport? Really? Are you sure? I think of running as a pretty common denominator activity. It doesn’t require an arena or course fees or a boat. It doesn’t even require a stadium or a track or bleachers … or even a ball, for that matter. And every kid who learns to walk learns to run. You got legs? Welcome. World-wide, distance running is currently dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians. Are you telling me that a sport whose most elite members have dark skin is at the same time a breeding ground for local Caucasian privilege? That doesn’t make any sense.
Add that to the laundry list of script indulgences – 1) school starts, when? After Labor Day weekend, right? And by that time, McFarland High has already played and lost a football game, fired the assistant coach who then put together a Cross-Country team from a reluctant student body in time for a meet in early September, yes? 2) The team is considered a joke, but a month later, Coach White is getting job offers from other schools just by word of mouth. For Cross-Country. Not basketball. Not football. Cross-Country. 3) The Quinceañera for teen daughter White exactly corresponds with a violent clash, a big meet and a job interview. 4) The runners are initially capable of top state-level running performances when timed at the track, yet none of this translates when invited to race. 5) Subsequently, the team shows marked and incredible improvement over the season owed to exactly one (1) training technique – stomping up and down ten-foot high piles of almonds. Um, fellas, that will help strengthen legs, but it’s a lousy solution for handling steady uphill grades or general distance running. Let me put it this way – how often do you set the treadmill for 2-second intervals?
Oh, and ¿Dónde está las chicas, Homes? Since when is Cross-Country a men only sport? This seems classic Disney to me – in your efforts to show how diverse you are, you’ve completely ignored a demographic represented by 50% of the population.
It’s hard to make a film like this that doesn’t pander to a demographic. Hispanics are underrepresented on the big screen, no question. So what do you do? Cast some as villains and you’re a villain. Fail to cast some as villains and you’re a stooge. McFarland, USA shows a good heart, which is why it’s so damn aggravating you had to play with the truth. For me, it takes away from the struggle. It must be a bitch to get up at dawn, work in the field, go to school, then go back to the field. Who does that? Really strong kids, that’s who.
Those Valley kids sure can run
But that skin color is one you might shun
The only yield
Life in the field
For most, the pain has just begun
Rated PG-13, 128 Minutes
D: Niki Caro
W: Grant Thompson
Genre: Hispanics go to the movies? Let’s make something for them!
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: People who appreciate effort over accuracy
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Snotty white Cross-Country elitists, if any exist
